IN AUGUST OF 1989 God awakened me in the middle of the night, led me to the first chapter of Jeremiah, and revealed my calling with one verse of Scripture. Nothing like it had ever happened before, and nothing like it has happened since. It was a one-off. For what it’s worth, it happened one week after my prayer walk through the cow pasture where I felt called to ministry. God knew that I might need two signs—just as Gideon did.

I knelt at the foot of my bed, opened my Bible, and started reading.

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,

before you were born I set you apart;

I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.1

No passage of Scripture is more personal to me than this one. It’s my matrix for ministry. I own it and it owns me. It’s not just Jeremiah’s calling; I feel as though it’s my calling. But there’s a catch. One caveat of that calling made no sense to me: “I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”

Honestly, I didn’t feel called to the nations; I felt called to our nation’s capital. I didn’t feel called to be a missionary; I felt called to be a pastor. This verse of Scripture, this part of my script, wouldn’t make sense for more than two decades. That’s when I got an e-mail from a pastor friend named Bryan Jarrett. And the veil that had covered my eyes was lifted.

I’m speaking at a leadership conference for the nation of Malaysia and visited the largest bookstore in Kuala Lumpur today. I was thrilled to see a copy of your book Soulprint in a very visible place. I stopped to praise God for the influence He has given you to the nations!

I had never before connected the dots between my calling to write and God’s desire to use me to speak to the nations. It had never even crossed my mind that my books would be translated into dozens of different languages. I don’t speak a lick of Korean or Russian or Afrikaans or Kinyarwanda. I speak English and just enough Spanish to order chili con queso. Pretty sad for four years of study! But through the work of interpreters, my books have been used to convey God’s grace, truth, and love all around the world.

Just as my writing has fulfilled this calling without my even knowing it, so has pastoring a church in Washington, DC. Twenty years in, the sun never sets on our missionary family all around the globe. And our podcast reaches 144 countries, some of which are closed to Christianity.

But I hadn’t really thought of NCC as a prophet to the nations until Dick Foth called me on a recent Sunday afternoon. Dick had just spoken at one of our campuses and wanted to tell me whom he had met—a family that had emigrated from China, a woman from Mongolia who had won a green card and moved to America, and the German wife of an American who had just been appointed consul general in Hamburg, Germany. Believe it or not, that is pretty par for the course at NCC. I had actually met a member of Finland’s parliament that same day at a different campus. But I had never really connected the dots until Dick emphatically said, “Mark, stay right where you are! You can reach the nations!”

That’s when it dawned on me, once again, that God has been fulfilling His calling without my even knowing it. God has strategically positioned NCC for such a place as this. We’re not only reaching members of the military, State Department emissaries, and international businesspeople, but we’re sending them to the four corners of the globe as ambassadors for Christ.

When David took harp lessons as a kid, he never imagined that those lessons would someday position him as a member of King Saul’s court. As he practiced slinging a stone while tending sheep, it never crossed his mind that this skill set would catapult him into the national limelight. Even when David was hiding out in caves as a fugitive, God was deepening his emotional capacity to write psalms that would pull heartstrings thousands of years later.

Just because something isn’t part of your life plan doesn’t mean it’s not part of God’s plan. God is working His good, pleasing, and perfect plan for your life in a thousand ways you aren’t even aware of. Everything in your past is preparation for something in your future. God wastes nothing! Even when you have a setback, God has already prepared your comeback. The God who works all things together for good will leverage every experience, every skill, every mistake, and every bit of knowledge you have acquired.

Predestined

Whenever Scripture doubles down on a truth by saying the same thing in two different ways, it deserves a double take. It’s God’s way of making doubly sure we don’t miss the point. For example, “With God all things are possible.”2 And just to make sure we’re picking up what He is throwing down, Scripture says, “Nothing will be impossible with God.”3

The same concept is repeated twice in Jeremiah 1:5: “before I formed you in the womb” and “before you were born.” Your destiny predates you. Before you were even conceived, God had a script for your life.

