Louie Giglio - Your Future Is Bright, And You Can Hold The Hype (12/13/2025)
Louie Giglio returns to Jeremiah 29:11 to remind us that even in difficult times, God knows the good plans He has for us—plans for hope and a future—and that’s why our future is truly bright, with God already there, holding it, fulfilling promises, shaping the best version of us, giving new identity, bringing harvest, and ultimately heaven itself.
Your Future is Bright
We left off in the message that I shared before Sabbath, talking about the future of our house, the future of the kingdom of God. We talked about awakening happening all over the world. I want to kick off these next few months as we approach the end of the year and remind us all again, it’s not just the church that has a bright future, but you have a bright future.
I want to return to a text we discussed a few months ago, Jeremiah 29:11—a life verse for many of you in the room right now. We explored this in depth a few months ago and dissected the context of this verse. It becomes even more powerful when you understand where God’s people were when he made this promise to them. He said, «For I know the plans I have for you.» Now, we will revisit this, but I think the most important part of this verse is, «I know the plans that I have for you.» God is saying to you today, A: he has plans for you, and B: he is fully aware and knows what they are.
Now, I’m going to reiterate today that he is not prepared to tell you what they are right now. It’s unlikely that he will reveal all the plans today. He just needs you to know that he has plans and that he knows what they are. You might ask, «Well, if he has plans and knows what they are, why wouldn’t he tell me?» Because you would mess up the plans. You may not like some of the plans. You might run from some of the plans or try to circumvent them. But he is saying, «No, I know what I’m doing with you.»
I want you to leave this house today convinced that God in heaven has plans for you. And here is what they are: plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. That is why we can confidently say today that your future is bright. I will say this many times through the next few minutes together, and you can hold onto that hype. I truly believe the best is yet to come. I loved hearing that phrase for the first time and thinking, «Wow, that did something inside of me, » to know that the best is yet to come. There has been some pretty good stuff in the past, but to think that God still has more in the future is exciting.
I genuinely believe the best is yet to come. But that can get hyped sometimes, and life isn’t hyped. Life is hard. Life is full of disappointment. It is filled with U-turns, left turns, curveballs, and the highs and lows of joy and sorrow. What God wants to say to you today is, 'I’m not going to shield you from this broken planet, but trust me: on this broken planet, I have hope and a future for you.' Your future is bright, and I will give you a few reasons why your future is bright. I will only be able to touch on these today, and we can unpack them another time.
God is in Your Future
The first reason you can know that your future is bright today, without any hype around it, is because God is in your future. I don’t know if you’ve thought about that or not, but that meeting you have coming up this week that you’re all stressed about? God is already in the room. He is already in your future. He is already around the table waiting for you to walk through the door. Wherever you may be in the future, Yahweh will be there. He is enough, more than enough, and greater than whatever you will face in the future. Your future is bright.
Your Future is in God’s Hands
The second reason your future is bright is that your future is in God’s hands. He says, «I know the plans I have for you.» In other words, you don’t have to hold the future because he is already holding it right now. When you get there, he will be holding the future. You don’t have to worry, «Man, I don’t know if I’m going to make it to this thing three months from now. How am I going to carry this and take care of it?» He’s like, «No, I have that. I’m holding your future one day from now, one year from now, one week from now, one decade from now. I’m already holding it all, so you don’t have to.»
It was pretty crazy a few weeks ago when my friend David Crowder slipped and fell, breaking his leg in several places. It was a catastrophic break. He is over here with a boot and crutches as a result of surgery he had recently. Crowder was up there, as you can imagine, in a motorized chair with a microphone, doing what only Crowder could do. It was a significant break, and a lot of things had to be canceled because of it. Shelley, Tony, and David worked it out right away that they would not be able to do this and needed to reschedule a lot of things.
A few days later, David had surgery. Shelley and I went to the hospital where the surgery was happening and went back to the prep area before they took David to surgery. We wanted to pray and ask God for a miracle. Just the day before, Forest Frank had been healed from a back injury due to prayer led by Tarn Wells at an event, and now he writes this song that blows up all over the world. If you don’t know who Forest Frank is, welcome to the world. So we told Crowder this, who had been kind of in and out with this broken leg for the last few days. He didn’t know how everything had resolved, and we told him about the healing, so we prayed for his leg and for healing.
