By David ReayThursday 3 Mar 2022LifeWords DevotionalsDevotionsReading Time: 2 minutes
Look here, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we are going to a certain town and will stay there a year. We will do business there and make a profit.” How do you know what your life will be like tomorrow? Your life is like the morning fog—it’s here a little while, then it’s gone. What you ought to say is, “If the Lord wants us to, we will live and do this or that.” Otherwise you are boasting about your own pretentious plans, and all such boasting is evil. (NLT)
One of the tasks that many church leaders take seriously is planning for the future. Even to the extent of mapping out five-year plans or year by year strategy. And it is right and proper to do some planning, some thinking ahead, some concern with longer term goals.
But our text reminds us that all such thinking has to be provisional. All our future planning has to be done in the light of our own limitations and in the context of a God who is free to act in ways that might surprise us. Thoughtful planning ahead is not to be another way of our seeking to control a church or an organisation or even our own lives.
We need to live with a degree of uncertainty, with an assumption that our varied great expectations might not come to pass. After our strategy groups have spent time on formulating plans for the future, we need to treat them as possibilities that may or may not eventuate. Nothing wrong with such planning, but there needs to be an awareness that all those plans might be changed as God weaves his own plans.
We may think we have got God’s plans figured out, but this is not spiritual insight or wisdom but rather arrogance and a desire to control. We are to leave God free to work things out his way even as we rightly seek to discern our part in it all. We surrender our own expectations of what he might or might not do. We write our plans in pencil, not indelible ink.
Blessings,
David