The irony of destiny is that it’s rarely discerned at the time. Sometimes it’s not revealed until after we die. David reigned over a kingdom of millions, but his psalms have inspired billions. That is David’s longest legacy, whether he knew it at the time or not. And I’m guessing not. Your greatest influence might be posthumous. It’s one more way God gets the last laugh and the glory!

When we zoom out and look through a wide-angle lens, I think it’s fair to say that our Founding Fathers have had more influence in death than in life. And that’s true of spiritual fathers as well. Your greatest legacy might be the children or church or charitable trusts that outlive you. For the record, this is one reason I write. Books are time capsules. I write because I want my great-great-grandchildren to know what I lived for and what I was willing to die for. And if others want to read my books while I’m living, all the better. But I write for the third and fourth generation.

“Before I formed you in the womb.” This phrase should fill you with a sense of destiny. It’s your spiritual birthright. God has ordained your days, ordered your footsteps, and prepared good works in advance. And He did it before you were even conceived.

One reason I love this seven-word phrase so much is that it reminds me of my firstborn son, Parker. Two decades ago I was preaching at a church in DC, pre-NCC. After I finished preaching, the pastor prayed for Lora and me. At some point that prayer became prophetic. Pastor Sullivan McGraw turned toward Lora and prayed, “Lord, bless the little one that is within.” That was news to us! But sure enough, the doctor confirmed it the next week. We’re the only couple I’ve ever heard of who found out they were pregnant during a prayer at church!

Posthumous

For the past decade I’ve served as a trustee for the Des Plaines Charitable Trust. It’s not a large foundation, but it has given millions of dollars to kingdom causes over the past quarter century.

In 1985 a businessman on the verge of bankruptcy walked into a prayer meeting. Jim Linen was desperate, so desperate that he struck a deal with God. He put his business, the Des Plaines Publishing Company, on the altar. He knew it’d take a miracle to dodge bankruptcy, so Jim made a pledge. If God would bless his business, he’d create a trust fund that would fund kingdom causes.

On July 2, 1989, Jim was tragically killed while jogging in London. His life on earth came to an end, but Jim’s legacy had just begun. At the annual meeting of the trust, we often read the original trust document that Jim drafted:

This trust is created in fulfillment of a pledge James A. Linen IV made to the Lord when Des Plaines Publishing Company was, by every known business standard, a bankrupt entity, as, in truth, was he. Following Mr. Linen’s commitment, the success of Des Plaines in the face of both national and local economic conditions can only be viewed as a miracle of God.

Destiny predates birth.

Destiny postdates death.

The trust has given grants to a thousand kingdom causes around the globe, and each one is an exponential of Jim Linen’s legacy. It could be argued that Jim’s influence is greater in death than it was in life. And when we follow in Christ’s footsteps, the same is true of us.

As Famous As

If your goal is fame, good luck. Even if you achieve it, you’ll realize that it’s as unfulfilling as fortune. You don’t need a bigger paycheck. You need a bigger why. Our chief end is to glorify God, and if your goal is to make famous the name of Jesus, good fortune will follow you all the days of your life and right into eternity!

He too was as famous as the three mighty warriors.4

That little three-word phrase, “as famous as,” is repeated several times in 2 Samuel 23. It refers to Benaiah, but fame wasn’t his objective. In fact, his destiny was to help David fulfill his dream. It wasn’t about Benaiah. It was about David.

In her spirit Julie Neal felt as if she was on the verge of something big. In fact, God told her to get ready! She just wasn’t sure how or for what. That’s when she visited her brother and sister-in-law, who had adopted a baby from Africa. On the way home Julie’s eight-year-old daughter said, “We need to adopt a baby.” Julie quickly came up with all kinds of excuses, but she had run out of excuses by the time she pulled into her driveway. She knew in her spirit this was exactly what God had been getting her ready for.

