Trust Final Results to the Lord

Do you sometimes think that if you could just plan carefully enough, everything would go your way?

Planning is a valuable tool. If we plan wisely, such planning can increase our productivity, while at the same time helping us keep a bigger share of our sanity. In short, planning can help eliminate the tyranny of the urgent.

However, there is a subtle lie that can go with planning. It is the deception that if we just plan well enough, all will go just as we wish. Life becomes a subtle game of trying to control variables we really can’t control at all. 

As hard as it is to accept, even with the best of plans, fortunes are lost, health can deteriorate, people die, accidents happen, reputations are tarnished, and families blow apart.

God addresses this in James 4:13-16: 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.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.

Although planning is wise when it takes into account God’s perspective, it can be prideful and foolish when we forget the brevity of life, uncontrollable variables, and an eternal perspective.

On God’s word, let us endeavor in God’s wisdom and power to be those who use planning as a tool to maximize on life and increase our effectiveness for Christ, yet let us also endeavor in God’s wisdom and power to be those who trust final details and results to God.

There must always be a contingency on our plans: If the Lord wills. By placing God’s will and eternal reality first, planning in our lives takes on the proper perspective.

In Christ,

Chris Heinss

Image credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dafnecholet