How to Set God-Sized Goals and Trust Him to Work Through You
“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions,” writes Annie Dillard. “Does any-one have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?”
We declare with our mouths that we worship an awesome God. But our teeny-tiny goals of what we’re asking that awesome God to do through us betray our unbelief.
This, of course, is nothing new. Jesus’s own disciples—those who witnessed his miracles firsthand—often struggled to believe that they could accomplish anything of consequence. And throughout the
Gospels, we see Jesus challenging them to expand their vision of what’s possible.
When Peter could imagine forgiving somebody only seven times,
Jesus multiplied his friend’s assumption by a factor of eleven (see Matthew 18:21–22). When Andrew saw only five loaves and two fish, Jesus showed him how one lunch could feed over five thousand people (see John 6:1–13). When each of the disciples saw themselves leaving one home and one family, Jesus opened their eyes to see “a hundred times as much in this present age and in the age to come” (Mark 10:30, NIV).
But listen up because this is absolutely critical: Jesus was not
calling his disciples to increase the size of their faith but the object of it.
As he famously said, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed,
you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you” (Matthew 17:20). Because it’s not the size of our faith that matters, but who our faith is in.
Our goals are so small because we are looking in a mirror—at what we can do in our own strength. But Jesus is calling us to look out a window—at what God can do through us.
Scripture is clear that it is not just you working on your goals but “God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose” (Philippians 2:13). And “the Spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power, love and self-discipline” (2 Timothy 1:7) to do “immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine,” for God’s glory and the good of others (Ephesians 3:20).
And because the One working through us is infinite, all goals are equally difficult. There are no hard things or easy things for God—just things. That truth should lead us to pray for the biggest, most redemptive outcomes we can imagine.
Excerpted from Redeeming Your Goals. Copyright © 2026 by Jordan Raynor. Published by WaterBrook, an imprint of Penguin Random House Christian Publishing Group, LLC. Used by permission.
