“God loves you, and has a plan for your life!” How many times in your life have you heard, or read those words? How many times have you heard those words preached or taught? If you are like most people who have been in church with any regularity during your life, probably too many times to count or remember. While I certainly do not dispute the statement, “God loves you, and has a plan for your life”, it is my contention that this statement is often misused and misunderstood, from a Biblical perspective.
God does love you. God is love, so it is impossible for God not to love. He is not love in the abstract, sentimental sense. He is love in the sense that love is one of the many characteristics of His being. However, just because He loves you, does not mean you are in a saving relationship with Him. The Universalist idea that because God is only love, everyone will eventually be saved, is not biblical. God is not “only love”. That is just one aspect of His many attributes.
God created you intentionally, so obviously He has some purpose for doing so, so in that sense, He has a plan. However, using that terminology, “He has a plan for your life” I think, is where some misunderstanding of what that means, comes into play, and has the possibility of causing us frustration and disappointment if we do not understand what that means.
Let me explain what I mean. When we think God has a plan for our lives, we generally interpret that in terms of specific things God has orchestrated for us to do. For example, I have heard people say things like, “God has instructed me to start this business.” “God has called me to pastor this church.” “God told me to write this book” You get the picture. The problem we run into is that, if we do these things, and then they do not work, what then? What if I think God has called me to start a particular business, and I do so, and the business falls flat on its face?
I remember a man who came to the church we used to attend. He had just moved from up north somewhere, I do not remember where. He got up in front of the church and testified that God had called him to move into the area, and raise money for God’s work as a day trader. He was playing the stock market. All the church leaders clapped and sang his praise. Well, somewhere along that time frame, the stock market crashed. After about six months or so, I no longer saw the guy. I don’t know whether he just left the church, or moved off somewhere else.
I remember another time when I met a young man who came from South Carolina to start a new church in the area. I was introduced to him by my brother-in-law, who was a minister in this guy’s denomination. (My brother-in-law has since retired.) I met with the young man several times, and he laid out his vision for the church. My wife and I became involved with the church plant, and helped him out a lot for several years. The church growth did not advance as rapidly as the supporting denomination required, and they began to cut funding. The young man finally took a job as a youth pastor in another branch of the same denomination and moved back to South Carolina. The church plant was a failure.
So, what is my point in telling these stories? I could recount many other examples. Both these men were convinced that God had a plan for them to “do” some specific thing, and it did not work out. I am sure both men had the right intentions. I am sure both men were convinced in their hearts, at the time, that they were following God’s “plan”. So, what conclusions do we come to from this? Either one of several things: 1. God mislead them, or God changed His mind somewhere along the way, and failed to let them know. (I certainly do not believe this.) Or, 2. They conjured something up in their own minds, and felt so strongly about it, that they convinced themselves God told them to do it. (Thinking back over the course of my own life, I know that there were times when I was guilty of doing this very thing. This has been a personal source of frustration and disappointment for me on more than one occasion.) 3. The third, and more likely option is that when we talk about God’s “plan” for our lives, it has more to do with the salvation of our eternal souls than our “doing”. God’s process in saving our eternal souls through the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and His finished work, is worked out in lots of different trying circumstances and experiences.
If you have ever experienced frustration and disappointment in your life because something you did, with the best of intentions, did not work out, and it was something that you strongly felt God “planned” for you to do, take heart. You are in good company. The Scripture is chock full of examples of godly people, who, in this world’s estimation of things, would be considered failures.
The other piece to this puzzle is this: It is better to do something (as long as that something is not causing harm to others) than it is to do nothing, out of the fear of failure. Fear of failure can be a crippling thing that can put your life on hold. Any failure should be a learning experience, not the end of the rope. I have often heard it said, “If you are not failing, you are not trying.”
Our world’s system hammers into our heads from the time we are old enough to learn that results are what matters. I am not disputing the value of good results. We should value results. However, if we access results strictly in the sense of numbers and outcomes that can be plotted and graphed, and discredit the value of the process, we miss the value of the Incarnate life the Son of God lived among mankind for thirty-three years. The ultimate goal and result of the life of Christ, was His crucifixion and resurrection, paying the penalty for man’s sin, and opening the way for the life of God to be manifest within the life of man again, as it was in the beginning, before the fall. However, Jesus’ life Incarnate was a process, just as ours is, and the fact that the eternal Son of God walked as a man on this earth for thirty-three years and experienced all the same life struggles and perplexities that we experience, is a staggering thought. Jesus’ incarnate life brings value to the process. Jesus’ incarnate life brings glory into the mundane and seemingly boring aspects of our lives. It brings glory and value into our day to day joys and struggles, because He walks with us through them.
God’s plan is to make you His child, and conform you into the image of His dear Son. That is the “plan”. The processes He takes you through to accomplish that is just the details. Don’t let life’s so called failures abort that process in your life!
Danny's Stump 