Proverbs 16:3 “Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and he will establish your plans.” This episode talks about how important it is to take time to sit with the Lord and ask Him what He wants from you in this upcoming year. Music:"Adding the Sun" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
What Are Your Plans for 2022?
Proverbs 16:3 “Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and he will establish your plans.”
This time of year is my favorite time of year! I love the beginning of a new year because it contains so many possibilities, so much potential. Nothing has happened that year yet. You are starting with a blank canvas and the upcoming year can be whatever you want it to be. If you want to grow in your faith that year, great! If you want to focus on becoming really good at your job, that’s great too! If you want to focus on your family or your relationships, wonderful. Whatever you want your focus to be is great. You get to decide. I wonder how many of you listening to this episode think about what you want to get out of this next year? I know it doesn’t tend to be something that many people I know think about. I would love to change this. I would love it if every person took some time and thought about what they wanted this upcoming year to look like. I am not talking about spending hours thinking about it and I am not talking about coming up with a list of 30 New Years Resolutions that you will probably only do for a week or two and then they will become a distant memory.
What I am suggesting is just sit down and invite the Holy Spirit to have a conversation with you about where He sees this year going? Is there anything in particular that He would like to see you focus on this year? In what ways would He like to see you grow this year? Ask if the Lord has plans for you and if so, what are they? What do you need to do to help the Lord’s plans come to fruition? The verse above says, “Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and He will establish your plans.” Are we doing that? Are we committing all we do to the Lord and then letting him establish our plans? Or, are we just going about our day, focused on our plans, and not really even stopping to check in with the Lord? Have you done this before? Have you started your year off by offering it to God and by asking Him what He would like you to do this year? If you haven’t may I suggest you give it a try this year? Even if you are not listening to this on New Year’s Eve when I posted it. Even if you are halfway through the year, or more. May I suggest you take 5 minutes and ask God what He sees for you this year?
Another verse that goes along with this one is a little further down in Proverbs 16. Verse 9 says, “In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps.” It’s not a bad thing to plan your course. It is good to have desires, dreams and goals. It is good that we have some direction and that we are working towards something. It is also important to remember that the Lord establishes our steps. This is especially important to remember when things don’t go according to our plan. How many times have things gone perfectly according to your plans? For me, I can say that things don’t tend to go perfectly according to my plans very often at all. I have learned to be very flexible, especially if my plans are relying on other people. For instance, trying to get out of the house with three boys all under the age of 5 was very challenging when the boys were younger. I would picture a nice morning where I got up and showered before the kids woke up. Since I was all ready to go before they got up I would have time to calmly help them get dressed and make them breakfast. Can you picture it? This nice relaxing morning before the start of the day? I don’t know about your mornings if you had young kids, but mine rarely went like that.
What was more likely was that one of the boys would be up in the middle of the night for something and then I would be so tired in the morning after being up in the middle of the night that I would turn my alarm off and then not even have time to shower in the morning before we had to go. Breakfast was more of a what can we take and eat in the car kind of thing and there was no calmly helping the kids get ready. It was more of a rush them to get ready so we weren’t late. I think it would have been helpful for me to remember in these moments that the Lord establishes our steps. Now, I am not trying to say that the Lord made me late. This may be an extreme example of when things don’t go our way. However, I think when things aren’t going our way, we could gain more perspective if we looked at it differently. Instead of looking at the situation and thinking that everything is going wrong, we can look at it and think that it’s just going differently. It is not going as we planned but that doesn’t mean it is going wrong.
So often we plan things a certain way taking into account all the things we can think of that could get in our way. For instance, we might set two alarms, because we know that we might sleep through one alarm. We might shower the night before because we know we sometimes get up to late to shower in the morning. We may even make muffins or a breakfast casserole the night before because we know we could oversleep or be rushed. Sometimes we get really good at planning for the unexpected. And yet, things still don’t work out as we wanted. Maybe we prepared a lot for an interview for the job we really wanted. We woke up early, we prayed, we ate breakfast, we showered, we did all we could to prepare for success at this interview. And yet we didn’t get the job. What happened? Maybe God knew to prepare for things that you did’t see coming. Maybe this job was going to keep you away from home more than you wanted, maybe the boss was not a nice person, maybe there was a much better job just around the corner that you didn’t know about.
We plan our course, we go through life trying to figure out what we want and then working towards it. However, God establishes our steps. He has a plan for us too and His plan is better than our plan. Sometimes we don’t know what His plan is. He doesn’t usually reveal the plan in whole before you decide if you want to follow it or not. Usually God establishes your steps one step at a time. It isn’t our job to understand the plan, or even God’s ways. Our job is to follow the steps that God establishes for us and then trust that they are leading us to where we want to go. If you ever doubt that God’s plan is leading you to where you want to go then read and reread Jeremiah 29:11, “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”
The last scripture verse that I want to mention to you today is Psalm 127:1, “Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the guards stand watch in vain.” This is similar to the first verse which said “Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and He will establish your plans.” However, this verse is slightly different. This verse takes it one step further and says if you the Lord doesn’t build your house, then you build in vain. If the Lord is not watching over the city, the guards stand watch in vain. What I believe these verses are telling us is that nothing is worth doing and nothing is worth having unless the Lord is involved. If you are planning your year out, or even a weekend out and you don’t invite the Lord into those plans, then your plans are made in vain. The Lord has a plan for your life and if you go about you life without stopping to consult the Lord and invite Him into the middle of it then all your planning will be in vain. I believe that the Lord wants to plan your life with you, but you need to be the one to invite him in and be willing to work with His plan.
I hope if you get nothing else out of this message today, I hope that you take away from this episode the importance of inviting the Lord into your life and into your plans. I hope that you will spend some time with the Lord and ask Him what He wants for you this year? Is He calling you to grow in any areas? Does He have sometime specific He would like you to focus on? I am not sure where each of you is in your faith. I am not sure if you believe that you can ask the Lord questions and that you will get answers. I assure you, if you ask the Lord a question and you listen for the answer, He will give you one. It may not be right away and it may not be how you expect it to come. However, I promise you, if you ask God a question, be on the lookout for the answer. It will come!
Dear Heavenly Father, I ask that you bless all those listening to this episode today. Lord, tomorrow is a brand new year. This is the last day of 2021. I ask that you encourage each of the listeners to take 5 minutes today and spend some time talking about this upcoming year. Lord, we ask that you put on our hearts anything you want us to do this year. Send the Holy Spirit down to convict us of what you would like us to focus on this year. Lord we are your willing servants. Show us how we can best serve you. We love you Lord and we are ready for you to establish our steps and our plans. You are amazing Lord and we ask all of this in accordance with your will and in Jesus’ holy name, Amen.
Thank you so much for joining me on this journey to walk boldly with Jesus. I can’t believe 2021 will be over at the end of today. I am entering 2022 full of hope and love and I hope you are too. Thank you for being faithful and listening over these last 6 months. I look forward to spending 2022 growing in my faith with you. Have a blessed weekend and A Happy New Year!