Let's begin where we ended last week: believe that God has a dream for you. Joseph "had a dream" (Genesis 37:5): his brothers, and indeed the entire human race, would bow down to him. 20 years later, they did. Does God have a dream for you?

Some evolutionists say that life began as a chance coincidence, with no particular plan or purpose at all. Existentialists say that this life is all there is, and life is chaos. Postmodernists say that truth is relative, and there is no overriding purpose to life. So, does God have a plan for us, or is life a random coincidence? In the words of Shakespeare, are we "sound and fury, signifying nothing"?

Does God still have a dream for us?

In Jeremiah's letter God claims, "I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future" (Jeremiah 29:11). Even though they were enslaved in Babylon, with no hope and no future.

God dreamed that Noah would save the human race. He dreamed that the childless Abraham would be the father of the Messiah. He dreamed that the shepherd Moses would give his laws to the world. He dreamed that the young shepherd boy David would be king of his people.

He dreamed that the fishermen Peter, James, and John would lead his global church. He dreamed that the persecuting Saul of Tarsus would take his word across the Empire. He dreamed that the imprisoned John would write his Revelation. And so it was.

God has a dream for you. For every day there is a dream. It doesn't matter how old or young you are, how healthy and prosperous you are or aren't. If God had a dream of greatness for an arrogant teenage sheepherder, he has a dream for you.

And he wants you to know it. He is sovereign over history, while you are free. He knows your future, but permits you to help decide it. He created time, and transcends it now. He is not today peering into the future--there is no "future" with him. He is the Great I Am, not the I Was or the I Will Be. He observes all time as now.

So he observes all that we will choose to do. Observing is not deciding. He knows our future, while allowing us to decide it. Choose well.