MAKING PLANS IN UNCERTAIN TIMES

Introduction

-Scottish poet Robert Burns once wrote in his sonnet entitled TO A MOUSE this ever-famous quip (given in more modern English):

THE BEST LAID PLANS OF MICE AND MEN OFTEN GO AWRY

-If there ever was a motto for the year 2020, that sounds like a good one to me. Just when you think you are able to make some plans, things change, and you have to start from scratch.

-I know that I have had to learn some hard lessons in these trying times that go against my natural grain. I am one who likes to know the plan ahead of time, get my ducks in a row, and then execute the plan having already accounted for all contingencies. And I do not like to turn to the left or the right—you stay the course.

~That doesn’t work right now. One week I come into a staff meeting with all these ideas, and by the time the next staff meeting roles around whatever I said the week before has to be scrapped and you start again.

-Of course, my notion that I could control every aspect of every plan, or come up with a fool-proof plan, was nothing short of fool-hardy, naïve, and a fantasy. There is no human being that is able to make perfect plans or able to ensure their plans go without a hitch.

~There is only one Sovereign who is able to control everything, and none of us are Him

-Not that we just stop making plans or dreaming dreams—there is never a call for that. We have plans for school and jobs, plans for marriage and family, plans for vacation and retirement, etc.

~it’s just that we have to be flexible enough that when circumstances change, or our plans don’t quite pan out, that we are able to adjust and to walk with God wherever He leads.

-In the passage that we are reading today, James warned Christian businessmen against the arrogant attitude of thinking that they are in such control of their circumstances and their plans that they completely ignore God.

-And what we want to take away from our text is that we Christians must humbly submit our plans and dreams to the sovereign purposes of Almighty God. We can’t become so clingy to our own plans that we become inflexible to the will of God. I believe this is important given the current circumstances in which we find ourselves.

James 4:13–17 ESV

13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— 14 yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. 15 Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” 16 As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. 17 So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.

-There are four lessons about making plans in uncertain times that I want to touch upon:

1) Keep a proper perspective

-James addresses people who make their plans without any thought about the bigger picture

~They think that they can go on and say: I’m going to do this and I’m going to do that, and there’s no one and nothing to stop me…

-But in v. 14 he gives them a dose of reality:

~One thing he mentions is that we have limited information. We are finite creatures who are not able to tell the future or predict the future. We don’t even know what tomorrow will bring much less what circumstances are going to be like further down the road.

~We are not omniscient. We don’t know what is going on in someone’s heart and mind or what is going on somewhere else in the world. There are so many factors that come into play when it comes to the plans we make, there is no way that a finite human knows them all or can take account of them all.

-And we most certainly do not know the mind of God without Him revealing it to us. We may think that we should go one direction, but God (who has all of eternity before Him) knows that with His will and plans our life is going to go in a completely different direction, and we won’t know that until God reveals it to us.

-We are working with limited knowledge, so, knowing that, we go into our plan-making with the perspective that things might change as more information becomes available.

-But James doesn’t only warn us that we have limited information, he also warns us that we have limited time and power. At the end of v. 14 he reminds us that our lives are like mists that appear for a little time and then vanish.

-James isn’t trying to be some sort of Debby Downer, he is giving us a perspective on reality.

~Because, first, it reminds us how little power we really have to control things around us. Think about what makes up mist—it’s nothing much. Mist can’t hold anything up. Mist can’t hold anything back. You can put your hand right through mist and it can’t do a thing about it.

-Even so, while we like to think we have control over many aspects of life, we really don’t. We can’t control other people. We can’t control the weather. We can’t control a virus. James is giving us some perspective on what we can control, and it’s not much.

-But this metaphor he uses also reminds us that our time on earth is short in comparison to eternity. And so, instead of making big plans for our earthly life, we need to think in terms of the long run (think in terms of eternity) because, relatively speaking, most of our plans won’t outlast our time on earth.

~So, the plans we do make take into consideration our lack of knowledge and our lack of power and our lack of time. We begin to take on an eternal perspective as we make our plans.

-Now, I do have to note that I am not subscribing to some sort of fatalism that just gives up any sort of planning or throws caution to the wind, que sera sera, whatever will be will be. That is not a biblical view on life.

