Wisdom - Plans

"Many are the plans in a person’s heart,
    but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails."

Proverbs 19:21

[This is the 16th message in this series]

In this series we are highlighting two-liner verses from the Book of Proverbs.

Plans

We always seem to have great ideas but on the backend, we really have no clear idea how to make most of them to work.

For some, they do have many great plans but really that's all they are, plans.

The Lord knows what is in our hearts. And many of what are in there aren't really nice, many of which we wouldn't want to tell our grandmas about (or anyone else).

Jeremiah 17:9-10

“The heart is hopelessly dark and deceitful,
    a puzzle that no one can figure out.
But I, God, search the heart
    and examine the mind.
I get to the heart of the human.
    I get to the root of things.
I treat them as they really are,
    not as they pretend to be.”

He Created Us

God knows us more than we do. He knows we have a lot of ideas and a lot of plans, and that there are more from where they are coming from. Deep in our hearts we have our love, our drive, our determination, our passion, our dreams and our ingenuity. But our hearts also hold our fears, our insecurities, our pains, our  disappointments, our regrets, our hurts, our scars and all our negative emotions and bad memories. If our plans are rooted in the latter, they will not bear good fruit.

Main Thing

We can plan all we want, but if we do not include God in it, then from His eternal perspective it will be a bust from the beginning.

The wheel has already been invented. We shouldn't be reinventing it. 

But don't get me wrong, lots of plans take off the ground and even reach their intended targets. Lots of people get rich by our world's standards and so many of them by doing the unthinkable.

In the end, those plans could end up in regret, sorrow, pain and many more things we haven't really thought about.

God's ways are definitely not man's ways. If we plan on our own and left God out intentionally, let us not hope for God to bless our plans after the fact.

Inevitable

God made us and everything around us. He knows about things that we will never ever know.

What God has decided to do, He will accomplish. It might take some time, but they will come to pass. It would be less painful to consider God's plans first as we are making our own.

God has plans to prosper us and not to harm us. Our plan might work but we don't know what it will eventually end up with.

Endgame

There has never been successful people who went on record to tell the world that there is nothing more that they wanted, that they have achieved everything they have planned, that they regretted nothing and that they are truly happy.

At the end of their lives, not a few of the very rich people donate their riches away, the same things they toiled to accumulate every single day of their lives. Many give parts of their earthly treasures to charity many times, for several years before they pass away from this earth.

We can just guess that with all their earthly riches,  contentment, satisfaction, true happiness, purpose and even good sleep, peace of mind and true happiness have eluded them. And these cannot be found in earthly treasures. 

Most things we accumulate on earth are temporary -- more often than not, they are not the most important things in life.  So many people regretfully find that out, at the end of their life.

True riches and true happiness never fades, they are eternal. They have one source, the One who created us, Our Maker, Our Creator, Our Origin, the Alpha and the Omega (the Beginning and the End). Everything comes from Him, and goes back to Him. It's the circle of life. 

This makes that saying, not to reinvent the (circle) wheel, a whole new meaning.

#EverydayWisdom

God's Wisdom Series