SERMON: Planning As Worship

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day sermon and we pray that as we declare the word of God that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith and you would catch a greater vision of who

Christ is. And may you be blessed in the hearing of God's word and may the Lord be with you.

Over the last several weeks, we have been in a mini series on worship. But before we go into another aspect of worship and dive into what that means,

I wanna make sure that we're not using the word worship carelessly or incorrectly.

If scripture teaches us anything, it teaches us that worship is not a narrow set of religious activities.

It's not merely songs or singing or guitar playing or the lack thereof.

It's not merely something you do or how you serve. It's not even merely an event that you schedule between 10 o 'clock a .m.

and 12 o 'clock plus a .m. on a Sunday morning. Biblically speaking, worship is the total orientation of a creature before his creator.

It's how all of life is directed to this God in all the various spheres of life that God has called us to.

And across all of the scripture, worship involves at least three inseparable realities.

The first is that worship is reverent submission to God. From Sinai's trembling mountain all the way to Isaiah's temple vision, from the

Psalms call for us to bow down to Revelation's throne room where we stand up, worship is the posture of the creature who recognizes the infinite holiness of God and responds with awe, surrender, obedience, and praise that is due his majestic name.

The second aspect is that worship is exclusive allegiance. The first commandment that we talked about earlier does not ask whether we will worship.

It assumes that we're gonna worship because we were made to be worshiping people. The question is not if we will worship, but who we worship.

And the question before us today is who will we fall down prostrate before?

Will it be Yahweh or will it be something else? In this way, we are worshiping people always aiming our worship at something.

Worship always has an object and that object will govern everything about you and me.

The third aspect of worship is that it's whole life devotion. It's not just a slice of the pie of who we are.

It's everything about who we are. Romans 12 tells us to present our bodies as a living sacrifice.

That means fingernails and the little hair that grows in your ear. All of us, every aspect, every facet, emotionally, mentally, cognitively, spiritually, materially, all of us are under the lordship of Christ to worship

God in the totality of our being. And that way, worship is not a compartmentalized behavior.

It is the ordering of the life under God's authority for his pleasure. That's what the

Bible teaches about what worship is. Now, as we get to the book of Proverbs, we've been looking at various different angles about what worship is.

And Proverbs has much to say about what worship is. It's taught us from Proverbs 1 through 9 that wisdom begins with the fear of God, not intellectual sophistication, not life experience, not liver shivers, not navel gazing, not experiences.

I remember one of the first churches that I went to as a Christian, they called their church service a worship experience because you're supposed to feel something.

If you don't feel something, what's your fault? You didn't, God was there, what's your problem? Proverbs has also taught us that, and that's wrong by the way, obviously.

Proverbs also taught us that wisdom is a gift from God. And before wisdom becomes a skill that's implemented in our life, it must be a gift that is given to us, that is cultivated so that we can employ that wisdom in the worship of Almighty God.

Which means that worship is not an act of heroism where we ascend the mountain in order to climb up to meet our

God. Wisdom and worship is kneeling at the foot of the mountain knowing that the

Holy God must come down to us. The world tells us to climb, wisdom tells us to bow.

One path leads to exhaustion, pride, and hell. The other leads to rest, transformation, and eternal life.

And in this way, true worship is not man reaching upward in his own strength, it is man rightly positioned, low and listening to the one who lifts him up.

If Proverbs has taught us anything so far, it's this. Worship is the posture of the heart before the all -seeing

God. The God that we must fear if we would worship him. The fear that is expressed through reverence, awe, and joy in every sphere of life.

And worship that is evaluated by God alone, by his standards alone. We've even learned last week, two weeks ago, that there is worship that God hates and abhors.

Because it's not about the practice of what we do in worship, it's our hearts before a holy

God. Ask Nadab and Abihu, it wasn't that God was upset that their fire was a little different, it was that they cared so little about the holiness of God that they would dare inflame him against them and act like that he wouldn't care, that he would only accept whatever they give.

And this is where we pick up our case this week, looking at another sphere of worship. And that is something that hits us practically every single week, unless we're perpetually late and never get anything done.

