God's Got a Plan

As many of you know, I am an avid long-distance runner. I have been a runner for most of my life – I joined the track and cross-country teams in 6^th grade and ran through high school. When I was in seminary, I picked up running again and have put many miles on many pairs of shoes. About five days a week in seminary, my friend Nate and I would run a 3 mile loop with my dog. I started running 5K races, but I never got any faster and I never ran any farther. Fast-forward a few years – my friend Rob, who is a United Methodist pastor up near Columbus, went and ran a marathon. I figured, if Rob can run one, I sure can.

One thing I learned quickly about running a marathon was that you have to have a plan. This is true for most people training to run any distance, but it is vital for anyone wanting to run a marathon. I can pretty much go out and run any shorter race without much additional training, up to a half marathon, but not so with a marathon. To run a marathon, you’ve got to have a plan.

But it’s not good enough just to have a plan. It’s got to be a good plan, and you actually have to carry the plan through to completion! Otherwise you will never finish.

Paul tells the church in Corinth: Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. (1 Corinthians 9:24). This is one of my favorite verses, not only because I can understand the running analogy, but because it is true in living the Christian life. I think I told you before that when I was a little boy, I really thought that for adults, living the Christian life was easy because that was the impression I was given at church – after you’re baptized, you just “livetheChristianlife” and that it is pretty much automatic.

Living as Jesus’ disciple is tough. There’s a reason the word “disciple” has the same root as the word “discipline” – it’s tough, and, like a marathon, we need a plan. So, what plan do we use? Can we go on Runners World online and find one? Thankfully, there is a plan. In Jeremiah 29:11, we read “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.”

God has a plan, a good and perfect plan. Now, this scripture is one that tends to get overused, often out of context, so let’s look at its context. Just as an aside, most of you probably already know this, but it bears repeating: the three most important things when doing biblical interpretation are context, context, context.

God is speaking here to a people in exile. They are not living in their homeland; they have been carted off to live in a foreign land with foreign rulers who worship foreign gods. God tells the exiles to seek the welfare of the city, but do not be deceived by the culture of the city. We can apply this directly to our lives – in exile or not. 1 Peter 2:11 tells us Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. I want to focus on the first part of this verse: I love the USA, but my citizenship is Heaven. Most people in our culture accept this country as our home, but it is not. Thus, we have to be aware that our own culture is trying to deceive us. Our culture tells us lies like “it’s a choice, and everyone needs choices.” Our culture says, “Look out for #1.” Our culture says, “Buy more, more, more. You need it, and you deserve it.” Our culture tells us that democracy is the best of all possible governments, and so it should work equally well for churches. While I love having a voice and a vote, God’s will is not subject to a vote. Do not be deceived by the culture of your city or your country. Our citizenship is heaven.

While we wait for heaven, remember that God has a plan. A plan of prosperity, the Bible says. So we should all sit back and wait to win the lottery, right? We’re gonna get rich, and when we do, make sure to tithe. Right? Except that the word “prosperity” is kind of a bad translation here. We associate prosperity with money, but the Hebrew word used here is shalom, which encompasses peace, wholeness, well-being, freedom, financial prosperity. God’s plan is a plan of complete wholeness for us, a plan for us to be the people he created us to be.

God has a future for us, and that should be enough to give us hope. But the question I hear asked all the time (and one I ask myself) is: what is God’s plan for me? The question I ask back is “Do you really want to know?”

Do you remember back in the days before we had GPS in our cars and before we had Google Maps on our phones? Back in the day when maps were paper and impossible to refold? If you wanted to go somewhere you had to look at the map and figure out where you were going. The good thing about it was that you had the big picture. You could see the whole route.

Now, when I was in high school, my best friend, David, and I went on a road-trip to Oklahoma – we had been offered full-ride scholarships at the University of Oklahoma, so we thought we should at least visit. David’s dad had a Triple A membership, and he went to the office and got this cool map thingy they called a TripTik. It was a series of maps on a ring, and you just followed the one map until you got to the bottom of it, and then turned to the next map.

This is closer to the kind of directions God usually gives me: he will only tell me the next step. Not the step ten steps from now, but the next step. Psalm 119:105 says: Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.

