Stop sabotaging your future by imagining worst-case scenarios

I was crossing a foot-bridge in a remote village when I had a passing thought: “It would be funny if I made some kind of sound and told my co-worker that my keys fell into the water.” I don't know why I thought it would be funny. But I didn't do it. I kept walking across the bridge and we went on with our work.Then, one hour later, I looked for my keys in my pocket. We looked for the keys for two hours. We never found them, as I had accidentally dropped them into the river.“What’s the lesson?” I prayed. The thought came to me, “Be careful what you imagine. Your imagination has power.”For many of you, your first reaction to this story is to dismiss it as self-help new agey ideology that a follower of Jesus shouldn’t be thinking. But when you look closer at Jesus’ life, you see that he was intensely concerned with what you imagine, because your imagination is what reveals what you believe, and what you believe has the ability to change the future.When a woman came up to Jesus to touch his garment, she thought that if she touched his garment, she would be healed. She imagined that a certain action would produce a certain outcome. When she was healed, Jesus specifically said, “Your faith healed you.” In other words, “What you imagined and believed about me healed you.”Later, Jesus is with his disciples on a boat, and there is a large storm. They begin to imagine the worst: “We are going to drown”. Jesus rebuked them for what they imagined. He said, “Why didn’t you believe?”Jesus knew that what you imagine about your future reveals what you believe.What does this have to do with goals? If you read through the process of setting God-sized goals, you know that your goals are shaped by the picture you imagine of the future.Once you set your goal for the future, however, there is a battle in your head to continue believing God that this goal is possible. This battle is waged in your imagination.Why is it so easy to imagine the worst possible outcome? Why do we imagine that God won't do what he said he would do, that others will fail us, or that we are incapable of doing what it takes to reach our goals?If you have a God-sized goal, you have an enemy who is interested in your failure, and he is going to do his best to keep you imagining the worst possible outcome. He knows that your imagination, which reveals what you believe, can affect your ability to accomplish that goal.So what can you do?You can do step number one of the monthly goal-review. We talked about how once per month, you need to take some time to review your goals. The first thing you do when you review a goal is to imagine it happening. Here are some keys to do that:

1. Ask for forgiveness for every time that you imagined your goal not working out. Jesus rebuked the disciples when they imagined the worst possible outcome, which means that he may be calling you to account for imagining worst-case scenarios. Bring all of your negative-outcome thinking to God and allow him to cleanse you and restore you. Even if you have failed in your imagination, Jesus can still grab your hand like he grabbed Peter’s when he sank into the Sea of Galilee.
2. Actively use your imagination to think about a future in which your goal comes to past. You can even ask God for a fresh picture of the final outcome. Allow him to breathe fresh faith into your thinking and into your imagination.

I have to be honest and admit that this is a battle that I sometimes lose, that there are days when I can’t wrap my mind around my goal coming to pass, and I have to rely on the fact that God can do more than I ask or imagine. But I know that he is concerned with my imagination, and that in his sovereignty, he has allowed my faith to play a role in the shaping of real future outcomes.This isn't to say that God is controlled by our imagination, but that it does have an effect.So I keep tabs on how my imagination is doing, as it reveals where my faith is, and I believe that my faith can mean the difference between sinking in the ocean and walking on water.What does your imagination reveal about your faith?