Archive for May, 2009
Is Planning Bad?
Look here, you people who say, “Today or tomorrow we are going to a certain town and will stay there a year. We will do business there and make a profit.” How do you know what will happen tomorrow? For your life is like the morning fog — it’s here a little while, then it’s gone. What you ought to say is, “If the Lord wants us to, we will live and do this or that.” Otherwise you will be boasting about your own plans, and all such boasting is evil. (James 5:13-15)
Is the Biblical principle to not make plans?
No. We can see in other places that it is not. So we will spend several days exploring and crystallizing our plans and how to make God a part of them.
There are two aspects of those passage. First it asks: “How do you know what will happen tomorrow? It’s here a little while, then it’s gone.”
When you come up with your plans, that should be one of the first aspects to think about it. Yes, 10 and 20 year plans are good and give vision, but many people make plans that put off living richly right now.
I know I have. You make sacrifices of time and people and enjoyment here on earth.
Second principal in this passage is that making plans all on ou own is boasting, and “all such boasting is evil.”
The planning process should be a partnering with God. Wouldn’t you like your plans to be done in concert with God, a case where you can humbly say, “If the Lord wants us to?”
I have had known people who never commit to any action and all their prayers are, “If the Lord wants us to, then….” or simply waiting to hear what God wants them to do.
As we will explore later, that’s not a Biblical principal. Active planning in partnership with God, however, is.
Action
What, in your life, is important and achievable right now? Imagine your life is just a morning fog, temporary, and that you don’t know what will bring tomorrow. What is a plan that you can begin now that will bring life into the present moment?
How have you partnered with God? Or how have you excluded him from these plans?
Prayer
Write our a personal prayer to God in which you, in your own words, seek God’s will in the plan and invite him into a partnership into what your plans should be.
Winning the war within with the right motives
Isn’t it the whole army of evil desires at war within you? You want what you don’t have, so you scheme and kill to get it. You are jealous for what others have, and you can’t possess it, so you fight and quarrel to take it away from them. And yet the reason you don’t have what you want is that you don’t ask God for it. And even when you do ask, you don’t get it because your whole motive is wrong — you want only what will give you pleasure.
The war within wages because we have desires, “evil desires” in the sense that it makes us jealous of what other people have.
Do we long for more power, wealth and prestige driven by the fact that others around us have it? In an area where I live where there is much money and wealth, it becomes easy to desire that and covet it. I know deep down inside, as much as I may consciously deny it, I do. I think there are far more people out there who, if they honestly asked themselves, are jealous of it. They may react differently by spurning all materialism altogether and being unhappily poor and judgmental of those who are wealthy. It’s a passive-aggressive way of trying to “take it away” from them.
So what is the way to address this evil desire?
By checking the motive.
This has been hard, checking to see if what I ask is “only what will give me pleasure.” But the Scripture doesn’t say to not ask. Throughout Scripture God wants us to ask. But in this passage, it shows what the exact posture is:
When you bow down before the Lord and admit your dependence on him, he will lift you up and give you honor.
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The War Within….
But there is another law at work within me that is at war with my mind. This law wins the fight and makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me. (Romans 7:23)
There wages a war in our mind. We have to acknowledge that it exists…even if we think it’s not there.
I, for one, know that it’s there. For some, the "sin" may be very narrowly defined: a sin to lie, steal, kill, commit adultery, and so because they do not wrestle with these, they do not feel there is a war.
But what about doubt? What about to project a negative outcome? What about worry? Poor self-esteem? These constitute "sin" in that they are opposite of God’s intentions and commands. And to allow those to win in the war for our mind allows us to feel separated from God which is ultimately the path where all sin leads.
I acknowledge that this war rages inside of my mind. I sometimes catch myself drifting into negative thoughts or worry, particularly now that I have had one deal go down badly, I start wondering whether my entire business prospects are viable. The pit of my stomach feels completely ripped apart having a customer pretty much say they cannot and will not do business with me because of what I perceived to be a basic miscommunication.
But what’s the answer? What can overcome?
In fact, Paul rhetorically asks this same question and provides an answer:
Thank God! The answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord. So you see how it is: In my mind I really want to obey God’s law, but because of my sinful nature I am a slave to sin.
