BULLETIN ARTICLE
7 April 2019
MY PLAN VS GOD’S PLAN

Have you ever tried to plan for something? Of course, you have. We have been taught since young the value of planning – we schedule our time, we plan our meals, we map our career paths. World financial gurus such as Warren Buffet have been noted to stress the importance of planning, saying: “an idiot with a plan can beat a genius without a plan.” Planning isn’t such a bad thing. It helps us know our priorities and make time for them. Planning takes hold of the direction we try to achieve in life and help us accomplish what we set out to. However, we must also learn there is an ugly side to the “planning” we’re doing with our lives.

In Genesis 16 we read that Sarai, Abram’s wife, had a plan. She desperately wanted a child and thought that the best way to do it was to have her slave, Hagar, take her place as the birth mother. She planned this out, and even got her husband in on the scheme. It seemed like a great plan, and if followed through, would definitely get them what they all wanted. However, as we know, things don’t go to plan. Sarai never contemplated the outcome she received and we often face situations which seem the same. No matter how hard we plan, it just doesn’t turn out “right”. Or does it?

With hindsight, we know now that God had intended for Sarai and Abram to achieve the outcome they desired, but not through their own means. Their initial plan fell through not because they didn’t succeed, but because they had put their plan over God’s. Nowhere in this story do we see that God had instructed Sarai to plan or do this. Nowhere in this story do we see that Sarai or Abram had consulted God on this plan. They daringly went ahead without considering what God had planned for their lives. Although things didn’t go to “plan”, it was their plan which failed, not God’s. Never God’s.

As God’s creation, we must acknowledge that God knows best. Proverbs 16:9 says: “In their hearts humans plan their course, but the LORD establishes their steps.” It is not wrong to plan but it would be wrong to go against God’s plan in favour of our own plan. It’s not that God wants us to fail in our own plans but rather, that he wants us to learn to trust in him and his divine plan. Jeremiah 29:11 teaches us: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

James 4:13-15 gives us a good reminder on how to live and plan our lives: 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”— 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. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”