James 4:15

My wife and I have a friend from our seminary days whose mother kept telling as she grew up, “You’re going to marry a pastor.”  The young woman kind of scoffed at the idea— nothing wrong with pastors, you see, but being married to one, that was a different story.  She went off to college, and she met a man, and she married him—and the guy wasn’t even a Lutheran!  Here she was, her life in her hands, and her mother’s predictions proven false.  Then life threw her a curve ball—or maybe her husband pitched it, or maybe even God himself.  Her husband went through adult instruction and became a Lutheran.  A pastor and some elders planted a seed in his heart.  Then one day he came home and said, “Honey, I want to go to seminary and become a pastor.”  Today he is a Lutheran pastor in western Kansas, and she is married to a pastor.  Her mother had been right all along.  How did she know it?  Who knows.  But this much is clear:  don’t think your life is entirely in your hands.  It’s not.  God sent his Son, our Savior Jesus to rescue you from sin, death, and the devil.  It is surely a small thing for God to guide and direct your life in ways you could never imagine or appreciate.  So make your plans, and live your life, but remember that your life is in God’s hands.  As James wrote, “You ought to say, ‘If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that’” (James 4:15 NIV).

I imagine each one of us has made plans for his or her life.  In fact, ours is an age of planning.  We have family planning, and we have strategic planning, and we have long-range planning.  Our military planners set recruiting goals, and MSU offers help with small-business planning, and when you’re finally tired and worn out from all the planning, you go and you make—what else—vacation plans!  If James was writing to anyone, it was surely to us.  “Now listen, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money’” (James 4:13 NIV).  “Let’s have one more child,” you say to your spouse after your cute, cuddly little baby gets a bit older.  “I’m going to retire in five-and-a-half years,” you tell your coworkers.  “I’m flying out to see my grandkids next month,” you tell me on your way out of church one Sunday.  Yes, we make plans, whether it’s plans about family or about money or about business or about church or about whatever.  We make our plans for our lives, and that is fine.  That is good.  A life without any plans leaves you at the mercy of everything and everyone around you.  A life with plans gives you a sense of direction.

Yet making plans for your life can become an idolatrous activity.  Plans can turn into an idol, and planning can turn into the worship service, and following your plans can mean living for that false god.  When you set up your plans as if they are what is most important in your life, then you have fallen away from your heavenly Father.  How would you know if you’ve done that?  Ask yourself this question:  Am I making my plans in order to be in control of my life?  If you are trying to be in control, then you are trying to take control from your heavenly Father.  If you are making plans because you believe that is how you will be protected from every harm and danger, then you are forgetting that it is your heavenly Father who guards and protects you from every harm and danger.  If you are making plans in order to guarantee that you’ll get whatever you want out of life, then you are forgetting that there’s more to life than what you want.  There is also what your heavenly Father wants, and there is also what your neighbor needs.  “What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?” Jesus asked (Matthew 16:26 NIV).  What good will your plans do you if they are plans that move you away from God?  What good will your plans do you if they flow out of an insecure, unfaithful heart?  You make plans for your life, and that is good, but far better is your heavenly Father’s plan for your life:  to purchase and win you through the precious blood of Jesus, to adopt you as his child in the waters of holy baptism, to guide and direct you in his ways by his good word and Holy Spirit.  In Christ, God’s eternal plan for you comes to full fruition, so that in Christ those who repent and believe will one day live with God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—forever.

So, what of your life and your plans?  Well, James has something to say about that.  “Now listen, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.’  Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life?  You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes” (James 4:13-14 NIV).  You don’t know what will happen tomorrow.  Stunning but true.  My wife and I recently learned that a friend of ours from college lost his brother.  The man was a medical doctor and psychiatrist, married with three kids, apparently perfectly healthy, in his mid-thirties.  He had plans I’m sure, and I’m sure his wife did too.  And those plans included him.  But one day he had a seizure, and he died.  His plans for his life are come to naught—at least, plans about the near future with his family.  His wife’s plans are, I am sure, sitting shattered like so many broken dreams.  And that story is not an isolated story.  Young men and women signed up for the reserves during a time of peace, and now families and communities grieve when they come home in a casket.  Young men and women get married with plans to build a home and a family and a future together, but unfaithfulness or divorce leaves those plans a pile of rubble.  Teenagers look forward to playing sports in high school and then college and maybe even beyond, but then a blown-out knee or a bad tackle changes their future for them.  We can and we should plan, but we cannot and we should not hang our hopes on our plans.  “Do not boast about tomorrow,” Proverbs says, “for you do not know what a day may bring forth” (Proverbs 27:1 NIV).  God gives, and God takes, and it is not always in accordance with your plans.

Yet this much is sure and certain, even if tomorrow is not:  God the Father has a plan for you.  He had a plan for you from before the beginning of the world.  It is a plan to bless you and not hurt you, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future,” as the Lord told the people of Israel through the prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah 29:11 NIV).  Before the beginning of the world God the Father chose you to be his own dearly beloved child, and “when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem [you who were] under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons” (Galatians 4:4-5 NIV).  In the waters of holy baptism God gave you his Holy Spirit and faith in his Son Jesus, and on the last day he will raise you and all believers in Christ from the dead to live with him forever.  Your place before God is certain and secure because of what Christ did for you.  Your future is certain and secure because of what God is doing for you.  Whatever God gives you in this life, and whatever God takes from you in this life, to those who believe in his Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior he will give you the crown of life in the life to come.

In fact, your whole life is in his hands, as we sang with the children just a few minutes ago.  That’s what James is saying.  “You ought to say, ‘If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that,’” James writes (4:15 NIV).  Why should you say, “God willing” or “If it is the Lord’s will”?  Because then you acknowledge that your life is in God’s hands.  Then you acknowledge that we propose, but God disposes.  Then you acknowledge that God’s plans for you are superior to your own plans.  Then you are submitting to God, which is just what James urges Christians to do (James 4:7).  Your life is not in your hands, and that is a good thing, because undoubtedly you would make choices and plans that would not be so grand and rich as the plans God has for you.  I’m not talking about plans for this life—sometimes what you experience in this life does not seem so wonderful.  Sometimes what you experience in this life is downright terrible.  Was that God’s will for you?  I don’t know.  But this I know:  your life is in God’s hands, in the hands of the God who sent his own Son to the cross to rescue you from sin, death, and the devil, in the hands of the God who raised his Son from the dead in order to give you the hope of everlasting life.  Your life is in the hands of the God who promised to work all things for the good of those who love him—even the terrible, heart-breaking things that happen in this life.  God has you in his hands, and he has adopted you as his child through Jesus Christ, and he has given you faith through the Holy Spirit, and he is not about to let go of you.  He loves you too much.  Come what may in this life, God has you, and he will keep you safe into the next life.

So what about your plans to see your grandkids or to retire or to have more kids?  What about your vacation plans and your financial plans?  Go ahead and make them, because planning for the future is good when you can do it.  Make your plans, and work your plans, but remember that the outcome of your plans is not in your hands.  Your life is in God’s hands, and there’s no better place for your life to be.

David Loy is the Pastor at Zion Lutheran Church in Bolivar, Missouri.