It’s easy to say that I trust God with my future, but it’s more difficult to live like I do. I like to plan. I like to know what’s coming, so I know how to respond, how to react, how to prepare. But I don’t always get that luxury. Half the time what I plan doesn’t even happen, rendering all my careful planning null and void. The rest of the time, what I expect happens but it’s so fast it’s all I can do to just keep hanging on.
Thistles at Hadrian’s Wall, Northern England, United Kingdom
Today’s verse is Proverbs 16:3.
Commit your actions to the Lord,
and your plans will succeed.
I was thinking about plans this morning. I have a lot of them. I have things I want to accomplish. I have things I want God to do. Most of the time I say I’m trusting God to take care of it, but I think deep inside I really don’t. Deep inside I’ve still got my plans on my schedule on my shoulders. No wonder I never get anything done.
I checked this verse in the Amplified Version of the Bible just to see if there were any specific word usages that I missed. I’m glad I did because simply saying to “commit your actions to the Lord” doesn’t really capture the concept behind this verse.
The Amplified Version says this: Roll your works upon the Lord [commit and trust them wholly to Him; He will cause your thoughts to become agreeable to His will, and] so shall your plans be established and succeed.
Wow. What a picture. Can you just imagine rolling your works on God? Have you ever had to move something heavy? So heavy you had to put it on wheels? Andy and I once helped one of my drama kids move, and it was quite an ordeal to get all of his things into the truck. Some of them were really heavy, and we had to use the ramp to get the heaviest things into the truck. Being able to roll those heavy things into the truck and let them go was a relief.
That’s what we’re supposed to do with our plans. If you have plans like I do at all, they’re heavy. They’re big. And that’s great. We all need to have dreams. We all need to have aspirations. But most of the time they weigh too much for us to support on our own, and we’re reduced to rolling them around like boulders over uneven paths. What this verse is saying, written by King Solomon so many thousands of years ago, is that we need to roll those dreams and plans on God and leave them. Whatever they are, we need to give them to God.
I don’t know what your dreams or plans are, but I know God gave me mine. My dream is a gift that He gave me, and the only way I will see it accomplished is to give it back to Him. That means letting go and leaving it in His hands, trusting Him to do what He wants with it. It’s harder than it sounds. But if we can do it, if we trust Him so completely, if we can learn to see life and living from His perspective, if we can allow Him to transform our minds and our thinking, God will use our plans to do more than we ever planned to begin with.
That sounds pretty cool to me.
Are your dreams weighing you down? Are your plans too much for you today? Roll them up the ramp and leave them with God. Our lives are too short to spend toiling under the heavy weight of self-inflicted deadlines. Trust God to do what only He can, and move forward with confidence because of who He is.
Always Peachy 