~Rather, we know that even though we are not in control and we are finite, we can make plans with the provision knowing that even though we don’t have all the circumstances under control, we know the One that does

~This leads me:

2) Submit to the sovereign Lord

-James says that this is the way we approach our plans (in v. 15)—IF THE LORD WILL WE WILL LIVE AND DO WHATEVER OUR PLAN IS

-That is, we submit our plans to God’s watchful care and eye, and if they fit within His plan, all is well and good; and if our plans do not fit into God’s plans, all is still well and good because God has something different in store for us

-It is good to plan, and it is good to have dreams, but always with the provision that if our plans somehow run contrary to God’s overall plan, then His plans will always take precedence.

~God has the power and wisdom to override anything that does not ultimately accomplish His sovereign purposes, or to adjust our plans as He sees fit.

-Yes, sometimes God allows things to happen on earth that seemingly run contrary to what we would consider His heart and character (and goes against our plans and desires), but, ultimately, they fulfill what God planned all along.

~We think of Joseph, who literally had a dream that his dad and brothers would bow down to him. He was all ready for that plan to take place, but instead he was sold into slavery, falsely accused of rape, and forgotten in prison. Yet years later God lifted him up, Joseph’s dream was fulfilled, and God’s purposes were advanced.

~If it was left up to Joseph, the whole slavery and prison bit would not have been part of his plan, yet in God’s sovereignty God used those circumstances to advance a plan better than Joseph could have done on his own without those things happening to him.

-Other times God allows someone to advance their own plans against His will but it is to their own detriment. They so stubbornly set themselves to fulfill their own desires and will, God gives them over to their plans and uses the consequences of their ill-sought plans as a means of discipline.

~For example, in the Book of Esther, Haman, the evil Persian prime minister, thought that nothing could ever stop his plan to have all the Jews in the Persian Empire destroyed and slaughtered, because it was guaranteed by the sealed decree of the Persian king which was irreversible. But God saw to it that his plan would fail, and that Haman instead would be executed.

-God has the sovereign power to do whatever is going to advance His own plan of redemption on earth according to His loving wisdom. Our lives as Christians are always at His disposal for His use in the grand scheme of things.

~Yes, He wants us to have the spiritually abundant life given through Jesus Christ. Yes, He wants us to experience shalom peace and well-being available through Jesus Christ. But, ultimately, only His plans will lead us there.

-God tells us in Proverbs that:

Proverbs 16:9 (ESV)

9 The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps.

-God is in sovereign control over our plans.

-And think about what this means for our salvation. If it were left to humanity, our plan would be that we would try to save ourselves through religion or works so we have a sense of accomplishment. But that doesn’t work. Our sin so separates us from God that we can do nothing about it. Yet, thankfully, God had a different plan, where His Son would take on humanity, die a cruel death on a cross after experiencing the Father’s full wrath against humanity’s sins. No human would have ever come up with a plan like that, therefore if left up to our plans we would be lost.

-That’s why, instead of thinking that we are so smart or so in control that our plans could never go wrong, we hold onto our plans very loosely, willingly saying that even though these are our plans, they will only happen if the sovereign Lord wills them to be.

3) Maintain a humble attitude

-In v. 16 James tells the businessmen that boasting in any form is evil—and, in context, more specifically, boasting about how great your plans are and that they are so air-tight they will never fail, is just plain foolishness. Boasting about how good and smart and talented you think you are is wrong.

-I’m imagining that there were businessmen who were successful in many of their ventures, and so they just took it for granted that anything else that they would come up with in the future would work out just as well.

~I can hear them say: I successfully started this company, and I took over that company, and I got this project off the ground, and I moved that project in the right direction, I just can’t fail on this next venture of mine

-Or maybe some dared to say: I’m just so good at what I do, nothing can stop me

-We’ve seen how that attitude has worked in the past:

~The creators of the Titanic boasted that even God couldn’t sink that ship. We saw how that worked out.

-The bragging of these businessmen took on many forms. In one sense, it means that they had the pretense of self-creation and sole causation. To put it in more slang terms: they thought that they were self-made men and women

~They didn’t think anybody helped them get to where they were at in life, and nobody else was going to keep getting them ahead, so they just continued down the road of self-reliance.

