What did you want to be when you were growing up? What were your childhood aspirations? What did you dream about? Every destiny journey begins with the answers to those questions.
God has put a dream in your heart and the ability to see those dreams happen. But, part of our privilege as believers is to search out the answers to our destiny questions and partner with the Lord to see our calling fulfilled. As it says in Proverbs 25:2, “It is God’s privilege to conceal things and the king’s privilege to discover them.” (NLT)
As I look back over my life, so many of the things that I dreamed about and did in my early years foreshadowed God’s eventual call on me. From an early age, I sensed I had a purpose, and that sense of purpose was visible in my everyday choices and even in the little games I played with my friends.
When I was a kid, growing up in San Francisco, I had a crazy dream. I wanted to be one of the Beatles. I knew every song by heart and had seen their first movie, A Hard Days Night, a dozen times. Every day, while walking from our day care center to school, three friends and I would run out ahead of the other children, looking back over our shoulders, like the Beatles running from their screaming fans. It was just a simple childhood daydream, but in a small way it reflected the destiny God put within me.
Driven by the pursuit of purpose, I intensified my search for God inwardly and outwardly, and finally was radically converted to Christ in the 70s while hitch-hiking and living among the Blackfeet Indians in Montana. I soon began preaching the gospel on the streets in San Francisco and later became one of the founders of SOS Ministries, an evangelistic ministry that still sponsors outreaches in the Bay Area. I also planted a Vineyard church in San Francisco and eventually was overseeing 20+ Vineyard churches in Northern California
After thirty-three years of pastoral ministry in San Francisco, I moved to Redding California with my wife and seven kids, and started on another dimension of my own personal destiny journey.
During my years of ministry, I realized that discipleship wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Although there were many good discipleship programs out there, they all tended to be either introspective, to controlling or too “cookie-cutter” in their approach. I also soon discovered that many of those who expressed a desire to become disciples lacked the motivation, the means and the maturity to follow Jesus fully. This realization set me on a journey of prayer and study that eventually led to an understanding of the importance of God’s destiny in a persons life.
As I looked at the limitations of different discipleship programs, I realized that what was needed was a way of helping people grow that was inspiring, personalized and “delight-directed”. The scripture informs us that Jesus was motivated by delight:”…who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross…” (Heb. 12:2b). In the same way, I believe the key to whole-hearted discipleship is to help believers identify the joy set before them, so they can sustain the motivation and means to “take up their crosses and follow” Jesus. This understanding is what eventually gave birth to the “Destiny Finder” approach.
My prayer in your journey with our Destiny Finder program is that you would discover who you are in Christ, where you are going in life and how you can become the person that God has created you to be. That Destiny Finder could be a tool that would equip you with the necessary means in your discovery process and eventually propel you into your uniquely designed destiny that God has planned for you.