But how do we worship through our planning? How do we worship through our calendar? So we've looked at theological different ways that worship intersects with our daily life.

We've looked at judgmental ways, that us and God, the wrath of God, we looked at that.

Now, today we're gonna intersect with a very practical way that worship happens, and it's how do we worship

God through our schedule? How do we worship God with our plans? How do we worship God in our calendar, our budgets, our career moves, our relocation decisions, our investments, buying a church, parenting struggles, business opportunities, doors that seem to sometimes slam in your face?

How do we worship God in those areas of life that are not merely opportunities for us to adult?

They're not just logistical nuisances that we have to do so that we can get onto the really fun parts that we want to do, because if worship permeates all of life, then it must reach into all of the places of life, even those places where we feel like God is maybe not involved, or where we feel like we have some measure of control, the place where we set our goals and create our five -year plans, where we make decisions and we map out the probabilities, the cost versus the rewards.

But what if the discipline that it takes for us to plan our lives is not a morally neutral activity?

What if the discipline of becoming responsible and planning and scheduling and all of those things is an act of worship?

Today, Proverbs is gonna show us that every step, every plan, every lot, even cast, every inward refinement, all unfolds before the majesty of a sovereign

God, and there's no outcome that falls outside of his ordaining hand, which means that worship is revealed not only in how you sing and how you pray, but also in how you plan and move and have your being.

So if you will, I'm only gonna read two verses this week. I planned on reading a lot of verses this week, and it did not work out.

So we'll do those later. But I'm gonna read Proverbs 16 .3 and Proverbs 16 .9, and then we'll pray and then we'll jump in.

Commit your works to the Lord and your plans will be established. The mind of the man plans his way, but the

Lord directs his steps. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you.

We thank you that you've allowed us to look into your word this morning. We thank you, Lord, that you've preserved your word for thousands of years.

From the Old Testament saints who faithfully wrote these things down, or even those who carried it by oral tradition through the sands of Egypt until they could be written down by Moses, all of your word, whether it's history or poetry or wisdom or prophecy, whether it's gospels or epistles or revelation, all of your word is good and for our good.

All of your word is God -breathed for our development, training, to make us into a man who's fit to handle the word of God rightly.

Lord, I pray that as we look into this area that maybe isn't often talked about, how do we worship you through our calendar and through our plans?

I pray, Lord, that we would catch a vision for how to worship God even in this little nook and that little cranny of our life.

It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen. The first thing that I wanna mention is that worship surrenders our plans to God.

We just read a couple passages, Proverbs 16, three and nine especially, that we have read probably thousands of times before.

Commit your works to the Lord and your plans will be established. I've read that passage over and over and over again and you have probably too.

It's been on the little Christian cards with the Thomas Kinkade painting in the background. We've read it.

And yet I don't think we really understand it. Commit your works to the Lord and your plans will be established.

What does that mean? Commit your works to the Lord. Does that mean say a prayer and then make your plans and then all is well, blank check,

God's given it, you go do it? Does that mean try to honor God with your decisions?

Does that mean wear the little bracelet like I did in the 90s? What would Jesus do? Does that mean that do what you will and God will bless it because you're a

Christian? I don't think so. The Hebrew word here is actually very interesting.

The Hebrew word for commit is the word garal. And what it means is to roll.

To roll or to transfer a weight, to shift a burden from your own back onto the back or the shoulders of another.

What it means is to take something that is so heavy that you can't hold it and to transfer it to something larger that can actually hold that thing in place.

It would be like a laborer in ancient Israel, the sun beating down on their back, sweat pouring down their face, muscles quivering under the weight of a heavy stone that they can't possibly carry by themselves.

Knees are shaking and they're getting ready to give in. And then in a moment, they throw the weight off of them and onto the cart that will sustain it and that will hold it.

That crushing weight, that back bent over, those legs that are shaking, that is a picture of what this word means to roll the weight off of you and to give it to someone else.