~They said: I got me this far, and I’m the only one that’s going to continue bringing me success and making my plans all work out

-James says that it is evil to boast like that—not that you’d boast like that out loud, but you boast like that in your heart

~There is not one thing that any human being has that hasn’t come from God. If you have a successful job, it’s because God gave it to you. If your plan that you so meticulously worked out actually comes to fruition, it was God who made it happen.

-Sure, God will use other people to bring your plan along, and God will give you the intelligence and talents to bring your plan along, but there is no reason for you to boast.

-It reminds me of a story that John Ortburg included in one of his books:

There was a CEO of a Fortune 500 company who pulled into a service station to get gas. He went inside to pay, and when he came out he noticed his wife engaged in a deep discussion with the service station attendant. It turned out that she knew him. In fact, back in high school before she met her eventual husband, she used to date this man.

The CEO got in the car, and the two drove in silence for a while. He was feeling pretty good about himself when he finally spoke: "I bet I know what you were thinking. I bet you were thinking you're glad you married me, a Fortune 500 CEO, and not him, a service station attendant."

His wife replied, "No, I was thinking if I'd married him, he'd be a Fortune 500 CEO and you'd be a service station attendant.”

-But another boast that we must be weary of when it comes to our plans is the arrogancy of people who always get their way—they have gotten their way all of their life, so they think that it should just naturally continue. And they think since the people all around them allowed them to get their way, that God should do the same.

-I don’t know where to even begin with such foolishness. Anything you have, and any plan that has worked out, comes completely by the grace of God. God has no obligation to you when it comes to your plans. His hand cannot be forced. He graciously does and allows things for our good and His glory, but it is arrogant to think that you should always get your way or always get what you want.

-James calls us to a humble attitude when it comes to making our plans. We are not as talented and smart as we think we are. Our plans are never fool proof. We aren’t owed anything by anybody.

~Instead, we humbly submit our plans to God and submit to Him: NOT MY WILL BUT YOUR WILL BE DONE

4) Determine to serve the Lord

-v. 17 tells us that whoever knows to do good and doesn’t do it, for him it is sin

-Within the context, it is speaking of what your ultimate goal is for your plans.

~Yes, it is perfectly fine to plan for your life and your lifestyle. It is fine to plan for family and for retirement. There is nothing wrong with personal planning.

~Yet, we must always remember that we keep God and His kingdom in consideration with everything that we are planning.

-You plan on a certain career path, and God graciously guides you in this. And while that career will sustain your life on earth, you must also remember that within your career God will also use you for His kingdom purposes.

~You plan on a certain path of studies in school in a subject you are interested in and feel particularly gifted in. That is well and good, but also remember that even during your studies God will also use you for His kingdom purposes.

-Whatever it is that you might have plans for, determine that within those plans you are going to serve God and His purposes.

~Plan on making the goal of your plan to be serving God with all your heart.

-God wants your plans to do good on this earth as a disciple of Jesus Christ, making an impact on those around you for eternity. Do not neglect what it is that you are ultimately called to. Your plan is part of God’s plan.

-There is an ancient urban legend about Jesus’ ascension into heaven.

He is met by the angel Gabriel who asks him, "Now that your work is finished, what plans have you made to ensure that the truth that you brought to earth will spread throughout the world?"

Jesus answered, "I have called some fishermen and tax-collectors to walk along with me as I did my Father’s will."

"Yes, I know about them," said Gabriel, "but what other plans have you made? "

Jesus replied, "I taught Peter, James and John about the kingdom of God; I taught Thomas about faith; and all of them were with me as I healed and preached to the multitudes."

Gabriel replied. "But you know how unreliable that lot was. Surely you must have other plans to make sure your work was not in vain."

Jesus quietly replied to Gabriel "I have no other plans. I am depending on them!! "

~And that has not been passed down to us as the major consideration of all our plans

Conclusion

-I conclude with this:

We can make plans for our life, but there may be roadblocks placed in our way. We don’t have to let that frustrate us when we keep a proper, godly, eternal perspective on our plans—that God is sovereignly in control and our plans are in the hands of His plans. We join Him in what it is we are doing on earth.

-Christian, give your plans in God’s hands today, and when things seem uncertain, rest in Him—His plans can never be thwarted

-But some of you haven’t joined God in His plan of salvation…