God Has A Plan For Our Lives

We’ve all heard it said that God has a plan for our lives. And I’m learning more and more that He won’t just use our gifts to fulfill those plans, He’ll use our weaknesses and challenges as well.

As I was thinking about this, there were a couple people in the Bible that came to mind—Joseph and Esther. Joseph was bound and sold by his brothers into slavery. Then when he started to make a name for himself as a servant in a new land, he was wrongly accused and sent to prison. Through all these hardships and challenges, God used him to save the people of Israel and his family: the very brothers that sold him off in the first place.

Esther was an orphan that was adopted by a man named Mordecai. She was a a Jew living in a Persian country and she was an unmarried woman with no children. As a single woman in a male-dominated society in these days, she had zero rights. But God used all of these things to help her fulfill her destiny. The King found Esther more beautiful to him than any of the other women and he made her his queen. And in her role as queen, she was able to save the Jews from death.

When you look at both of their lives in the beginning, they look like they have little hope or future. But God used them in amazing ways to make a huge difference in the lives of those around them. 

Many of us may look at our own lives and wonder how God could ever use us. But we have to realize that God uses the unpleasant challenges and struggles in our lives to create God-ordained opportunities that can make a difference in our lives and in the lives of those around us.

The key in both Joseph’s and Esther’s lives is that they continued to trust in the Lord. Yes, they struggled and I’m sure they had moments where they wondered if God had forgotten about them. But through it all, they continued to seek God and trust in Him.

When we look at our own lives, do we trust in the Lord? Do we believe that He can work through the disfunction and challenges in our own lives? We serve a God of miracles and I believe He has a plan for each of our lives. And I trust that He will use the good and bad in our lives to accomplish it!