That's what the word commit means. It means take the pressure that is on you and give it to someone that can hold it, to something that can hold it.

So what that means is this is not that we're supposed to just grind out the Christian life and commit all of our plans to the

Lord and just carry them and carry them and carry them in our own strength. That's the opposite of what this means. It means that we're supposed to roll the weight, the pressure, the burdens of our plans, our future, our outcomes and our control off of our shoulders and onto God.

Because when we think about our plans and our future rightly, we know that we can't bear the weight.

We know that we're not in control. We know that even if we act like it, we're not in control.

We know that a million things are happening right now in this moment that are outside of your control that will lead to the end of your day that you can't even possibly imagine what it's gonna look like yet.

When we even so much as act like we're in control, we feel the suffocating weight of our expectations getting blown.

When we attempt to manage our own outcomes, they press down on us and they crush us.

And what's most alarming about this is that we all love this. Maybe not existentially.

We don't like the pain. We whine about the pain when we get it. All of us do that. But we take the weight on ourselves constantly and we try to carry it apart from the strength of God.

We grab things in our life that will surely crush us and we try to hold onto them for dear life and say,

God, just bless me while I'm holding this. And yet,

God never called you to do that in your strength. God never called you to hold that thing in your strength. God never told you to white knuckle that thing and try to bear up underneath the burden of it.

For some strange reason that I do not fully understand, me, along with everyone else in the human race, loves to carry weights that we were not designed to carry, that only

God can carry. And that is the chief reason why many of us are feeling like we're being smushed.

Because underneath all of the pious lingo, we feel like we can carry it, which is a statement saying we feel like we are gods.

As long as that stone that is my plans, as long as I can manage it, well, you know,

I'll be okay. As long as that great rock of time is in my control,

I will be okay. As long as that boulder that's my schedule is on my back, well, then

I'll have success. We're the ones constantly who are trying to hold everything together.

We're the masters of our own fate, the captains of our own destiny. And we stagger through life, crushed, back bent, knees buckling, sweat pouring, refusing to roll the weight of those things off of us and onto God.

Because when we do that, then we're saying to him that we're weak. And we are.

And honestly, much of the Christian life would be solved if we just simply say to ourselves, we're weak.

He's strong. I can't do it. He can. I must become less.

He must become great. I must die. So he will live.

You see, the upside down nature of the Christian life is that you're not enough. You're not enough even for your calendar app.

Which is why when we say it's my way, my plans, my, my, my, my, my, we get into situations and seasons where we feel like we're being crushed.

And then we ask God, why are you doing this to me? Maybe you shouldn't be holding everything you're holding and thinking that God has called you to be like Atlas standing there holding the weight of the world on your shoulders.

And maybe he's asked you to actually lay it down at his feet and submit it to him. Now, planning is not the problem.

I wanna say that right away. I've learned to become a better planner over time.

And it's a good thing. Planning is not the problem. I'm not saying that we should just commit our works to the Lord and by that,

I mean, oh, I guess we just shouldn't plan at all. We shouldn't do anything. We should just wait for God to just do everything for us. I'm not saying that.

A thousand times, I'm not saying that. Look at what the text says. The text says, commit your works to the Lord and your plans will be established.

So what I want you to notice here is that planning is assumed in this text, not condemned.

The verse doesn't say stop making plans. It doesn't say close your calendar app. It doesn't say wonder aimlessly through life.

It doesn't say that strategizing is sinful. God made you with a mind. He gave you the capacity to think and to reason and to analyze and to strategize and to prepare and to build businesses and companies and to do lots of things that he's ordained for you to do.

He's designed us to be planners over a myriad of areas of life, which means that planning itself is not the problem.

So how do we square the circle? The problem is when we plan as if we are

God of our own life. The problem is when we make plans and then inform God that he needs to make them happen.

The problem is our heart in relationship to our planning when we treat

God like he's a 1099 employee who just answers our prayers and assists us in our mission.

There's a universe of difference and an eternal soul -defining differences between those two postures.

God, I'm planning on making this move, this career change, this investment, this relationship, but I'm gonna commit it to you and I'm gonna trust you.

