Does God Have a Plan for Me ?
BY JERRY SHEVELAND
THE MOST complicated clock in all the world stands in the Town Hall of Copenhagen. It has ten faces and some 15,000 moving parts; it took 40 years to build. It measures not only the time of day, but the weeks and the months and the movements of the planet. So complicated, so accurate is that timepiece that it loses only two-fifths of a second every 300 years.Rom. 8:28,29; Eph. 2:10; Prov. 3:5-18 Yet, that amazing timepiece is regulated by another more accurate timepiece, the universe itself. Not a clock made up of 15,000 parts, but a timepiece made up of billions of parts working together with absolute precision century after century, and millennium after millennium.
We live in a universe characterized by the precision of a master designer, an infinitely wise Creator. Should we not expect the One who designed and created this precise universe to have also marked out our lives with a perfect plan that is purposeful and beautiful?
Yes, God has a plan for all those whom He has created and called for His great purposes.
A Master Plan
First of all, God has a master plan. In Romans 8:28, we read, "We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose."God works all things according to His purpose, you see. And what is "the good" that God is working towards? What is He aiming to accomplish by His plan? Here's what He says in verse 29: "For those God foreknew (that is, those whom He had loved even before time began and whom He would draw throughout history to love Him) he also predestined (that is, He had a prepared plan for them) to be conformed to the likeness of his Son."
If God has called you to follow Him and trust Him and love Him, then He definitely has a plan for you. In His great master plan, He is going to take you through life in such a way that the very character and beauty of Jesus will be shaped in you, so that your life might become a testimony to the great working of God's grace.
A Loving Plan
I know people who are afraid to trust their lives to God. They're afraid of what God might do. What they have failed to see is that the master plan of God's is a loving plan. You couldn't read Ephesians 2 and possibly miss that truth.After declaring that we were spiritually dead in sins and transgressions, God goes on to explain why He made us alive and seated us in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus. He says in verse 4, "...because of his great love for us/' and in verse 7, "in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus."
God wants to effect changes in our lives in such a loving and kind way that when He is done with us, we'll sense that it has been good to be in the hands of God.
Now, just because it's a loving plan doesn't mean that it is always an easy plan, that everything's going to work out nifty, everything's going to go smooth. But God, even when He puts us through difficult times, does so in a kind and loving way.
What we need to understand is that because His master purpose is to mold us into the likeness of Jesus, often we can be in the center of His loving plan and still feel as though our world is falling apart.
Sculpting. When I was in school, one of the classes I loved the most was an art class. I particularly loved to sculpt and to form things out of clay.
There are a number of things you had to do before you could shape the clay. First, you had to take the clay and beat on it for a while. You had to smack it and slap it around. Then, to work out the air bubbles, you'd slice up the clay into many pieces, press them back together and slam it down onto a concrete slab. And you'd keep working on it to remove the little pieces of sand until finally it could be shaped into what you had in mind.
Well, because God has a master and loving plan for us, when He works it out in our experiences, sometimes it feels as though God is just slapping us around. But all that is part of the process by which God is shaping us into what He wants us to be.
A Personal Plan
Not only does God have a master plan and a loving plan, but He has a personal plan for each one of us. We read in Ephesians 2:10: "For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do."For every child of God, it says there, before he was ever born, before this planet was ever set into its orbit, before there was anything at all, God had already prepared certain works, certain ministries, certain responsibilities that were uniquely his.
When we remember that, we can wake up every morning rejoicing, not only because this is a day that God has made, but also because this is a day in which God has some divine appointments long prepared for us.
No accidents. It isn't by accident that you live in the neighborhood you live in. It isn't by accident that you work with the people that you work with. It isn't by accident that God has given you the family members that you have. It isn't by accident that God has given you a personality that is uniquely yours.
It isn't by accident that God has brought you through certain experiences in your life that at the time were horrendous. It isn't by accident that tragedies came into your life that resulted in your reshaping some of your thinking and attitudes.
Those of us who have trusted ourselves to the Almighty God and to His shaping process know that when God brings us into a day, there are certain settings, certain needs, certain people, certain opportunities which God has prepared for us, and for which we have been prepared to meet.
Often when we think about God's plan for us, we want to have a crystal ball. We want a road map. We want to know exactly what is it that I'm supposed to do today, what college should I choose, whom should I establish a close relationship, where am I supposed to live, where should I head my occupation or career, and so on.
We can wake up every morning rejoicingalso because this is a day in which God has some divine appointments long prepared for us. Obedient response. And God says to us, "Well, I'm concerned about helping you with those decisions. But I'm much more concerned that you'll so walk with Me that you'll be able to receive from Me both expected and unexpected things and simply respond out of what you've come to know in Me and to the way My Holy Spirit will use you in those situations."
