Tag: Plans

Morning Musing: Luke 14:28-30

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“For which of you, wanting to build a tower, doesn’t first sit down and calculate the cost to see if he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, after he has laid the foundation and cannot finish it, all the onlookers will begin to ridicule him, saying, ‘This man started to build and wasn’t able to finish.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Sometimes a thought about one thing can lead to an idea with an entirely different focus, which serves to take you back to the first thing after all. It’s a nice, little circular journey. If you do it right, though, you wind up a little further down the road than you started. Let me share a quick jaunt I’ve been on recently with you this morning.

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Morning Musing: James 4:15

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“Instead, you should say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’”‬‬ (CSB – Read the chapter) 

What are your plans for tomorrow? Do you have any? I do. How firm are those plans? How much are you depending on those plans? The fact is, we all make plans. Even the most free-spirited person still has some vision of what tomorrow ought to bring. And when we make plans, we generally hold to them fairly tightly. In fact, we’re sometimes tempted to stake our hope on them. That’s a problem. 

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Digging in Deeper: Luke 2:7

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“And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.”‬‬ (ESV – Read the chapter) 

Have you ever had anything not go the way you were expecting? Perhaps the better question is whether or not you’ve had that happen yet today. We regularly make plans only to have to throw those plans in the trash when they bump up against the walls of reality. The real question we need to face here is not whether or not we’ve faced this disruption of intent, but what we did about it when it happened. 

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Digging in Deeper: Matthew 1:18

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“Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.”‬‬ (ESV – Read the chapter) 

When was the last time you had plans for your life and they were suddenly wrecked by something over which you had zero control? That’s never a fun place to be. Even the most free-wheeling, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants person still occasionally makes plans and isn’t all that much a fan of seeing them interrupted. Joseph feels your pain. 

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Morning Musing: James 4:15

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“Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.'”  (ESV – Read the chapter)

How do you make plans?  How attached to those plans are you?  What James offers here is a reminder that all of our plans must be made contingent on what the Lord has planned.  All of them.  We can strive for whatever we want, but nothing will happen that He does not allow for some reason.  The question then becomes: What does God have planned? Read the rest…