All sports teams devise a game plan for their opponents. Every general draws up meticulous plans before going into battle. Unless you have a game plan for your life, you will wander through it, stumbling about, and never becoming the person God created you to be. That’s tragic. Imagine facing your King and having to explain why you didn’t accomplish the work He gave you to do in the time He gave you to do it (2 Corinthians 5:10).
We will all be without excuse (Romans 1:20). Praise the Lord, He has not left us without guidance here. He gives us a complete game plan by which to live. In just a few verses, Peter lays out the entire plan.
In his second epistle, Peter writes, “For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with goodness, goodness with knowledge, knowledge with self-control, self-control with endurance, endurance with godliness, godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they will keep you from being useless or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. The person who lacks these things is blind and shortsighted and has forgotten the cleansing from his past sins” (2 Peter 1:5-9). There is your complete game plan for life.
Step one is faith. Without faith in Christ, there is no plan. There is no hope (Hebrews 11:6). Everything begins with believing in Jesus and bowing our knee to Him as Lord. Skip this step, and nothing else you do in life will ever matter. Our faith in Christ leads us to obey all His commands (John 14:15). By following His wise words, we will live a life of goodness (Ephesians 2:10). When we practice goodness in every area of our lives, we bring honor to God, the perfector of every good thing (James 1:17).
Obeying God’s commands will lead us to hunger to know Him more and more. We will gain knowledge as we seek Him in His Word. Such knowledge will give us self-control in our lives as it results in patience with others, and in lessening our selfish desires. We can all have self-control for a moment, but as we grow in the Lord, that self-control blossoms in endurance, with our self-control becoming a part of who we are. As all these traits become the habits of our life, we begin to look more and more like Christ.
This godliness is the goal, but it is not the end. When we live godly lives, it will reflect on the way we treat our brothers and sisters in Christ. We will forgive them just as Christ forgives us (Colossians 3:12-13). This humble and sacrificial attitude will lead us to love everyone, even our enemies, as we come to see them as beautiful creations of our God (Matthew 5:44-45).
This is the game plan for your life. As we grow through these stages, we will become the people God created us to be. We will spend our lives walking in His will. When our time comes to die, there will be no regrets and we can face the judgement to come with confidence because we will know we have run a good race (2 Timothy 4:7-8). The game plan isn’t hard to understand and our Lord has been gracious to lay it out for us in scripture. There is no mystery here, only a decision for us. Will you choose His plan or choose to go your own way? You will only find victory and eternity with Jesus by following God’s game plan for your life (Matthew 7:13-14).