Where Do You See Yourself Five Years From Now

“But make sure that you don’t get so absorbed and exhausted in taking care of all your day-by-day obligations that you lose track of the time and doze off, oblivious to God. The night is about over, dawn is about to break. Be up and awake to what God is doing! God is putting the finishing touches on the salvation work he began when we first believed. We can’t afford to waste a minute, must not squander these precious daylight hours in frivolity and indulgence, in sleeping around and dissipation, in bickering and grabbing everything in sight. Get out of bed and get dressed! Don’t loiter and linger, waiting until the very last minute. Dress yourselves in Christ, and be up and about!” – Romans 13: 11-14.

Many interviewers will ask a job applicant, “where do you see yourself in five years?” This interview question is not designed to test your forecasting ability because no interviewer expects job candidates to be able to describe exactly what they will be doing in 1,820 days. Rather, the interviewer wants to understand more about your career goals and how this position would fit into your grand plan. What if God asked you where do you see yourself in five years? What do you expect life to be like?

The answers to that in a job interview and a conversation with God would be completely different. What matters most to God isn’t what you do; it’s who you are. So pursuing certain accomplishments in life isn’t nearly as important as becoming the person God created you to be. So how do you effectively focus on living up to your potential, growing into the person God intended you to be? What are the barriers to becoming that person in five years.

The trouble is, so many of us have tragically short attention spans. And the stick-with-it-ness is not as a strong as it once was. So we tend to underestimate what we could do in the long-term if we just stuck with it. Romans 13:11 says, “This is all the more urgent, for you know how late it is; time is running out. Wake up, for our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed.” The question is this: are you in a life that you get stuck with or a life that you create with the help of God.

Five years is enough time to accomplish quite a bit. You could grow closer to God than ever before. Or you could grow apart from God because your life is not the way you planned it.

Five years is long enough to do a lot for good or for evil. By the time you get to five years from now, you will have had enough road that’s been traveled for you to do a lot one way or another. It is all about making wise, Godly decisions. Let’s get to five years from now and be delighted in the choices we made.

Discussion Questions:

How do you see yourself spiritually in 5 years?
In order to get there, what do you have to do differently?