When the Lord told Jeremiah he was ordained to be a prophet to the nations, he might have wondered if God had really thought this thing through! He began offering reasons why he wasn’t qualified to fulfill the destiny God had for him: “Ah, Lord GOD! Behold, I cannot speak, for I am a youth” (Jeremiah 1:6).

But God knew exactly what He was doing. As the call itself indicates, He had thought it through quite thoroughly: “This is no spontaneous decision on My part, Jeremiah. Don’t you realize that I knew everything about you while your mother was still carrying you? Don’t you realize that I’ve had this destiny mapped out for you all along?”

God had planned for this moment; and with joy, He looked forward to the deep satisfaction of seeing His child put to use the gifts that were so lovingly reserved for him. When Jeremiah protested his youthful inexperience, God reassured him: “I am with you to deliver you” (v. 8). He put His hand on Jeremiah’s lips and said, “Behold, I have put My words in your mouth” (v. 9).

Just as He did with Jeremiah, God treasures the moments in which He sees us growing into what He designed us to be and moving toward the destiny He has planned for us. The same is true in human relationships. John Ortberg explains: “If I love someone, it means I have certain hopes and intentions and wishes for them. I’m in their corner. I long for them to flourish and blossom. I want them to realize all their potential. I want them to become filled with virtue and moral beauty.”8

The difference is that with God’s love, these treasures exist before we do. He has reserved them for us from the very beginning. Paul speaks of this eternal knowledge and love of God when he writes to the Galatians about his own calling. He explains that God “separated me from my mother’s womb and called me through His grace, to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the Gentiles” (Galatians 1:15–16a).

Just as God had a destiny for Jeremiah and for Paul, He also has a destiny for each of us—one that He designed before we were born.

Before You Were Born, God Knew Your Possibility

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

—GENESIS 1:26–27

Warren Wiersbe has noted that “there is a divine conference among the members of the Godhead before man is created, something not seen at any other step of the Creation.”9 Out of this conference came God’s determination to create man in His own image. Being in God’s image doesn’t mean that we are like God in every way. Our likeness consists of bearing His character and nature, even though those attributes have been diminished by the Fall.