So how do I apply this?
Normally the response to this war raging inside, and how I sometimes tackle it, is sheer will. There does need to be "perseverance" to believe and stay the course when this negative "law" rears its head. But the answer must also be in Jesus Christ, and I am even now wrestling to invoke His name to free me from the tormenting negativity.
These "Debbie Downer" spirits are natural, but the war that is being waged in my mind is not just an up and down. It is a battle for my thoughts. This is where filling thoughts with those of the Spirit as so essential to healthy living and to Life.
Paul says:
I love God’s law with all my heart.
And that is what it will take. Every day.
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Perseverance Counts
As you know, we consider blessed those who have persevered. You have heard of Job’s perseverance and have seen what the Lord finally brought about. The Lord is full of compassion and mercy. (James 5:11 NIV)
Don’t give up. I am sure you have already heard the countless stories of people who faced rejection, and they kept going forward. I myself have seen businesses or companies sticking with what seemed "impossible" or just a plain "bad idea" and eventually something turned around.
And then there are the "standard" stories we always here: Abraham Lincoln who kept going despite losing most of his elections; Colonel Sanders who slept in his car till he could find someone who believed in his chicken; I remember reading about a hair stylist who sold is products out of a car, was cashless for much of the time, till they finally have become the biggest hair-products company in the world.
Job is an example of persistence (versus his patience) in the face of trials. Satan "afflicted Job with painful sores" which Job scraped using a "piece of broken pottery."
It’s a powerful image of pain and torment. His own wife said, "are you still holding on to your integrity? Curse God and die!"
His reply and response:
Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble"? In all this, Job did not sin in what he said. (Job 2:10 NIV)
In the face of being, he did a couple of things:
- He was persistent and would not tarnish his integrity
- He stayed faithful to God and did not curse him, despite other people telling him to do so
- He saw that God can give both good and bad…and still trusted
I was in the middle of a deal which could’ve given me a nice, recurring, passive income. I’d been working with this customer for a while. I had asked to work with one of their vendors to get more technical information and try to also become their vendor for some of the equipment. What I didn’t know was that there was tension and politics going on between this vendor and my customer and so my email trying trying to assuage the vendor we want to cooperate with them got oddly misconstrued, sent up to the CIO in a very political fashion, and crashed the proposal to the ground.
Done, that was it — hard work, quality service, done in by politics and my own mis-wording.
But I have to look at it — if God wanted this to happen, it would’ve happened. And I looked at whether there was some sin in my own life in handling it — the only thing was that the guy I spoke to had a thick "red-neck" accent and was being suspicious towards me and, having had some very bad experiences as a minority with such folk, felt a tightening and pre-judgment in my own heart. And so perhaps God felt it was more important that I examine that.
Or…this could’ve been a very dangerous and litigous situation if done improperly and with all the machinations. I won’t know. But God knows, and I’ve got to trust in it.
Although I experience the "sores" from losing and not having the recurring income which I badly need — I need to focus on a couple things:
- Keep persistent: don’t let rejection take you down
- Trust that good and bad can come from God: perhaps it’s better this way, I just don’t know it yet
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Beware of shortcuts!
"Don’t look for shortcuts to God. The market is flooded with surefire, easygoing formulas for a successful life that can be practiced in your spare time. Don’t fall for that stuff, even though crowds of people do. The way to life – to God! – is vigorous and required total attention. (Matthew 7:13-14 MSG)
How true this statement is, that the marketplace has tons of "easygoing formulas for a successful life" that it can be distracting. It distracts people who may not be Believers from exploring the Truth; but it can also distract Believers into following these alternatives and tugging away from focusing on God’s prescriptions.
I have often looked around, asking, Why haven’t I "made it"? What am I missing from being "successful" and achieving my goals?
The answers I found were in the Bible itself. If I would just listen and partner and allow myself to be transformed, I could experience those things.
The problem: I was distracted by the "easygoing formulas for a successful life" that are made available everywhere. And I realized that, at least for me, in order to put them into practice, I had to actually write them down, put it into my own words, and make them real.
So that’s what I am trying to do. To come up with my own personal alternative, to distill for myself God’s blueprint for navigatin this life and experiencing all the richness he’s promised for following Him.
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