The Word whether written or spoken to your heart is not just a revelation of God, it is a revelation of God’s tomorrow for you.
Have you ever heard something that suddenly triggered a whole cascade of thoughts and revelation from the Lord? It happened to me a few years ago as I was listening to Billye Brim preach in the church I pastor.
She was telling a story about a trip to Australia she had recently made. On the journey the pilot pointed out the moment they had crossed the International Date Line, suddenly making it Tuesday when moments before it had been Monday.
When she arrived, she placed a call to her grandson, Cody. She said, Cody, I’m calling you from tomorrow and I just wanted to let you know everything turns out all right.
Or course we all laughed when she said that. But instantly the Spirit of God used that cute concept to quicken a powerful truth to my spirit. He began to show me that God, because He transcends space and time, has already been to our future. That means His Word, spoken and written, is a revelation of tomorrow. In a sense, the Word is God calling you from tomorrow with a message about your future.
What is that message? If you’ll follow certain principles in my Word today, I guarantee your tomorrow will be wonderful.
I’m not talking about predestination here. I’m not suggesting that you can get lazy, disregard God’s standards and principles, and still enjoy the bright future God has planned for you. Some would suggest that God has foreordained everything and therefore you can just cruise along waiting to see how things are going to turn out.
That’s not biblical at all!
Yes, the Bible clearly teaches that God has a unique plan for your life. And yes, you have a divinely appointed destiny in Christ. But He also created you a free moral agent. You have to make the choices that will align your life with that plan and destiny. Only then will you experience all God has for you.
That makes God’s call from tomorrow conditional. He’s saying, Here’s what your tomorrow will look like if you’ll do certain things today.
You see, the choice is ours. We can choose to align our thoughts, words and actions with God’s Word. Or, we can choose to go our own way the way of fallen man.
A Glimpse of Your Future
When examining your future, the first thing you need to know is what it will look like if God gets His way in the matter. What will your life be like if God gets to write the script? We get a clear picture of that in Jeremiah 29:11,
For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.
When your heavenly Father thinks about your future, He’s thinking thoughts of peace.
The original word translated peace in that verse is the familiar Hebrew word shalom. According to Strong’s Dictionary, it literally means completeness, welfare, soundness and peace.
That’s what God wants for your future. He wants you to experience well-being in every area of your life. He wants you to know prosperity and soundness body, soul and spirit. If God gets His way, your tomorrow will be wonderful.
I can’t overstate how important it is that you get this truth into your heart and firmly planted in your mind.
So many believers only pay lip service to this concept. If you get down into their heart of hearts, you’ll discover a sneaking suspicion that God is mad at them. That God is a harsh taskmaster Who is likely to bring hardship, heartache or even disaster into their lives if given free reign.
This is the enemy’s favorite lie and he uses religion to perpetuate it.
Please get this. God’s thoughts for you and your tomorrows are of peace and prosperity.
Your Expected End
There is another phrase in that powerful verse I want you to notice. God said He wants to give you an expected end.
This is a reference to your tomorrow. God is telling you what He wants your tomorrow to be like so you can begin to shape your expectation accordingly. Why is this important? Because God knows you tend to get what you expect.
This is an immutable principle God has woven into the fabric of the universe. With Jeremiah 29:11 and in many other verses, God is taking deliberate steps to shape our expectation about the future. Your experience of tomorrow is in large part determined by your expectation today.
We see this truth stated in slightly different terms in Proverbs 23:18,
For surely there is an end; and thine expectation shall not be cut off. Hear thou, my son, and be wise, and guide thine heart in the way.
Surely. Not possibly. Not maybe. Not probably. But without question, your expectation, good or bad, shall be your end experience.
If your Bible has margin notes, you may find a comment there about the word end in that verse. Mine says it can also be translated reward. This further illuminates the truth we’re exploring. God wants your experience of tomorrow to be rewarding!
As this verse assures us, if you’re doing the things today that allow God to bring you the tomorrow He desires for you, your expectation shall not be cut off. It will come to pass.
There are many other scriptures that affirm this principle, including Philippians 1:20 in which Paul declares, According to my earnest expectation and my hope, that in nothing I shall be ashamed….
Let it suffice to say that your experience of tomorrow depends upon the expectation you have today. You must come to a place where you intensely anticipate healing, financial provision, marital wholeness and relational success. You must anticipate that raise and promotion. Above all, you must expect the anointing and power of God to flow through your life and touch others.
So the question becomes, how do you cultivate that kind of intensity. As always, the Word gives us the keys.