God’s Word is the light that shows us the way. I generally like to go running before dawn. That is, when I get to bed at a reasonable hour! I love to see the stars, but mostly I love to beat the heat. I will sometimes remember to bring my headlamp along. It’s not very strong and I mostly count on it to help drivers to see me, but it does illuminate my path. Here’s the thing, though: it only illuminates the path right in front of me. You should have seen me running through the Ridgewood Cemetery at night with just a little light shining… I was moving pretty fast!

God’s Word gives us our ultimate direction – Christlikeness. It shows us our ultimate destination, heaven, fully in God’s presence. But the directions that God gives are more like the step-by-step directions. I believe that God only gives us step-by-step directions often because if he gave us the full plan, we would be overwhelmed.

This week in my daily Bible reading, I read this passage: Psalm 25:4-5 Make me to know your ways, O Lord; teach me your paths. Lead me in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all the day long. David, who is said to be a man after God’s own heart, prayed this way: God, make me to know your ways. Teach me your paths.

What would your life look like if you prayed that way? Why don’t you make an experiment of it: bookmark Psalm 25:4-5 in your Bible and pray it every day? Write it down somewhere that you are going to take it with you and remember it. When you ask God to show you his ways, the Holy Spirit will begin to speak to you. But you’re going to have to get yourself into a place where you can hear. Turn off the TV. Put down your cell phone. Stop being so distracted.

Our goal is Christlikeness, so shouldn’t that mean that we seek after God’s heart? But we don’t just want God to teach us his ways – there are plenty of people who know about God but they don’t know him. David prays for God to lead him in his truth. The Holy Spirit will lead you if you listen. In 1993 I went to Russia on a mission trip. It was a cultural exchange, where we would each be paired with a Russian roommate (they were all English language students), and one thing I prayed specifically was that God would give me a friendly roommate who wouldn’t ask hard questions just to stump me. God granted me my request – my roommate was the most social guy in the program. Unfortunately he kept everything up on the surface and would never go deep. But I also met Radick, who kept asking hard questions just to stump me.

And it seemed like every time he asked one of those questions, I had an answer right away. Not because I was so smart or because I had prepared for them, but because the Holy Spirit was speaking through me, giving me the answers. The last hard question he asked me was, “How would you feel if the Russian Orthodox Church sent missionaries to America?” (My answer, by the way, was, “If the Russian Orthodox Church can spare some, bring them on; the USA needs Jesus, too.”) It finally made sense; he was never really asking the questions that he was asking, if that makes sense – he was asking, “Can I trust you?” The point is that because I was listening to the Holy Spirit, I had answers every time.

A few years later, I was on a camp-out with a friend and two brothers who we had just met that night. We ended up having a really deep conversation around the camp fire, and I had all kinds of great comments to add to the conversation… and then the Holy Spirit clearly spoke to me, saying, “Shut up.” Because my comments would have distracted from the gravity of the situation and would have diverted attention to me, away from God. The Holy Spirit will direct you if you listen and follow.

The Holy Spirit will lead us in God’s Truth. How do we know God’s Truth? From His Word. From knowing Him intimately.

Some of you know of him – you know a lot about him, but you don’t know him. Take the time today to come to him, to ask him to reveal his presence to you, so you can know him, so he can lead you in his path. His plan for you is perfect wholeness. And he has a hope and a future for his people that is better than you could possibly imagine.

If you are someone who does know him well, then it’s time to quit making excuses. God is forever asking ordinary people to do extraordinary things – things way outside your comfort zones. When God asks you to do something, it’s not going to be something you can do easily – otherwise you could just do it on your own; you wouldn’t need God for it, and God wouldn’t get any glory for it. So God calls us to do something that only God can get credit for, something we might think is impossible.

If you are a leader in this church, your job is first to pray for God to give you His vision for this church – what are we going to attempt that would be ridiculous without God? And, get this, back in 1890, Charles Spurgeon told us that delayed obedience is disobedience, and it’s still true today. So if God is calling you to do something, don’t wait. Do it now. Trust God to do what you cannot.