As believers, we must learn to live between the now and the next. The now is what is; the next is what is to come. The now represents your current situation; the next represents your future situation. Learning to cultivate appropriate levels of awareness of each of these realities enables us to move our lives forward.

The now with no next is nothing more than a rat race. Without a sense of what is next, your life is nothing more than a perpetuation of the present. And while living in the present is important, living in the present without a hope for your future is a terrifying prospect. By nature, we long to know what is next, and we instinctively yearn to know that what is next is greater than what is now. Our God-given thirst for transcendence presses us onward toward the God of hope, and we find our peace and joy in his presence as he fills us with hope.

The next with no now is nothing more than a fantasy. Without a sense of what is now, your life is nothing more than an anticipation of the future. But you cannot live in the future; you must live in the present. For it is only in learning how to live in the present that we are able to learn how to direct the present toward our anticipated future.

The now and the next are intricately connected; if you embrace both, you can make them work together. If you neglect one, you’ve ultimately lost both. We can neither neglect the already for the not yet, nor forsake the not yet for the already. We must learn to live in the presence of both our present and our future!

Regardless of how grand the next is, the now will never lose its significance because it is itself a next  of a past now. In this sense, the now and the next are historically indistinguishable, even though they are temporally distinct. We experience them in different ways as we pass through time and space. But when we look back on all of the nows and nexts of our lives, we remember them not as nows and nexts, but as thens.

The thens of our lives inform our nows; they become for us a reference point for assessing our progress toward the next. I experienced this recently when I listened to a sermon that I preached back in 2011. I found myself thinking, Wow! I haven’t preached like that in a long time! The result was that I began to press toward a higher mark in prayer and study as I prepared for the next Sunday’s message, and the result was one of the most powerful Sundays in the history of our church!

It was the memory of my then that empowered me to utilize my now to press toward my next. This is the formula for moving your life forward with great intentionality and resolve. The keys to your next are hidden in your then. Find them and use them to activate your now!