OUR PLANS

Often, we live our lives guided by our own plans and ideas.
James 4:13 Now listen, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.’
Planning is not evil; in fact it is very wise to plan and prepare for the future.
I believe that planning is vital for success in every area of life.
Can you imagine building a house without a plan?
Taking such action would be doomed to failure.
So planning is important.
However, sometimes we can feel so immortal and so in control that we think all things rest within our own power and ability.
When I was a young man, I felt very much like this. My life seemed to stretch endlessly ahead of me. I felt immortal (as if I would never die) and anything was possible if I just applied my heart and mind to it.
We can almost become arrogant, thinking we can go wherever to like, stay for as long as we like and do whatever we like.
This can easily become the sentiment of the way we live our lives.
It can get to the point where we try to plan our whole life without HIM.
Don’t plan your whole life without Him.
Too many of God’s children have become so ‘mature’ that they have stop trusting God and His word.
They rely more on what ‘seems good unto them’ and don’t really trust Him.

LIFE IS UNPREDICTABLE

There is a problem with these great plans that we develop.When I was a young man in my father’s church, we went through an exhaustive planning program. We spent days and many hours devising our mission statement and our goals and vision. We had a facilitator come in and help us to put this all together so that we had a short-term, medium-term and long-term plans for the growth of the ministry. We were even taken through a detailed SWOT analysis to analyze our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to guard against every eventuality. By the end of it we were all exhausted, but at least the plans were in place and we were very happy with ourselves.
Now I believe it was a good and a valuable exercise and would recommend it to others. But one aspect was overlooked, and that was if something happened that none of us could have ever imagined. That is exactly what happened, my father dropped dead at a Christian march a few years later. Most, if not all of those plans proved of little value and were abandoned and have been relegated to the annals of history.
The truth of matter is that life doesn’t always go according to our plans.
James 4:14 ‘You do not even know what will happen tomorrow!’
A plan is very specific, yet we don’t know what tomorrow will hold.
Tomorrow is certainly unknown, but next year could be even more different than we could imagine.
Proverbs 27:1 ‘Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring.’

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