Trusting God's Plan: Surrendering Our Own

"Thank goodness, a week and a half before Christmas, I got a call from my mom. She said, hey, we're at the base exchange. And if you don't know what that is, on the military basis, basically it's their target. The only thing is though, it's cheaper than it would be at target and there's no tax. So I was super excited to hear her say, she found a bike. She described it to me. It had the little ribbons coming out of the handlebars, you know, and had the beautiful seat was purple, my daughter's favorite color. And so I remember my mom telling me all about it. And she goes, what do you think? Do you think she would like it? I said, oh, that sounds perfect. Thank you so much for finding it. And so I, you know, hung up the phone and, you know, I told my wife, I said, hey, we're good to go now. We've got her gift. We'll just pick it up on Christmas Eve from the house. And, you know, I'll pay my parents for it and everything. So anyway, Christmas Eve came around and we all gathered together. And what we do is we have a nice big meal. And every year it's a tradition where we open one, every child gets to open one gift. All right. So what we're going to do is open gifts. And then when everybody left, I was going to linger behind and I was going to get the bike and drive it home and then put it together until about midnight as parents do right on Christmas Eve. So plan was all laid out. We go to my parents' house. We have a great dinner, great night, a lot of fun. Everybody's having a great time. Everybody's going home. I go to my mom. I said, okay, mom, where's the bike? She goes, what do you mean? Where's the bike?" [00:01:44] (84 seconds)


"The reality is we go through life making plans. We go through life thinking, oh, I got this figured out. I'm going to do this. It starts off when you were young, right? We first maybe big decision we make as we plan for our Halloween outfit. And then our mom says, you can't be Freddy Krueger, right? Or we're going into middle school for the first time. We get to pick our classes and we want the ones with our friends. We can't get any of our friends, right? We get into high school and maybe we're trying to figure out the school we're going to go to, the college we're going to go to. We have five. There's one we really want. We don't get it, you know? Or we finally, we get married. We're going to have kids. We're not going to mess our kids up like our parents did. We know how to parent, just don't do what they did, right? And we have our first child and it's demon possessed. You know, it doesn't matter what we plan. It always seems like... But God or something, life interrupts our plan and ruins it. And it causes a lot of stress in our life. There's a great proverb in Proverbs 16, 9 that says this, people make plans for what they will do. Love it. Starting off great." [00:04:50] (68 seconds)


"But it is the Lord who leads them in the right way. A couple of assumptions I think we need to make about that scripture. Number one, we... Got to know that our plans are going to get interrupted. There's a but in the sentence. We make our plans but, right? We have things in our life we want to happen. but. And the second assumption is that God's plan is the right way. What does that make our plan? Very good. You guys are catching on, right? So yes, there's a plan that seems right to us, but in God's mind, there's a better way for us. So we're going to be talking about that this morning and we're going to be learning about three things that bother us, but three lessons we can learn in the process." [00:05:57] (52 seconds)


"The first lesson we want to learn, I'm bothered by God's plan because it makes mine go out the window. It makes mine go out the window. And the first lesson we really need to learn is our security is much less important than our security in Him. Our security in ourselves and our own plans, that's fine, but it's much more important to be secure in what God's trying to do in our life." [00:06:49] (27 seconds)


"Stay there until I tell you. I'm having some conflict at work. Stay there until I tell you. We get into difficult circumstances in our lives and we don't understand it. And we feel like God's not moving us, but it doesn't mean God has forgotten us. He has a plan and sometimes his plan doesn't make sense to us, but that doesn't mean his plan isn't good. So here he is. He's sending him off and he's saying, stay there until I tell you to return because Herod is going to search for the child to kill him. That night, Joseph left for Egypt with the child and Mary, his mother, and they stayed there until Herod's death." [00:09:36] (39 seconds)