Cultivating Intense Anticipation
The first vital key to developing the kind of intense expectation necessary to secure a bright future is one we’ve already seen. You must know what God wants for your tomorrow. And as we’ve already noted, the thoughts God has about your future are thoughts of hope, peace and soundness in every area of your life.
Think about it. If you don’t allow the promises in God’s Word to inform your thinking about your future, what will? The fact is, if you don’t base your expectation of tomorrow on God’s revealed desires, there’s only one other thing upon which to base it your yesterdays.
That’s precisely where people in the world and far too many believers live. They’re basing their anticipation of the future on what they’ve experienced in the past. And as we’ve seen, you get the end you expect.
That’s why so many people never see the increase God so strongly desires for them. They’re locked into a cycle of defeat because they can’t manage to expect anything different from what they’ve known in the past.
People who grow up in poverty tend to stay poor. Why? Because their earnest expectation of the future is based solely on their experience of the past.
God doesn’t want us to base our expectation of tomorrow on what happened yesterday. That’s why Paul said,
…forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:13-14)
You can’t press forth into the high promises of God until you forgotten what happened yesterday. The first key to cultivating intense expectation is to base it solely upon what you see in God’s Word. Nothing else.
Believe It, Receive It
Once you know what God says about your tomorrow once you’ve seen all the hundreds of promises in the Word concerning healing, abundance, favor and increase the next step is to simply believe them.
I know a lot of people who know what the Bible says. They can recite verse after verse. But deep down, they don’t believe it.
You can’t develop intense expectation about a glorious future if you don’t believe what the Bible has to say about it. You must know that you know it’s true, because expectation can’t exist without faith. They go hand in hand.
Adding faith to your expectation may require distancing yourself from some old friends and acquaintances. You have to get away from the mockers and scoffers if you’re going to move into full heart-belief concerning the promises of God.
Know what God says and wants about your tomorrow. Believe it. Then guard that belief for all you’re worth.
Prove It
Not too long ago, just prior to a service, I was speaking with a sweet Christian lady who had been confined to a wheelchair for many years.
As we spoke, it became clear to me that she believed with all her heart that healing was for today. She also was absolutely convinced that God’s will for her was healing.
But when I asked her if she truly expected to get out of that wheelchair that night. She truthfully had to answer, No.
This illustrates the difference between mere belief (which is vitally important) and belief that is accompanied by intense expectation. When expectation is present, it produces corresponding action.
This is precisely the point of James 2:17 which tells us that faith, without corresponding action, is dead. When you are in intense anticipation of the manifestation of a promise in your life, it alters your behavior.
If you earnestly expect and intensely anticipate that the stock market is going to plummet tomorrow, you sell your stocks today. The action is the proof that your expectation is real.
Expectation is the greatest shaper of human behavior in existence.
That’s why expectation is so vital to activating your faith. Only earnest expectation can produce the appropriate corresponding action that brings your faith alive. And only living faith can engage the biblical promises and heavenly rewards with which God so earnestly wants to fill your future.
God’s Guarantee
That future is rushing toward all of us. What will it hold for you? As we’ve seen, if God has His way it will be bright and beautiful. In fact, because He stands outside of time, God is in your future right now.
Look into His Word and you’ll hear Him calling you from tomorrow. The message?
My child, do things My way today, and I guarantee, everything turns out all right.
All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Mac and Lynne Hammond are senior pastors of Living Word in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, which they started in 1980. Many outreaches and ministries have launched from Living Word since that time, including Maranatha Christian Academy, a Pre-K through grade 12 school with nearly 900 in attendance, and Living Free Recovery Services, a licensed outpatient treatment program.
Most recently, Mac and Lynne have launched a vision to plant fifty churches across the globe in the next five years. As of August 2024, nine churches have been planted in the Dominican Republic, Ireland, Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, and Guatemala with construction underway for seven more churches in El Salvador, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Prior to becoming a pastor, Mac was a pilot. He served in the Air Force, served two tours of duty in Southeast Asia, and was honorably discharged in 1970 with the rank of Captain. Between 1970 and 1980, Mac was involved in varying capacities in the general aviation industry, including ownership of a successful air cargo business serving the Midwestern United States. A business acquisition brought the Hammonds to Minneapolis, where they ultimately founded Living Word. Currently, Mac is the host of The Winner’s Way and The Winner’s Minute broadcasts and the author of several internationally distributed books. Mac is broadly acclaimed for his ability to apply the principles of the Bible to practical situations and the challenges of daily living.