Today’s message emphasizes the importance of surrendering our plans to God. While we often create our own plans to feel in control, only God knows what is best for us and can guide us toward a plan that aligns with His will.
By praying and sharing our hopes, dreams, and passions with God, we invite Him to reveal His plan for our lives.
Surrendering to God’s will allows us to experience a more meaningful and perfected path that we couldn’t achieve on our own.
Trusting God’s plan leads to a greater sense of purpose and fulfillment.
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Transcript:
Do you have a plan? It’s fair to say that nearly all of us have some sort of plan. It could be a plan for what you do after this message. It could be a plan for what you do later today, this week, this month, this year, or even by the decade’s end. We all have plans.
In today’s world, there are plenty of tools that help us with our plans. Tools in our smartphones, organizers, calendars, and even consultants can help us with our plans.
With all the resources we now have with our plans, do we ever take the time to reflect on how God can help us with our plans?
Making Plans
Part of the reason we default to having a mindset to create our plans is because it helps us feel in control. Deciding on each step of a plan to reach a goal allows us to think we are entirely in control of the outcome. This feeling remains even though we don’t necessarily have complete insight into parts of our plan that are outside our control.
Is our plan “rock solid” when we need to depend on someone else? Certainly, when we rely on someone else, we can no longer say that we are entirely in control of the outcome of our plans.
So what can we do to make sure that we are pursuing the plans that are best for us and our well-being and pursuing plans that are most likely to succeed?
How do we approach plans that take place over a large span of time? How do we put our ducks in a row in such a way that we can accomplish our goals over many years?
Clearly, there are so many things to consider regarding our plans. We have plans for the short term or plans for the long-term. We may have all the resources to plan, but ultimately, there is so much that we don’t know about our future, and as a result, we can never know what is best for our plans.
Trust God’s Plan
Trusting God’s plan for us is an entirely new way to look at plans. So far, we have been touching on making our own plans and organizing steps in such a way that we feel confident and comfortable that we are in control. In reality, we are only partially in control because we cannot possibly know what is coming in our future. We could very well orchestrate the best-laid plans, and a random event in our future derails these plans completely.
With God, our plans can take an entirely new light.
One of the most important things I want to share about making plans and trusting God’s plan is surrendering your plans to God.
Why we should surrender our plans to God
Why should we surrender our plans to God? Let me give you a few reasons.
#1 He created you. He knows what you are made of. He knows your strengths. He knows your weaknesses. He knows what you know about yourself, and He knows what you don’t know about yourself. God knows everything about you and every person you will ever meet for the rest of your life. God knows your heart, and He knows your mind. God knows a thing or two about you.
Because he knows so much about you, he knows exactly what is necessary to occur in you in order to align you with your perfect plan. Only God knows how to teach you what you need to know about your gifts in order to align you with the ability to share your gifts with the world.
#2, only God knows the past, present, and future. All of us do have free will, but only God has the capacity to orchestrate events in your future in such a way that you will be aligned on a path, on a plan that is best for you.
I mentioned in last week’s message that I have seen this time and time again in my life. I have seen how God would orchestrate someone else’s path to intersect with my own in such a way that a plan was being revealed to me piece by piece through another person’s actions or reactions.
While you may have the ability to create a plan for your future based on all the knowledge that you know, based on the education that you have pursued, based on advice and teaching, and guidance from others, only God knows a plan for your future that is perfected just for you.
I think what most of us experience in our lifetimes are plans that have increasing outcomes of success based on learning from previous experience and based on factors that we have some level of control over.
I think a small percentage of us have learned that while we can form plans in our hearts and minds, the most efficient way to execute a plan is to bring that plan before God upfront and ask Him to reveal what is best for us. God is not opposed at all to us forming plans and creating a vision in our lives, and we are certainly allowed to go it alone to figure things out. Going it alone can certainly lead to success, but bringing plans to God ensures that plans are shaped and transformed into something that is aligned with His will for your life. I have learned that God’s will for Steve McDonald is so much more thoughtful, meaningful, and perfected than my own will for Steve McDonald.
Asking God to Reveal His plans for you
So how do we ask God to be involved with our plans?
#1, pray and share with God your hopes and your dreams. Share with Him your vision, your passions, and the thoughts that you have about the future. Share with Him what inspires you, excites you, and motivates you. God delights to hear from you about these things even as He knows you may or may not have fully discovered your full potential.
#2, after you have revealed these things to God, ask Him to reveal His will for you. Pray to God and share with Him that while you have shared your hopes and dreams, and passions in life , you ultimately ask Him to show you His will for your life. Ask him to reveal the gifts in you that you have yet to know. Ask him to show you what he has in store for you to share with the world.
There is a love from God that is so absolute and so complete that He can and will guide you to a plan that is designed perfectly for you, keeping in mind the hopes and dreams you presented to Him in prayer.
You might be thinking, “Will God reveal things to me that are completely in sync with what I presented to him as my hopes and dreams?” That’s a fair and good question. I will share the way I approached that question.
I considered that while I thought I knew what I would be most excited about, I recognized that maybe I don’t know everything there is to know about what I would be excited about. For example, one of the prayers I have presented to God over many, many years is this: Release the ideas and innovations, and contributions You have planted in me into the world to change millions of lives for the better. Now as I share this message with you, I admit that when I first started presenting this prayer to God, I had a very specific idea of what I meant and how that would occur. I actually wanted to create and launch a mobile app that would be in the hands of millions of users, and I still do by the way.
It’s been about 5 to 8 years since I started praying this on a regular basis. If you had asked me a year ago if I would be doing videos online about walking in step with God, I would have said “Absolutely not!”.
Now that I am, I see how much I enjoy sharing my life experience about God and how much I enjoy sharing my thoughts on walking with God. I am seeing an approach to sharing gifts that have been planted in me with millions around the world manifest in a whole new way.
Will I ever be sharing my gifts with millions of people around the world? I don’t know, but I have brought it before God, and I believe it is possible.
Most importantly, while I had an idea of how I wanted that to happen, I have most definitely surrendered this ask to God’s Will. I could very well find out 5, 10 years from now that my messages from this ministry are reaching millions of people around the world, or I could even learn that 5, 10 years from now, I’m reaching millions of people with the mobile app idea that I originally had in mind. It may even be a combination of both! The main thing I’ve learned is that if I bring something to God and it is His will, and I am obedient to Him to follow His will and His guidance, I will see his manifesting of planning for me in such a way that I could have never accomplished on my own.
Wrap Up
Today we have talked about plans. Making plans, forming plans, finding plans, all kinds of plans. We have discussed the fact that it is in our nature to form plans and do that in such a way that we have complete control, or at least as much control as possible.
We’ve discussed the fact that the most efficient and effective way to have plans in our life is to bring our thoughts and hopes, and dreams to God, asking Him to reveal His plans for us.
As a matter of fact, if we have concerns or questions about what we should be doing with our lives in the first place, we can also bring this to God and ask Him to reveal to us what He has in store for us and our future.
The most powerful thing we can do, even as we have free will and even as we have the ability to make our own choices, is to surrender our hearts and minds to God to follow His will for us. God will recognize the things that excite, energize, inspire, and motivate you and align you with a plan that is designed just for you.
Are you interested in discovering more about the guidance offered in this message? Learn more in the companion article Going Deeper With The Word – Trust in God’s Plan – Not Your Own.