We prayed right there, in Jesus' name, for miraculous outcomes. Some really amazing things happened during the surgery; God was organizing and orchestrating things in that process. But Crowder comes out post-surgery and posts about the experience. He is in the hospital bed and just came out of surgery. He has Forest Frank on the brain now, so he hashtags or tags Forest Frank in his post. The next thing you know, Forest Frank says, «Hey, I saw where Crowder broke his leg, and I’ve been working on this song. Maybe Crowder would collaborate with me.»
Over the next few days, I’m not sure exactly how many, but I know it wasn’t very long from when he broke his leg to when the song dropped. They collaborated on a song called «The Rock.» If you’ve heard the song, it sounds like this going into the chorus: «Do I put my faith in Jesus? I put my trust in God. All of the ground is sinking. So I’m standing on the rock.» This song comes out, and yes, we have the 808 going in the house down here. I hadn’t felt that out of our system before, but I loved every bit of it.
I think it was only a few days from «I just broke my leg in three places» to «I have to cancel stuff, rearranging things, » and then «I’m making music and releasing a song that goes to the top of the charts.» God is saying, «Your future is in my hands.» Amen. And no matter where you are right now, I have plans for you, declares the Lord. Amen. They are plans to prosper you and not to harm you, to give you hope and a future.
It was so fun watching Forest and Crowder collaborate on this song and seeing it leap out into the world, knowing that it all happened during Sabbath. God works in ways we would never see coming. I would bet Crowder would say, «If it were a choice between doing a song with Forest Frank, which I loved, or having my leg back and not broken, I’d probably choose my leg back.» The point is that God works, and he has a future, and he’s holding onto your future.
God’s Promises are Future-Oriented
The third reason you can know your future is bright is because God’s promises are future-oriented. Every promise of God, according to scripture, is yes and amen. All those promises God speaks over you today are future promises. In Matthew chapter 1, I went back to Babylon to the people being released from slavery to Nebuchadnezzar. Cyrus comes now; they are going to be freed, and the leader who will lead them back is Zerubbabel.
I wanted to think about Zerubbabel for a moment, so I looked up the generations from Abraham to Jesus in Matthew 1 because Jesus is a son of Abraham. It was important for the Jewish reader to understand where Jesus fit in with Abraham. All the lineage from Abraham to Jesus is laid out in the first chapter of Matthew. Many people skip over that part when reading because who wants to know who was the father of so-and-so? But in the midst of this, Zerubbabel is in the story after the exile to Babylon. Jeconiah was his father, and it just goes down the list, and then there’s Zerubbabel. You track down from Zerubbabel, and here he is receiving a promise: «I have hope and a future for you. It’s to prosper you, not to harm you, to give you hope.»
Now, they are being freed back to their place to rebuild the walls and the temple. Zerubbabel is the one who rebuilt the temple. All the while, God is saying that this promise is not necessarily for today; it’s for the future. You go down from Zerubbabel; he had a son who had a son who had a son, all the way down to Jacob’s son, number 10, who was named Joseph. Joseph was the husband of Mary. Mary was the mother of Jesus, who is called the Messiah. The promise here was a future promise for you.
The Best Version of You is Yet to Come
The fourth reason your future is bright is that the best version of you is yet to come. I pray that the best version of you isn’t in the past. I pray you are sharper, more mature, stronger, smarter, more free, more able, more in touch with your gifts, more filled with the Holy Spirit, and more saved than you currently are. I don’t mean that there is a way to get saved, but salvation is a process that works through our lives and leads to sanctification. I pray that you will walk more confidently, lead more powerfully, and see God work through you in ways you haven’t seen in the past.
I pray that in your job, in the sphere where you spend your time, you will be better at what you do in the future than you have been in the past. That you will have a bigger impact in the future than you have in the past. That you will get rid of things that have held you back in the past. That you will be delivered from struggles you’ve faced all your life. God’s promise is that the best version of you is yet to come in Christ. You can check out 1 Corinthians 15:9-11, where Paul writes, «By the grace of God, I am what I am.»
In other words, you wouldn’t believe who I was, but look at who I am now. Why? Because God’s plan for Paul was future-oriented. When he saved him on the road to Damascus, he was saving him into the best version of himself.
