A Biblical P.A.T.H to Purposeful Goals in 2023

If you’re already struggling to keep up with your goals for the year or you chose not to set any at all because they usually don’t work for you, I want to share with you 4 biblical principles to purposeful planning to make this your best year yet. Enjoy!

It’s the beginning of the year and everyone is talking about goals, resolutions, intentions, and vision boards. It’s actually quite exciting, until it’s not and you’re overcome with anxiety about how you’ll actually meet these goals or the doubt of questioning if you will. And year after year, we put ourselves through the same cycle of goal planning. Make a goal, get some momentum on it at the beginning of the year, and watch it fissile out by the end of February.

Our problem is that we focus on our plans and associate our satisfaction on accomplishing the plan over fulfilling God’s purpose. Proverbs 19:21 says:

Having plans is not bad and this is good because as the scripture tells us we have many of them. Dreaming and thinking of all the plans we want for the new year is the easy part. The Bible supports this truth when it says, “many are the plans in a man’s heart.” We’re not short on plans, dreams, and ideas of what we want our year and life to look like. If you’re like me, you have memos, notepads, and journals full of ideas and plans. Our ability to dream may not have limits, but our lives do. We’re constrained by the amount of time, energy, and resources we have. This is why planning goals can become full of anxiety and fear for many people. We know we can’t do it all, but we sure do want to, so we fear setting goals and then facing the disappointment of not seeing them come to pass. But what if I told you there was a better way. 

When we look to the scriptures, we see we are not to place our hope in our plans anyway. Instead, the scripture tells us it’s God’s purpose that will prevail. Plans are what we want to do; purpose is why God called us to do something. Plans can be checked off, while purpose is about becoming the woman God created you to be. Plans have restrictions, where purpose holds God’s promise to see His will in our lives. This doesn’t mean we should not plan. We should write down our hopes, dreams, and visions because they come from God too.

But once we have our plans laid out, we need a way to move from simply having plans to living God’s purpose. In order to complete our plans to see God’s purpose this year, we need a clear path from plans to purpose. You need clarity to know which way to go and God’s Word lights our path to give us clarity as we move from plans to purpose.

Psalm 119:105 says that God’s Word is a light to our path showing us the way to live for His glory. As we look through the scriptures, I’ll help you develop a path for each purposeful goal you have for this year.

Instead of setting goals for the year, I’m going to take you through my P.A.T.H. to Purposeful Goals method so you can plan for purpose and experience the joy and satisfaction of fulfilling God’s desire for your year. It's a 4 Step process that includes:

• Purpose
• Achievements
• Tasks
• Habits

1. Purpose

So let’s start with purpose and what it means to set a purposeful goal instead of a traditional goal. A traditional goal says: I want to write a book. The traditional goal is so fixed that it doesn’t leave room for flexibility. Either you write the book or not and even if you write half the book by the end of the year, you feel like trash because you didn’t complete writing the book like you planned. Traditional goals are so frustrating because they focus only on an end destination and leave little to no room to focus on the process and progress to getting to that destination when that’s where we spend most of our time when it comes to pursuing goals.

A purposeful goal however focuses on becoming and the why behind the goal. While a traditional goal may simply say “write a book by the end of the year,” a purposeful goal says: “I want to become an author who inspires women to understand their identity in Christ.”

So the purposeful goal is much more flexible. Your focus is writing because that’s what authors do regardless of if you finish writing the book or not and you’re clear on why you want to become this type of writer.

I’m not saying don’t give yourself a timeline, but the focus shouldn’t only be to accomplish a task in a certain amount of time, but rather becoming the type of woman who accomplishes those types of things and why it’s important. Writing a book is just writing a book. But when you focus on why you want to write, in our example: to help women know their identity in Christ, it attaches so much more meaning to our goals making it more likely we’ll reach them.

Here’s a personal example of mine on what it looked like to set purposeful goals. I have the desire to reach 100,000 subscribers on my YouTube channel. And for so long, I viewed this as a goal. But it’s not a goal, it's an accomplishment. Instead, my goal this year is for this channel to become the leading source of Biblical content for women to learn, love, and live God’s Word. That’s my purposeful goal. Whether we reach 100,000 subscribers or not, the purpose is more important. 

We have to realize it’s not worth it to reach our goals if we miss God’s purpose. If you lose 15 pounds this year and reach your goal weight but you’re unhealthy with all types of heath issues, would you want that? Instead, what if you didn’t meet your goal weight, but you decrease inflammation in your body, you increase your energy so you can do more physically, you become stronger, and grow in your endurance. That would be a better outcome than simply losing 15 pounds. Now the type of woman who lives a healthy lifestyle may very well reach the achievement of losing a certain amount of weight, but she does so as her focus is on her purpose.

