I am encouraging you to not just live for the moment, but to discover, plan, and prevail for your future, which the LORD has already laid out for you. That is what life is really all about - the future. When God laid out a detailed plan for man's redemption from sin, He prepared the details long before Adam fell. Jesus is called "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world" (Rev. 13:8). When Christ was praying before His death, He said that God loved Him from "before the foundation of the world" (John 17:24). God planned a future for all of mankind before Adam and Eve were created and fell into sin!
Once man sinned, God Himself released the first prophecy by predicting that the seed of the woman would bruise the head of the serpent (Gen. 3:15). God spoke this about four thousand years before Mary gave birth to the Messiah (Luke 2). After Cain slew his brother, Abel, God wasted no time in replacing Abel with Adam and Eve's new addition to the family, a son named Seth who would initiate a nine - generation lineage of righteous men, leading up to tenth man from Adam, Noah. (See Genesis chapter 5). God continually has your future on His mind and in His purpose.
The Almighty God's passion for the future is also witnessed in the fact that God thinks generationally. When God established His covenant through Abraham, He was planning that Abraham's descendants would become a nation. First, God promised Abraham a son and to make a "great nation" from Abraham's children (Gen. 12:2). Years later God predicted that Abraham would be "a great and mighty nation" (Gen. 18:18). Years passed, and then God visited Abraham's grandson Jacob, changing his name from Jacob to Israel. God enlarged His promise by saying to Jacob, "A nation and a company of nations shall proceed from you" (Gen. 35:11). After the nation of Israel expanded from seventy souls to more than six hundred thousand men marching through the Red Sea and on to the millions of Jewish people now in the world. God was beginning the preparations for one large family called the children of Israel when He was making covenant with one man - Abraham! This is why God changed Abram's name (meaning "father") to Abraham, meaning "father of many" (Gen. 17:5). Israel began with a dream and a vision!
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