"The reason our plans go out the window is that we are playing checkers, but God is playing three-dimensional chess. We have plans that seem important and are important. Nothing wrong with our plans. But when God derails our plans and sends us into a place where we don't know what to do, it's often for a much, much greater purpose. See, Jesus went into Israel and crazy, but he identifies himself with the nation of Israel by doing that. Just like they were in captivity in Israel, he was exiled to Israel for a period of time. He comes back into the land later, just like Israel came into the land later, but not like Israel did. He came as the perfect representative of Israel and fulfilled a prophecy that God had for hundreds of years in the past. See, God has much bigger plans than we realize." [00:12:10] (58 seconds)


"The second lesson that we learn, I'm bothered by God's plan because it humbles me. It humbles me. And here's the lesson we need to learn about that. This, our self-confidence, it's fine to feel confident, but it's far more important to have God confidence. Way more important to put our trust in him, knowing he knows what he's doing. There is nothing that can humble you like a child. I'm telling you, there's nothing. My son is a... A philosophy professor. Philosophy is one of the hardest... majors that you can take. It's questioning everything." [00:13:35] (37 seconds)


"How do you know what you know? You know, the famous, I think, therefore I am. That was the end result of a bunch of thinking about how do I know I even exist? How could you prove and explain to somebody logically that you exist? It's harder than you think. And so he's in this world of philosophy and he's thinking about the nature of everything. And then he has his little five-year-old son one day in the car with him and he's thinking and he goes, daddy, I got a question. What's the difference between a tree and a bush? And Tim is thinking, well, I know the difference. You know, trees are tall, bushes are short. He's about to answer. He goes, the reason is, he goes on, because trees sometimes have branches that go all the way to the bottom and bushes sometimes don't have branches till start really high. So what's the difference? And Tim goes, I don't know. Right? I mean, there's questions that our kids answer or things that our kids do that boggle our mind. I don't know if you've ever had a kid go down the why trail. Why? And you tell them the why. You tell them why. And then you end up with, well, God said so. Right? You don't know what else to say at that point, but kids can humble us. Let's look at what Jesus did in Luke chapter two here." [00:14:11] (68 seconds)


"Jesus is saying, of course, you know the prophecies about me. You went to the temple. You heard about the angels coming. You knew who I was. Of course, I would be in the Father's house. Sometimes we don't get what God's doing because we're just focused on the here and now rather than the incredible things that he may be doing behind the scenes. And it humbles us. And just because our plans don't go the way we want, it doesn't mean we're unimportant. In fact, it could be that we're more important than we realize. And God's going to use us for an important task. Amen?" [00:19:34] (35 seconds)


"I'm bothered by God's plan because for it to happen, I have to surrender. Here's the lesson. His plan is not an alteration of ours. It's a completely new plan. I thought about surrender. You know, I don't know if you've ever surrendered to the Lord before, but I often half surrender. Did you know that half surrender is not a surrender? I don't know if you know how surrender works in war. Like when you have to surrender, you have to surrender. when you have an enemy, they say, I surrender. I would just like to keep my gun for a little while longer. Can I keep my gun? And I'd like to stay near the front run lines. You know, my friends might need some help." [00:21:19] (39 seconds)


"That's what we do sometimes with surrender. It's like, God, I give you everything except my finances. Let me hold on to that a little bit longer. I'm not sure if I can trust you there. I surrender except for my health. I don't really trust you there. I surrender except for this relationship. I really need to make this thing work, right? We are really good at surrendering, not surrendering. Surrender is 100% complete. It has to be, or it's not surrender. It's compromise. And in order for God to do his plan in our lives and use us, we've got to surrender to it. He can still do his plan without us. It just won't be us involved in his plan. We have to surrender. This is what it says in Matthew 5. Matthew 2 about Jesus' return. It says," [00:22:02] (52 seconds)


"And honestly, you can have so much peace in your life when you just give up, when you stop fighting it and you just say, God, it's yours. I've tried it my way. I keep running into walls. I keep getting frustrated. So yeah, I'll make my plans, but can you help me out with them in the future a little more? Maybe, maybe how about if I include you a little bit and if things don't go the way I want, I'm still going to trust you because I know you're in it. And you have a bigger plan than I could possibly imagine." [00:24:32] (30 seconds)