Your life is more than a bunch of items on a to-do list that you check off as fast as you can. Your life is about walking with God to become more of the woman He’s calling you to be. It’s a process and journey that doesn’t have to feel like an impossible and disappointing path when our focus is in the right place: His purpose. 

Now, like I said, as we focus on our purposeful goals, we will reach certain achievements along the way to signal that we are headed in the right direction. Proverbs 16:9 says:

2. Achievements

Our achievements are the steps on the path to our purpose. So, with the example of writing a book, an achievement may look like completing the outline for the book, writing the first chapter, finishing the books, editing the book, and finding a literary agent. Achievements map out what results will look like along the way to ensure we are heading in the right direction. Achievements are the result of our purpose when lived out. Many people set goals that are really just achievements but have no purpose behind them. 

By starting with our purpose, we can now set our achievements, knowing why we are doing what we are doing. This increases our chances of actually achieving our goals. So when you envision your life living out the purpose that you’ve set, what achievements will you accomplish each step along the way? Remember, your purpose is more important than the achievements themselves, but achievements act as indicators that we’re making progress. We don’t have to be perfect, but plotting out each achievement helps us to stay on path.

Each achievement then serves as a stepping stone, on our journey towards the purpose that God has for your life, and not just a means to an end. Again, your life is not just about checking off plans and achievements, but enjoying the journey of discovering God’s purpose for your life.

After we’ve determined our achievements, we need to set tasks and habits.

3. Tasks

Tasks are the one-time actions we need to take to reach each achievement. This is where many people get stuck. It’s exciting to think of our purposeful goals and of the achievements we want to reach, but the steps to get there are not always so glamorous. Still they are necessary if we want to reach our goals. Proverbs 21:5

As we stay diligent to the tasks it takes to reach specific achievement, we’ll find ourselves closer to our purpose. So if an achievement is to complete the outline for your book, tasks may include:

• Create a google doc for the outline
• Collect all your notes in one place
• Setting a time in your calendar to create the outline. 

Some tasks will be mundane, but when we realize they are the necessary steps to reach the purpose we want, we can enjoy the journey as we work for the glory of God.

4. Habits

Finally, we need to establish habits. Proverbs 16:3 says:

We need committed and consistent actions that we take to reach our purposeful goal. We can’t eat one healthy meal and think we’ll be healthy. We can’t write one sentence and think we’ll complete a book. Either we do something one time and become frustrated because we don’t see results the first, second, or third time that we do it, or think we have to accomplish everything at once, become intimidated, and don’t do anything at all. But those who have the patience to do a little bit at a time over a long period of time will most likely reach their goals. These are called habits. 

Many people fail at reaching their goals because they see goals as a one-time accomplishment and not a lifestyle commitment. When we view goals this way, we work hard at the beginning, reach a few accomplishments, and then stop because we’ve reached our goal or gotten close enough. Then we revert right back to our old way of living. So if you want to become an author, you need to commit to writing. You need a habit of writing. Maybe you write 2 hours every morning or 1 hour each night, but you need a consistent system that leads you to your purposeful goal. So ask yourself, what are the habits of an author if you want to write a book? What are the habits of a runner if you want to run a marathon? But living intentionally with purpose is a consistent and faithful lifestyle composed of daily, monthly, and yearly habits that make us the purposeful women God has created us to be.

So I hope as you plan for this year and think of all the many plans in your heart, your focus will be God’s ultimate and greater purpose for you.

And to help you with that, I’ve created the Beloved Planner to help you design a life guided by grace, field by faith, and led by love. This is a digital planner that you can print out or use on your iPad or tablet with purposeful planning pages to walk you from your plans to your purpose for this year. It’s a dated or undated planner with monthly and weekly layouts, themed months with scriptures throughout to keep you encouraged on your purposeful goals year-round. You can get the planner now by visiting thebelovedboutique.com or as a free gift for those that become Beloved app members for a limited time, so join now at belovedwomen.tv or in the Beloved app available in the Apple or Google play stores.  

So let me know, have you planned for this year already or are you just getting started like me? I look forward to chatting with you in the comments.  If you enjoyed today’s video, will you do me a favor and share it with a friend because you just never know who might need some Beloved encouragement today.  

As always, thank you so much for watching and until next time, be beautiful, be blessed, and be loved.