Sunday Service 17th May

Sermon: “Plan the plan…” (Please Read Isaiah 55: 6-9, Luke 12: 13-21 & James 4: 13-16)

Now that he had sold more units than anyone else in the company, Stuart was well on his way to making it big. He had big plans. He was not quite a millionaire but he reasoned it wouldn’t do him the least harm to be seen driving a car that matched the success he had been enjoying along with the other young, upwardly-mobile men of late 1980s Britain. Living the dream and driving the dream car, an Italian job, just shy of six figures with the prancing horse badge for good measure. Stuart was just about to make a very big down-payment. But he simply was unable to sign on the dotted line. Something, someone stopped him. When we first met him fourteen years later Stuart Piper drove an old banger: he was a Baptist Minister and Hospice Chaplain. He came to my baptism and he married Susan and I. God changed Stuart’s plans. Thank God, I say! “Life is what happens to us when we are busy making other plans” as the saying goes. Things don’t always go to our plans!

None of us had planned for THIS! Probably like me you sat with your calendar or diary open at the beginning of 2020 and, as you’d done so many times before, you wrote out a list and worked out a plan for your year – where you were going, who you were meeting, what was to happen and the likely outcome. This is the way we live and work. We make our plans and we see them through… for the most part. Of course, things sometimes go wrong but not for all of us, all over the world… and not all at once. We have no experience of this – we didn’t plan for this…for a line to be drawn through everything. There is no precedent for this. Every one of us now lives in some way or another with uncertainty, fear, grief, and anger – you name it…

Everyone makes plans. It is normal and acceptable (and biblical) to do so. God has nothing against making plans: Jesus told his would-be followers that we must make plans when we build a home or go to war. (Luke 14:28) Even Churchill said, “He who fails to plan, plans to fail!” James the brother of Jesus speaks directly to our situations and to our false sense of security in even our best-laid plans. Hear his warning to the church…

Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.’ Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.’ As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil.

We hadn’t planned for any of this. But we should have known all along. We should have known that none of us has any idea what the future might bring, what tomorrow might bring. So, any and all our diary entries, our plans, are contingent anyway. We are all like King Canute really, commanding the waves to stop from rolling to the shore! We have buried deep within us any sense of our real fragility and mortality…we are like grass, a mist or a vapour. These things we know… but we don’t want to think about them. We don’t give much thought to James’ question, “What is your life?” The lockdown has forced us to think about it and it has driven some people to despair…

The Lockdown has become for us…”Our rude awakening. We have for too long pretended that we are God. We have presumed too much. For a while we made God in our own image and then we cut out the middleman and made God redundant or declared him dead. Something other than humans is determining our present way of being and our prevailing humanism has taken a body blow. The crisis is calling out our functional atheism…” (Steve Finamore)

We have left God out of the picture. We have to confess we have left Him out of our plans. The churches to whom James wrote were making plans as if God didn’t exist. Instead, they should be prayerfully making their plans, like we should do every single day about all things great and small…alert to the possibility that God might change those plans, and move them in a new direction - one which they had not anticipated, but one that would prove more fruitful.

The apostle Paul often made plans regarding his travels. Sometime later Paul said to Barnabas, “Let us go back and visit the believers in all the towns where we preached the word of the Lord and see how they are doing.” (Acts 15:36) When the Corinthians asked him to spend more time with them, he declined. But as he left, he promised, “I will come back if it is God’s will.” (Acts 18:20) Paul wanted his plans to be contingent (conditional) upon the Lord’s plans. Paul states, he hopes to spend some time with the people of Corinth, "if the Lord permits." (1 Cor 16:7)

Note verse 15 where James tells us, "We ought to say, "If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that." Churchill used the postscript DV at the bottom of all his letters – “Deo Volente” – God willing. Oh, that our politicians would begin their conferences and briefings by bringing their plans before the LORD in prayer and humbly submitting them before Him. We can but pray!

James tells us church folk were making plans about doing business. They had plans to go to this town and that town, make a mint and move on and make even more in the next town. Their plans were set. James is not against making money; he is against making definite plans and not allowing God to have any say in those plans. (“Your business is God’s business!”)

Making plans without God is arrogant & can be dangerous too. They were making plans without considering what God wanted for them. Then they would boast about what they were going to do. James reminds them that they don’t know what tomorrow will bring; in fact, tomorrow may not come for many of them. We are reminded of Jesus’ parable of the man who had an abundant harvest and builds new barns so he could retire, relax, eat, drink and be merry (Luke 12:16-21).

This man made plans without reference to God and was only counting on what he could personally do. God calls him a fool. Making plans without God – foolishdangerous… Jesus says to the man – worrying about wealth – ‘you’re not in control of today, let alone tomorrow!’

We pray for God’s guidance. We say we are open to God’s leading. But this means giving up control. And we desperately cling to control. We make our plans for things we believe are good, but God may have different or better things in store for us. In the end we often accept what second best and reject what would have been better, God’s plan…

The plain fact is we can’t learn, look or live for that matter unless the God of providence wills it so; in Him we live and move and breathe and have our being. This is not fatalism (doing nothing, not planning): it is walking by faith; trusting that God is in control… But if we know (accept) God is in control then we don’t need to fear the sudden changes to our plans.

Listen to the wonderful words God told the prophet Jeremiah, "For I know the plans I have for you; plans to prosper you and not to harm you - plans to give you hope and a future" (29:11). We need not fear tomorrow. Surely, He says, “…as I have planned so it will be!” (Isa 14:24)

So, what can we do to make changes (TODAY) so that God becomes a priority in our lives? Well, plan by all means but don’t be pompous or presumptuous. Don’t be like the woman who wrote: “Procrastination is my sin, it brings me naught but sorrow, I know that I should stop it, In fact, I will…..TOMORROW!” “Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins…” (Jas 4:17)

Make plans for your life. But seek God’s will in them. Spurgeon said, “Write your plans in pencil, but know that God has the rubber.” Plan to please God. Enjoy the fulfillment of your plans but don’t boast - you did not achieve them alone. Pray and seek God’s will with respect to your plans. PRAY — Praise, Repent, Ask and Yield. Pray and seek and yield to God’s will – those who seek the Lord lack no good thing. Be still and listen to God. Listen to others – others may be passing on God’s plans to you…

And let me remind you… this is still Easter time. ‘We celebrate the resurrection of Christ Jesus from the dead. We understand it as the first installment of a future resurrection of the people of God. Jesus’ defeat of death is the sign that death (and disease) is not the defining force in the universe and that any apparent hold it has over us is temporary…’ But maybe (out of the dashed plans of many) there is another sort of resurrection happening. Our human-centredness and our claim not to need God. A fresh awareness of God is in the air. He is sovereign. In the death and resurrection of Jesus God has a plan which he has already put in place to save all who would come to Him. 6Seek the Lord while you can find him. Call on him now while he is near. 7 Let the wicked change their ways and banish the very thought of doing wrong. Let them turn to the Lord that he may have mercy on them.

God holds the key of all unknown

And I am glad

If other hands should hold the key

Or if he trusted it to me I might be sad…

The very dimness of my sight

Makes me secure

For groping in my misty way

I feel his hand, I hear him say

My help is sure….

Enough. This covers all my wants

And so I rest

For what I cannot see – He can see

And in His care I safe shall be

For ever blest!

Not making plans can be dangerous.

 

MFR 17/05/20

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