I'm gonna hold it with open hands and I'm gonna trust your wisdom and not my own and I'm gonna let you redirect my steps if I'm going the wrong way.

I'm gonna follow you wherever you take me even though I'm gonna make plans today. I'm going to do something, not just sit still, but I'm gonna trust you and if you wanna redirect me, amen.

That's the right posture. The sinful posture is God, I've decided which way

I'm gonna go. I've decided my plans and I expect you to bless it. I expect you to make it work.

I expect you to remove the obstacles and open the doors and to do everything that I need you to do because don't you wanna make me happy,

God? This can't be a bad thing, I've decided it. I have decided

I'm moving forward with it. God, I need you to come alongside of it and breathe some blessing. And we don't really talk about it that way, but we act like that all the time.

For instance, this building that we're currently looking at we have made plans.

We've went and looked at it three times now. I've made hundreds of phone calls and sent hundreds of emails and sat down with prospective investors.

We've put in an offer and we've said, not our building, Lord, yours.

If it's meant to be ours, God will give it to us. We've planned, we've done things. We haven't sat here and prayed,

Lord, if that building's supposed to be ours on 10 or on 40 Mammoth Road, have them call us. They don't know us.

So what, God can do that, right? Okay, sure, but that's not the way

God often works. We made plans, but we've given our plans to the

Lord. And if this building doesn't work out, guess what? I'm gonna rejoice and I hope you will rejoice because it wasn't ours in the first place.

And imagine if we did think that it was ours. What a great opportunity. We start imagining children playing on the playground.

We start imagining worship happening in the sanctuary. We start imagining maybe a daycare is there.

Maybe something else is there. Maybe we have businesses that grow up there. And we start imagining and playing the movie in our head and we say, no, this must be from the

Lord. Then we start adding onto it that God has raised so much money this week or this past two weeks, that God has done some amazing things.

It must be from God. It must be from God. And then what do you have? You have a 15 ,000 square foot noose around your neck that will drag you down.

Yeah, we make plans. Yeah, we put in the effort. But at the end of the day, the outcome doesn't belong to us.

The outcome belongs to God. And the weight of all of these matters belongs to him and not us because the weight would actually crush us.

We labor to see his will. You don't find out God's will sitting still. That's tweetable.

You don't find out God's will sitting still. You just don't. But like the Israelites who were wandering through the wilderness, they learned which direction

God wanted them to go by walking in a direction and then having the spirit of God turn them left or turn them right, but they did not sit down and ask for the entire roadmap.

So we labor to see his will. We want to have success and failure in ministry.

We wanna have these things that God has given us, but the pressure of all of that doesn't belong to us.

And brothers and sisters, whatever it is in your life, it doesn't belong to you either. Here's a very helpful calculus for you.

This is a diagnostic tool that you can use over and over and over again to see how you're doing in this area, to see if you're actually trusting

God, if you've been infected by the oozing boils of self -sovereignty. When it comes to your plans, what happens when

God disrupts them? Ask that question. When it comes to your plans, what do or what happens?

How do you feel when God disrupts them? What happens when the funding falls through? Or what happens when the friendship ends?

That friendship was from the Lord. What happens when it's gone? Those children are mine.

What happens when they sink? That diagnosis, my health, the promotion that was given to someone else because who

I thought was my friend just stabbed me in the back at my company and now he's taken my promotion. The pregnancy test is negative for the fourth year in a row.

When your child rebels and leaves the faith after moving out of the home. When your retirement fund crashes.

When the door that you were so sure that God was opening slams shut in your face.

How do you respond? And that will tell you where you're at with this question.

Do you respond with Job? The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the

Lord. Or do you get angry? Do you spiral into depression? Do you become cynical about prayer?

Do you start avoiding church because you can't sing songs about God's goodness when it doesn't feel like God's been good to you?

Do you nurse bitterness like a wounded animal licking its wounds? Do you begin to subtly or not so subtly blame

God? Proverbs 19 three says, the foolishness of man ruins his way and his heart rages against the

Lord. Did you catch that? It's the fool who rages against his circumstances.

