For most of us, planning for the future means forecasting. In our businesses, we review the current supply and demand for widgets and extrapolate them into the future. In our personal lives, we let our current skill set drive our vision for who we might become.
With forecasting, we look in the rearview mirror, rather than the possibilities ahead.
When we forecast, we ask, “What can we do with what we have?” But often, the status quo itself is part of the problem.
"For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God" (Romans 3.23).
Looking in the rearview mirror of your life, you'll see two things:
1. That you've sinned.
2. That missing the mark of God's glory is a recurring decimal in your life.
This viewpoint may make you resign yourself to fate, thinking nothing is going to change. That's a lie. Jesus Christ shows us the possibility of transformation and how it can be achieved. He invites us to Backcasting.
Forecasting takes all our problematic assumptions and propels them into the future. It artificially restricts our vision of what’s feasible.
Backcasting flips the script. Rather than forecasting the future, backcasting aims to determine how an imagined future can be attained.
"Don’t let your heart be troubled. Believe in God. Believe also in me. In my Father’s house, there are many homes. If it weren’t so, I would have told you.
I am going to prepare a place for you. If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and will receive you to myself; that where I am, you may be there also. Where I go, you know, and you know the way.”
Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going. How can we know the way?”
Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father, except through me." John 14.1-6
Backcasting demands that we see the future God wants for us and follow the steps he expects us to take to get there.
What do you want your life to look like? Work backward from that. Instead of letting your existing reality drive your vision, let God's vision drive your reality.
When we forecast the future, we try to predict it. When we backcast the future, we create it.
Do you want the glorious future God has promised? You need to take certain steps to make it real in your life.
1. Hear the Gospel of Christ (Romans 10.17)
2. Believe the Gospel ( John 8.24; Romans 10.4)
3. Repent of your sins (Luke 13.3; Acts 17.30)
4. Confess faith in Christ (Matthew 10.32-33)
5. Be baptized for the remission of your sins ( Romans 6.3-4; Galatians 3.27)
6. Remain faithful to Christ in His Church to the end (Revelation 2.10)
We can become who God wants us to be irrespective of our past if we yield our lives to God in obedience to the Gospel.
Scriptures encourage backcasting when the Holy Spirit says in 2Pet 3:10-13:
"But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and the works that are upon it will be burned up.
Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of persons ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be kindled and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire! But according to his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells."
May God guide you to make hay while the sun shines in Christ's Name. Amen