This personal plan that God has for you will largely go unseen with your eyes. Oh, one day you may look back and see it. But in the middle of it, all you know is this: God is at work shaping you and God is at work using you the way you are in a situation specifically designed for that moment and for that hour.
Following God, therefore, is not following a precise road map. Following God is the adventure of knowing that God is at work unfolding His plan for me. And I can trust Him with it because it is a master plan, a loving plan designed especially for me.
How to Follow God's Plan
"I do want to be in God's master plan," you say, "but how do I know what that plan is? And how do I respond to it?"Commit and submit. In this regard, I've found one passage in Proverbs 3 to be most helpful. Let's first read verses 5 and 6:
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make direct your paths.It begins with a commitment. We say, "Lord, every dimension of my life belongs to you. I want to trust you and acknowledge you in all the ways in which you are working and leading in my experience."Now, the next two verses: "Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord and shun evil. This will bring health to your body and nourishment to your bones."
We not only commit our ways to Him, we submit our wills to Him. The great bulk of God's will for our lives can be found in the teachings that He has set forth in the Bible, directing us how to live. We submit to those teachings because we know that in them is the good course, the wise design that God has for us.
Divine manual. An automobile mechanic once described the Bible as God's Operating Manual for his life. He thought of the Bible, you see, in terms of the manual he goes to when he repairs a car. I think that's a pretty good definition. If we want to have a sense of how God is going to shape us, we go to His manual and follow its directions.
For example, when we have been hurt by someone, what we normally most feel like doing is to hurt him back, to get revenge. But we come to the Bible and see that we are to forgive. God says, "It's OK to be angry. And it's OK to confront in love. But ultimately My will for you is to forgive that person."
God is at work shaping you and God is at work using you the way you are in a situation specifically designed for that moment and for that hour. That's a hard plan for us to follow. But what we'll discover is that as we work in the midst of that plan and find the forgiveness that He calls for us to exercise, there is a healing that comes within us that we desperately need for our own spiritual and physical health and our own emotional being.
When we submit to God and do the difficult thing He teaches, the beauty of God's plan will begin to unfold with all its blessings. And we learn to trust Him.
Seek wisdom. To follow God's plan for our lives involves something else. Look at verses 13-18 of Proverbs 3:
Blessed is the man who finds wisdom, the man who gains understanding, for she is more profitable than silver and yields better returns than gold. She is more precious than rubies; nothing you desire can compare with her. Long life is in her right hand; in her left hand are riches and honor. Her ways are pleasant ways, and all her paths are peace. She is a tree of life to those who embrace her; those who lay hold of her will be blessed.All too often, when we want to know God's plan as we try to make a decision, we try to look for inward feelings or outward signs, or both.What happens? One day we wake up and have a certain feeling about it. But several hours later, we have the opposite feeling. And we ask, "God, why are You giving me different impressions?"
No, God isn't giving us different impressions. Those are just our very human feelings struggling with dif
ferent dimensions of the same problem.And when we look for an outward sign, we tend to read circumstances in ways that confirm what we want to do anyway. We see something happening and we say: "Oh, that must mean that God wants me to do this." No, when we do that, we're just trying to rationalize our own desires.
Please God. When we have to make a decision, God wants us to simply seek from Him the wisdom to make the choice that will please Him.
You say, "But Pastor, what if I make the wrong decision? Suppose God wants me to go to this college and meet the person He wants me to marry. If I make the wrong choice, I'll never meet that person."
Think about it. God has a master plan. Even before you've made a choice, He already knew what that choice would be. From ages ago, He knew which college you're going to go to, what occupational path you're going to choose. And He has already placed on those paths the special people you're going to meet, the special opportunities that you're going to find and the special ministries you're going to undertake.
Walk with God. It isn't your responsibility to discern as though you have a crystal ball. It is your responsibility to walk close to the Lord, to seek His wisdom in prayer and to make choices that are pleasing to Him. You don't have to worry about missing the unfolding of God's plan in your life.
I have found myself on occasions struggling with a decision, a choice that I had to make. As I look back on how I had gone about making that choice, I realize that because I wanted something to happen so badly, I worked at manipulating it, finessing it, making it happen. That's wrong.
Had I just trusted God and prayed for the wisdom to simply make the choice that will honor Him, I could put aside all the anxiety and the self-efforts at manipulation and simply trust my life to the unfolding plan of God. That, my friends, is how I want to live. How about you? o
Dr. Jerry Sheveland is senior pastor of College Avenue Baptist Church, 4747 College Avenue, San Diego, CA 92115.