It's the fool who looks at the bad thing that's happening to him and ruins his own life by responding to it with rage.

And here's the thing. It says in this passage that he's actually in reacting to his bad circumstances.

He's not raging against bad luck. He's not shaking his fist at the proverbial universe or karma or fate or whatever else.

He's raging against God. When we argue against our circumstances, get angry at our circumstances, whatever they are, from a minor traffic inconvenience to the most horrible thing that you've ever walked through, when we look at those situations and we rage against them,

Proverbs is telling us that we're actually raging against him. Because deep down in all of us, beneath all of the

Sunday morning glitz and glamor and ties and dresses and theological language and Bible verses that we've plastered on the wall, we either believe that God's plans are from him for us, whatever they are, or we believe that our plans are our own.

We're either gonna believe that he is sovereign or we're gonna believe that we have to work hard enough to get what we want, pray hard and pray long enough, be faithful enough, live righteously enough, and that God will give us whatever our heart desires.

And when that delusion comes upon us, and when we think that God's will is controlled by our effort, it will crush you because you can't actually perform at a level that would warrant any blessing to come upon you.

I remember reading, you can write this down if you want, one of the greatest books

I've ever read in my life. I'd count it probably number two to the Bible, which is number one among regular books.

The Rare Jewel of Christian Consentment by Jeremiah Burroughs. And I remember, this is a summary of chapter one.

It doesn't matter what happens to you. It doesn't matter. You could walk out of here and get hit by a car and be alive just enough to where you're in pain.

I'm making this up. I'm summarizing Burroughs. He lived a long time ago. Cars weren't invented. You have chemical burns over every inch of your body.

Someone just out of the spitefulness of it ripped your toenails off, and now you're in desperate pain.

You lose your job, you lose your insurance, you lose your house, and in that mangled mess, you're sleeping in a puddle outside on the street.

Jeremiah Burroughs would say that you have been treated more graciously than your sins would dictate that you deserve.

So that any blessing, even pain, is a rare gift from God who should have, could have, and would have destroyed you if it were not for the finished work of Christ.

So in everything we can praise, in everything we can say with Job, the Lord gives, and the

Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. We can say with Jeremiah, great is

His faithfulness. His mercy renews every morning as the thing that we thought was most important in life is burning in the background.

We can say with Horatio, it is well with my soul because this

God is in control and He would never give me anything outside of His sovereign will and His goodness.

That is the key tell on where your attitude is. It's when your plans fall through.

That will tell you whether or not you're worshiping God in your plans or you're worshiping you in your plans.

One of those attitudes is gonna lead you to a place of rejoicing even when you don't get what you want, even when you go through very, very hard things, and the other is gonna lead you to a place of needing deep repentance because bitterness has come into your life and calcified you in anger and despair.

So that's the first thing I would say is where is your trust when it comes to your plans?

Who do you turn to when your plans get broken? It's an important question to ask. Now, I wanna transition to three kinds of planners.

You notice, you notice it's simple, right? I planned three types of planners. You get it? Three types of planners.

The first one is the anxious planner. The person who treats planning like a palantir, which in the

Lord of the Rings is a magic seeing stone. In our modern world, it's an evil company led by a wicked man,

Peter Till, but you get my point. It's a magic seeing stone that's gonna insulate me from failure. If I can just look through this stone long enough,

I'm gonna gather enough intel and enough data to where I can insulate myself from problems. This is what Sauron does in the

Lord of the Rings. So for the anxious planner, every detail must be locked down.

Every contingency plan must be anticipated. Every variable must be controlled. They have a backup plan for their backup plan for their backup plan.

And they obsess over schedules and budgets and itineraries, and they cannot rest until everything is mapped out.

I call that the anxious planner. Why? Because deep in that person's soul, they believe that if they can just plan hard enough and perfectly enough and copious enough, that nothing bad is gonna happen.

And you can spiritualize this, where you say, well, I'm just using wisdom. I'm just being careful.

