Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, And before you were born I consecrated you; I have appointed you a prophet to the nations. (Jer 1:5).
God knew us before we were formed in the womb. He knew us before we were a physical being. At that point we existed, and He knew us, as a spiritual being. God is spirit, and we have come out of God. Our spirit is eternal: it will never die, because it is of the essence of God.
What am I here for?
We saw last time that all of us have a destiny.
“For I know the plans that I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans for welfare and not for calamity, to give you a future and a hope” (Jer 29:11).
God’s plan is for us to enjoy peace and wholeness; His plan is to prosper us and to see us succeed. He gives us a hope by giving us a vision of our destiny. So do we know what we are here for? Do we know who we are meant to be? And do we know our name?
That may sound like a strange question, but God has a name for us which is our true name. It encompasses all we are and all He intends us to be. It is a heavenly name which is assigned to us in accordance with our destiny. It is the name that is on our thrones, and in our scroll. When I saw my name, I knew it was me. It will be the same for you, because your spirit will leap in recognition, just as John leapt in Elizabeth’s womb when he sensed Jesus in Mary’s womb. That is what happens when aspects of our destiny start to take place around us. Things start to move us and our spirit begins to leap.
In Your book
We existed before we had a physical body. The scripture tells us that there was a substance to our lives which God saw when it was still unformed.
Your eyes have seen my unformed substance;
and in Your book (scroll) were all written
the days that were ordained for me,
when as yet there was not one of them.
How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!’
(Psa 139:16-17).
We have briefly mentioned our scroll of destiny before, in the context of judgment. That scroll was written not only before we were formed, but before God created the heavens and the earth. Understanding who we were then, even as an ‘unformed substance’, will really help us to understand who we are now. Everything we are called to be now was written then, on our scroll.
Sometimes we will find that we have done the things that are written on it, even though we might have never read it. That will happen because our destiny is inherently tied up with who we are. When we choose to line up with the purposes of God, and seek to be guided by Him, we start to fulfil our destiny.
But if we actually read it, we can engage with our destiny in a completely different dimension. And God is willing to show it to us, though maybe not all of it, not all at once. It would be too much for us.
If we picture a scroll (like the one at the head of this article), we can look at one section of it, but there is much more of it still rolled up which comes before and after what we are looking at. The same with a book: we can see the pages which are open, but all the other pages are hidden until we turn to them. If we ask, God will reveal a portion or an aspect of what is on our scroll: He may show it to us, read it to us, or tell us in some other way. But we will know. And depending on what we do with the portion He has revealed, He is always willing to show us more.
How precious are Your thoughts
Psalm 139 tells us that God has many thoughts about us, because He knows us intimately. We need to get hold of those thoughts, because they will transform how we think about ourselves. It will be nothing short of life-changing for us to know how God thinks about us! I guarantee that not one of us thinks about ourselves 100% the way God does. But the more we allow God’s thoughts toward us to affect the way we think about ourselves, the more transformation we will see in our lives, and the more we will become like Jesus. We will do the things He did, and the greater things we are called to do.
The thoughts of God toward us today are totally in tune with what was written on our scroll before the foundation of the world. But destiny is not fate. We have a choice, to agree with God and pursue it, or not. We already agreed with Him when our scroll was written. If we choose to agree with Him now, it is essential for us to get hold of His thoughts toward us and to know what is written on our scroll.
Important: Mike has new insight on our Scroll of Destiny – check out blog post 281. Scroll of Destiny: Just Being (from Dec 2021).