I recently read The Circle Maker by Mark Batterson.  Mark is the pastor of National Community Church in Washington DC.  He is also the author of several books, and his latest is on prayer.  At the end of the book, he shares some tips for Goal setting that I believe can be helpful for our current teaching series, Keep Calm and Carry On. 

10 Steps to Goal Setting

1. Start with Prayer - I highly recommend a personal retreat or a season of fasting to help you clearly see the dreams before you.  If you set your goals in the context of prayer, there is a much higher likelihood that your goals will glorify God.

2. Check your Motives – you need to take a long, honest look in the mirror and make sure you’re going after your goals for the right reason.

3. Think in Categories – My goals are divided into five catergories: family, influential, experiential, physical, and travel.  I have not included spiritual since I see all my goals as having a spiritual dimension.

4. Be specific – If a goal, isn’t measurable, we have no way of knowing whether we’ve accomplished it.  Losing weight is not a goal if we don’t have the target weight within a target timeline.

5. Write it down – If you haven’t written your goals down, you haven’t really set them.  Something powerful happens when you verbalize a goal (whether in a conversation or in a journal)

6. Include others – Nothing cements a relationship like shared goals. 

7. Celebrate along the way – When you accomplish a goal, celebrate it!

8. Dream Big – Your life goal list will include goals that are big and small.  It will include goals that are short-term and long-term.  But I have one piece of advice: Make sure you have a few Big Hairy Audacious Goals on the list.  You need some God sized goals that qualify as crazy.  Big goals turn us into big people!

9. Think Long – Most of us overestimate what we can accomplish in two years, but we underestimate what we can accomplish in ten years.

10. Pray Hard – Goal setting begins and ends in prayer.  God-ordained goals are conceived in the context of prayer, and prayer is what brings them to full term.

Excerpt from The Circle Maker by Mark Batterson (page 179-186)

This past Christmas, we focused on Matthew 1 – the genealogy of Jesus.  Instead of skipping the begats of the Bible, we decided to let the Holy Spirit let us revisit the people in Jesus’ family tree.  Every tree has a story, and every tree has twisted roots.  So do you, and so did Jesus.  Despite Jesus twisted roots of Abraham, Rahab, Ruth, and Uriah’s wife, Jesus came up out of the ground and grew in favor with God and man (Luke 2:52). 

As predicted in the Old Testament:

“A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.” Isaiah 11:1

“In that day the Root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples; the nations will rally to him, and his place of rest will be glorious.” Isaiah 11:10

“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders, and he will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” Isaiah 9:6

“In that day the Branch of the Lord will be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the land will be the pride and glory of the survivors in Israel.” Isaiah 4:2

It was predited thousands of years earlier that a Savior would be born unto Israel and to the world.  He would come through the dry ground and roots of Israel as a ”tender shoot” and as a ”branch”. 

The Bible shares that Mary and Joseph were engaged to be married and they traveled from their hometown Nazareth in Galilee to Bethlehem.  The name of this tiny village in Nazareth tells us something about the people living there and offers a clue to the identity of the child Mary would bear.  Nazareth comes from the Hebrew word “netzer”, which means “branch” or “shoot”.  Sometimes when a tree is chopped down, a shoot will grow from the stump, allowing a new tree to spring up where the old one has died.  This shoot is called, in Hebrew, a netzer.  Isn’t it interesting that the town that Jesus came from is called “the branch”.

The netzer was a promise of hope.  The words as used in Isaiah pointed to the promise though Israel had been cut down like a tree, she would rise up once again.  Can anything good come from Nazareth?  Little did the people of Israel and of the small hopeless town of Nazareth would come the Savior!  What does it tell us that instead of luxury, God grew up among working class people? 

“God chose the foolish things of this world to shame the wise; God chose what was weak in the world to shame the strong.  God chose what is low and despised in this world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing the things that are.” 1Corinthians 1:27-28

Jesus comes from a genealogy of imperfect people.  Jesus, from the roots of Israel, is the branch of Christmas!