A year later the Neal family adopted Caden from Ethiopia. Two years later they adopted Cruz. Then in 2010 Julie visited the village in Ethiopia where Cruz had been born. It’s the place where her son took his first breath and his biological mother took her last breath. When Julie asked Cruz’s grandparents how his mother died, they said she died because they didn’t have anywhere to take her to get medical treatment. That’s the day a dream was conceived in Julie’s spirit. Her first step was raising $200,000 to build a well in memory of Cruz’s mom. Cruz actually dedicated that well, a posthumous gift in memory of his mother. They built a school a year later. And Julie won’t stop dreaming until a medical center is built.

“If God had laid the entire dream out in front of me at the beginning of this journey, I would have run away from it,” said Julie.

In His grace God doesn’t always download the entire dream at one time. It would overwhelm us. But make no mistake: His plans and purposes are beyond what you can ask. And He wants to use you in ways you cannot imagine.

Your job isn’t to accomplish the dream.

Your job is to stop making excuses and start obeying.

“God gives us a little piece of the plan at a time,” Julie said. “And if we keep focusing on Him, it all falls into place—sometimes slowly and painfully. But it all falls into place.”

One fun footnote. The organization that Julie serves, I Pour Life, is one of the kingdom causes that Des Plaines has funded.5 Des Plaines is a very small piece of the puzzle, but I Pour Life is still part of Jim Linen’s legacy—a dream within a dream.

Double Destiny

You have a destiny, but you don’t just have one. You have two—one is universal, and the other is unique. Think of it as your double destiny.

Just as we share a common grace, we all share a common destiny. We are predestined to be conformed to the image of Christ.6 In other words, our universal destiny is to think like, act like, love like, and be like the prototype—Jesus. If you pursue that common destiny, it will lead to an uncommon life. You’ll go places you can’t get to. You’ll do things beyond your capabilities. And you’ll meet people you have no business being in the same room with. But the goal isn’t going, doing, or meeting. The ultimate goal is becoming like Christ.

We all share that destiny in common, but the other destiny is unique.

There never has been and never will be anyone like you. Of course, that isn’t a testimony to you. It’s a testimony to the God who created you. And it means that no one can worship God like you or for you. If uniqueness is God’s gift to you, then individuation is your gift back to God. We all need heroes who inspire us, but you aren’t called to be more like them. You are called to be you—the best version of you possible.

Like happiness, destiny isn’t something you discover by seeking it. It’s a by-product. You don’t find it by looking for it. You find it by looking for God. Then your destiny finds you.

Hold that thought.

Mel Gibson lionized Sir William Wallace in his epic film Braveheart. It’s tough to discern fact from fiction when it comes to medieval knights, but one biographer noted that Wallace actually killed a lion during a trip to France.7 One fact is certain, however: Wallace never went anywhere without his Psalter. As a fugitive and as a warrior, Wallace identified with the psalms of David in a unique way. And just as David had Benaiah always at his side, Wallace never went anywhere without his boyhood friend and personal chaplain, John Blair.8

I’m reading between the lines, but Benaiah was more than a bodyguard. He didn’t just protect David’s back; he also had David’s ear. Benaiah was to King David what John Blair was to Sir William Wallace. Benaiah was David’s closest confidant, a kindred spirit. He was more of a brother than some of David’s brothers. Perhaps that’s why David’s son Solomon trusted him like an uncle.

I have a friend, Joshua DuBois, who chased a lion into the White House. Joshua served as the head of the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. “I went to policy school, not seminary,” he noted. But Joshua understood that even if you report to the president, you still answer to a higher authority. For seven years Joshua was a priest to POTUS, sharing a word of encouragement from Scripture every single day.9 His unique destiny was serving the president of the United States; of course, his higher calling was serving God.

No matter what you do, you are a priest first and foremost. You certainly have a job to do, but you also have a calling to fulfill. If you are a Christ follower, you are part of the royal priesthood. That means you are a priest-entrepreneur, priest-athlete, priest-entertainer, priest-politician, priest-coach.

Your portfolio is your pulpit.

Your company is your congregation.

And that goes for your team, your class, or your organization.

Destiny isn’t pie in the sky. Destiny is being faithful right where you are. The best way to land your dream job is to do a good job at a bad job and do it with a great attitude!

Be like Christ.

Be yourself.

That’s your double destiny.