What does the future hold?
If the past 100 years is any indication, you are in for quite a ride.
* 100 years ago 8% of homes owned a telephone.
* 30 years ago there was no Internet. Motorola offered the 1st commercial cell phone for $3,500.
* 20 years ago there were only 130 websites total and you had to pay for an email account through an ISP.
* 10 years ago Skype, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Dropbox, & Instagram didn’t exist.
* Today, 8% of people in North America DON’T own a cell phone.
Check out the running tally of Internet actions IN A SINGLE SECOND at this site.
What About The Future?
1. Creativity, invention and innovation will continue to characterize progress. Necessity is the mother of invention.
There are needs that will propel people towards creative solutions.
A cure for cancer.
Making poverty history.
Ending homelessness.
Ending child sexual exploitation and abuse.
Greed is also a strong motivator. There will be progress made purely for profit.
2. The world is being held in trust awaiting a supernatural destiny. God is the Creator and Sustainer.
He has complete control of the events of our existence. “…the present heavens and earth are…being kept for the day of judgment…” (2 Peter 3:7)
God’s attitude is likened to the way a mother may good-naturedly chide her children by reminding them, “I brought you into this world and I can take you out.”
God is the Creator – He spoke all things into existence and all things are sustained and accountable to Him.
3. Some people feel thinking about the future is moot. Some Christians believe Jesus will come back before we ever get close to another decade let alone another one hundred years.
I hold a different opinion. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I believe Jesus is coming back again. The New Testament is chock full of pointed warnings, parables and prophecies about His coming back.
I also am convinced that our world will not come to an end through any man-made or natural disaster – global warming, flood, famine, or a zombie apocalypse.
There is a still a one thousand-year future time period – a millenium – when Jesus will physically reign on this earth. (Rev. 20:2,7)
4. Your times are in God’s hands. You can’t know for sure what will happen tomorrow, let alone 50 years from now, but you can know the One who holds the future.
Faith in God is not fatalism – “what will be will be.” Faith in God means to plan like you will live for another 100 years and also that this day may be your last on earth.
“Now listen, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.’ Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, ‘If it is the Lord’s will,we will live and do this or that’.” James 4:13,14 (NIV)
Make today your masterpiece.
Go all in and live all out.
Give God your best and your future will take care of itself.
APPLICATION: Please leave a comment below. Thank you.
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You are such an outrageous optimist, Pastor Bob, someone has to temper your attitude and I’m just the pessimist to do it.
“2. Creativity, invention and innovation will continue to characterize man’s progress.” This statement assumes that man has progressed and is progressing. Technologically, that is true. However, in the first 18 years of the 21st century, nearly one third of a billion children will have been sexually abused (see: The Worst Atrocity that Mankind has ever Afflicted upon Itself – in the Save A Child link on the left of this page). Most of them will have been abused many times. That’s more in 18 years than all the victims of war, genocide, and epidemics in the 20th century. Is that progress?
Technology itself is often used for more evil than good. The CIA invented something called the ‘darknet’. It is an internet that operates secretly and offers many layers of encryption so people can use it with anonymity. It’s great for CIA spys to communicate with Langley, and for police informants to use, even for people in very troubled countries to get information out. However, the vast majority of its use is by sex tourists, pornographers, child pornographers and their customers. It is also used by drug dealers and arms merchants (see A Little Light Shines into the Darknet – also on Save A Child).
I also suspect that Christ will return sooner rather than later. My theory goes like this – God gave the men of Sodom over to their lusts because of their greed and arrogance, EZE 16:49. He then destroyed them, all of them except Lot, his wife, and his two virgin daughters. But lot had other children, adults with families leading normal lives except they tolerated the evil that went on around them. This we know because they refused to come out of Sodom with Lot. Sodom was a filthy place, but it was prosperous. Thus, those who tolerated the evil of the Sodomites were destroyed along with those who committed the atrocities.
In 2013, we have seen a shift in attitude toward homosexuality that is stunning. What was illegal in most countries in the world 50 years ago is now not only legal but countries are falling all over themselves to legalize gay marriage. The attitude that the majority of western countries have taken toward Russia’s stand against homosexual proliferation is a spectacular shift. What was evil is now good, and what was good is now evil.
There’s no coming back from this – we will never put the genie back in the bottle until the Lord returns. Because of the rapidly growing tolerance for evil, we are now as ripe as Sodom for the Lord’s judgment.
“It was the same as happened in the days of Lot: they were eating, they were drinking, they were buying, they were selling, they were planting, they were building; but on the day that Lot went out from Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all. It will be just the same on the day that the Son of Man is revealed.” Luke 17:28-30.
Pessimist…optimist…we both agree the world needs Jesus.
While you help remind of how technology can be used for evil as well as good, I’m not convinced there is ever a point of no temporal for the consequences of man’s choices. Jonah was sent to communicate judgment to Nineveh and the people repented and God spared the city. So many of the past revivals changed the morality and ethics of localized regions and entire nations. The Welsh Revival and the Great Awakening in America created 180 degree changes.
Keep up the good work of creating awareness and combating the effects of child sexual abuse and violence against children.
As a school teacher who is embarking on students using technology for everything, we are discussing and challenged by the issues of technology daily. Technology does have it’s place,but we need to try and educate the next generation on how to use it wisely, responsbily, and creatively.
Evil will always exist. Technology did not create the evil that exists on line today. Evil will find it’s way regardless of technology.
If God hold’s time in His hands, then it’s up to me to spend my time, gifted by God, honoring God. My time well spent – choosing love, choosing peace, choosing faith, choosing patience, choosing encouragement, choosing goodness, all with the help of the Holy Spirit, – is honoring to God. That is what, I pray, my future will hold.
If God sent His son to die for me to save my life then He obviously has a different way of looking at the world. I would never have tried to save anyone by having my son die. What a crazy and beautiful way. I want to trust His ways are higher than my ways and his thoughts higher than mine. The only way I can begin to understand God is not to be conformed to this world, but transformed, by the renewing of my mind.