I'm stewarding God's resource. See how good we can get at Christianese? Your heart's riddled with fear.

I'm stewarding. The Lord would approve of this, correct, right? When you say those kinds of things, you often have a worship problem because when your plans fail, the anxious planner doesn't actually rejoice in God.

They get flummoxed and flustered, and that's the key sign that you actually aren't resting in God. When your plans fail and you get flummoxed or flustered, you're not resting in God.

You're resting in you. The anxious planner was not really trusting in God, were they?

They were trusting in themselves. They were trusting in the God of control. Their plans weren't really acts of humble stewardship.

They functioned like a kind of incantation, a magic formula designed to ward off disasters, that if I can just do this, do that, and get this particular sequence of events, then

I will be safe. Then I will have security. And when that fails, anxiety spikes.

And when that fails, you become irritable. And when that fails, you get mad at other people because they didn't follow your system.

If you struggle with this, maybe you lied awake at night thinking through different scenarios that went wrong and how could

I have done better, trying to anticipate every problem so that at some point in the future, you'll get your planning so perfectly right that even the will of God couldn't thwart it.

And you resent the kind of people, probably like me, who seem to wing it.

And you think to yourself, how irresponsible. Why would they do that?

Well, the problem is, is that you're thinking you can control something and you actually can't. When something goes wrong despite all of your plannings and you don't feel disappointed, but you feel betrayed, betrayed by God who didn't hold up his end of the bargain, if that's you, then

Proverbs 16, three, should liberate you. Roll the weight off your back and give it to God because you can't control it anyway.

Stop asking God for clarity and start asking God for submission and you'll be free.

That's the first kind of planners, the anxious planner. The second one is the presumptuous planner. This is the person who has a kind of confidence, not because they're trusting in God, but because they're trusting in themselves and their ability.

It's the person who is competent, capable, successful. They've learned how to work the system.

They've learned how to network, negotiate, strategize, think on their feet, they set goals, they kind of usually hit them, they make things happen.

And somewhere along the way, they've started believing their own press. They've stopped asking God what he wanted and they start informing

God what they've decided. And in that way, prayer becomes a kind of perfunctory act for the presumptuous planner.

Wisdom becomes optional because God has been gradually demoted from Lord over all to cheerleader over me.

To this person, our Lord's brother, James would say this in chapter four, verse 13 through 16.

Come now you who say today or tomorrow, we will go and do such and such a city or we will go to such and such a city and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.

Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.

Instead, you ought to say, if the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.

But as it is, you boast in your arrogance and all such boasting is evil. That's astounding, isn't it?

I'm gonna go there tomorrow. James says, that's a kind of boasting that he says is evil.

He's not saying that it's just unwise to make plans that maybe you cannot keep. He's not even just saying that it's inadvisable to make those kinds of plans.

He says it's evil because you're presuming upon the grace of God. You're presuming upon the sovereignty of God.

And in that, we're being foolish and we're being idolatrous. You say,

God's gonna give us that building because he's already helped us raise so much money. I don't know that and you don't know that.

The Lord may, in fact, have done all of those things to encourage us, but it may not be for that building. It may be for another or it may be to be here for the next 20 years.

We don't know. But let's not presume upon the grace of God and think that we know something that we don't just because we've had a really banner week.

We've had a great week, praise God. The Lord can just as easily take that week and give us a different kind of week.

Are we gonna praise God then? Whether he takes or whether he gives, blessed be the name of the

Lord. This happens in entrepreneurial type people,

I think sometimes where they're not praying before their business deals. They're doing market research to pull in the trigger, but they haven't thought about how this relates to God, whether God wants them to do this or that or thing.

Couple who never ask God about buying the house, they just say, I've looked at the numbers, it makes sense. The student who makes college plans without seeking wisdom.

The parent who arranges their child's entire future without consulting the God who gave them that child. If our plans are not committed to God, they're then announced to God like a

CEO informing a board of directors that the decision has been made. How do you know if that's gonna happen or not?

We rarely pray about decisions until things go wrong. All of us.