Your New Identity is in the Future
The fifth reason, quickly, is that your new identity is in the future. I was thinking about the woman at the well, who was known in her town as the woman who struck out in marriage repeatedly and was now with a man she wasn’t married to. Everyone in town knew it, and that was her identity until Jesus showed up.
He was like, «No, my purpose for you is not to harm you. It’s to prosper you and to give you hope and a future.» When Jesus left that town that day, she had a new identity. She wasn’t just a woman who broke up marriages; she was the woman who met the guy at the well and invited everyone to come and see him. She became the reason why others got saved because she led them back to him.
Now she is known around the town not just as someone with a past but as someone with a brand new identity moving into the future. Your new identity is in the future. The enemy wants to keep you stuck in the past, tagged by your old identity, while God wants to free you into the future and give you a brand new identity. I was thinking about Bethany Hamilton, the young surfer girl who got bitten by a shark. She was 13 years old, a world-class surfer, out paddling on her board when a shark came by and bit off her arm. She got back on the board and, crazily enough, became a world-class surfer again.
But she has accomplished much more. For a long time, people identified her as the girl whose arm was bitten off. If you remember her story, you might have thought, «Oh, that’s the girl the shark bit.» I wanted to catch up with her a bit, and I saw this amazing picture of her family. I thought, I bet her kids don’t call her «the girl whose arm was bitten off by a shark.» I bet they call her «Mom.» They don’t wake up in the morning and say, «Hey, girl whose arm got bitten off by a shark.» They wake up and say, «Mama, » because she has a new identity.
Bethany has very much embraced her past but has transformed it. Her story has brought hope to people who have gone through similar things. But her identity is different now. The day the shark bit her arm, God already knew there were four kids in her future. He didn’t discover that later; he already knew. You’re a mom. He already knows who he’s making you to be. You don’t have to be defined by the circumstances branding you right now. God can and will give you a new name in the future. It will not be, «Oh, you know she…» or «Oh, he…» or «Oh, they…» No, that will not be how people talk about you in the future. In Christ, you will receive a new identity as you move forward in him.
Your Harvest is in the Future
Sixth, your harvest is in the future. If you’re planting and sowing in Christ, your harvest is in the future. Do not be deceived; God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. Whoever sows to please the flesh will reap destruction, while whoever sows to please the Spirit will reap eternal life. So, look at verse 9: «Let us not become weary in doing good.» Galatians 6 tells us not to grow tired in doing good, for at the proper time—we’re talking about the future—we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.
If you’re sowing in prayer, faithfulness, the word of God into people’s lives, or generously into kingdom ventures, your seeds planted in good soil and faith in Christ will bring a harvest at some point if you don’t give up. Like every good farmer knows, their life revolves around when the harvest comes. All year long is about preparing for the harvest. They plan, till, sow the seed, and monitor the weather. Everything leads to the harvest because they know they planted and nurtured; they know the harvest is coming.
I wonder if we’re stuck in whatever may be numbing our minds today, forgetting that faithfulness plants seeds for a harvest tomorrow. We should walk around expectant, knowing our harvest is coming. The things I’ve prayed for are coming. The things we’re giving into are coming. The words I’ve been speaking to that friend are coming. The harvest is coming; it’s not in the past. There has been a harvest, but there is one coming right now.
Heaven is in the Future
Lastly, heaven is in the future. If you think it’s hype to say «the best is yet to come, » you forgot the new heaven and new earth are yet to come. I’m telling you, the best is yet to come. Your loved ones who passed in Christ are in the future, in the new heaven and in the new earth. I believe pure London girls are in the future, in heaven and on earth. That’s where we’re headed. That’s why Jesus himself said, «Don’t lay up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and vermin destroy and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where moths and vermin do not destroy and where thieves do not break in and steal.»
If we are faithfully following Christ and being discipled by him, storing up treasures in heaven, then all of our wealth is in our future. The best of the best of the wealth we will know in life is in the future, in the new heaven and the new earth. The enemy is trying to trap someone in this room in the past, making someone afraid of the future, in both cases stealing your joy today. God wants to give you your joy back today by telling you that you will not be defined by the past and that he is already holding your future. Let him give you joy today, for he is changing you from the past, and your future is bright-and that’s not hype.