We make our plans first and we ask God later to rubber stamp them with blessings. And we're genuinely surprised when someone suggests that we might be wrong.

We're genuinely surprised when setbacks happen and we call that spiritual warfare. Maybe our plans were not so great.

Everything is not a demon. There are real demons. I hope that you're not meeting any right now or later.

But if your self -imposed calendar structure is causing you pain and suffering because you are holding so tightly onto your self -sovereignty instead of giving that over to God, then repent of that and be free of that.

That's why Proverbs 16, nine says, "'The man plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps.'" You can make all the plans that you want, but you have to reckon with the fact that it is

God who ultimately is the one who's directing your steps because he is God and we are not.

Now, obviously, both of those ways are sinful. Neither is bringing worship that we would either cling to and trust in our own plans or we'd become anxious when our plans fail.

So now let's talk about the third type of planner, the worshipful planner, the planner that this is biblical and this is the way that we should approach the way that we plan our life.

And if we do this, then it would be an act of worship to God. The worshipful planner researches, calculates, strategizes, budgets, prepares.

They work as if everything depends on them, but they pray as if everything depends on God. And they wait to see which way the

Lord will direct and guide their steps. They plan with open hands and with bowed hearts. They hold their goals loosely.

They hold their God tightly. They're not anxious when things go wrong. They're joyful, even when things fail tremendously because they know that God is in it and he's teaching us and he's shaping us even through our failure.

They labor, but not in vain. They build, but only because the Lord is building the house.

They're like Nehemiah. Nehemiah prayed for four months before he went and spoke to the king about going back and to rebuild

Jerusalem's walls. They're like the Apostle Paul making plans to visit

Rome and he says, but only if God permits. They're like Mary responding to the angel's announcement that a virgin is gonna have a baby.

Behold, I'm the bondservant of the Lord, and all things are made to be done according to your word. These are people who've learned that worship is not in the absence of planning, but planning done under the

Lordship of Christ with a heart that is content for the Lord to be in control, that's worship.

And of course, that engenders the question, how on earth do we live this way? Because Proverbs 16, nine contains a pretty powerful tension that's produced libraries of theological debate.

The mind of the man plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps. I want you to notice something really crucial here if we're gonna ask, how do we actually live this way?

The text says, man attempts to plan, but God overrules.

It doesn't say that man thinks that he's planning and that God may come along and do something.

It says that man plans his way, present active verb, showcasing a genuine human agency.

But, and without apology and without explanation and without softening the tension, it says, but the

Lord directs his steps. We plan, and yet the Lord directs, which sounds like a paradox.

It is a paradox. And somehow both truths are true simultaneously.

Human planning is real, and divine direction is ultimate.

And worship happens when we learn to live in the tension of man makes his plans and God directs his steps.

When we learn to live in that tension, our whole life will be filled with worship instead of collapsing on either side of the anxious planner or the presumptuous planner.

That's why Psalm 127, one says, unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it. Unless the

Lord guards the city, the watchman awake in vain. It doesn't say don't build houses, just pray and one will appear.

It doesn't say don't hire the watchman, God will protect your city somehow supernaturally.

It says build the house. It says grab the hammer, grab the boards, grab the screws, grab the nails, grab all of it, start working.

But realize that at the end of the work, it wasn't you who built it, it was God. Hire the watchman.

Hire the one that has the Desert Eagle 50. And yet know that if your city is safe, your church is safe, your home is safe, it's actually because God was the one who protected you, not you.

There's a tension here. This Psalm is not condemning effort, but it is condemning self -sufficiency.

It's exposing one of the great tragedies of life that we spend building and striving and sheathing and trying to acquire, only to discover at the end that it was built on nothing but moth and rust, things that will be destroyed in the fire, wood, hay, and stubble.

Because you've wasted your efforts apart from God. Jeremiah 10 .23 says, I know,

O Lord, that a man's ways is not in himself, nor is it in a man who walks to direct his steps.

That's one of the most humbling statements in the scripture. A man's way is not in himself. In other words, you and I don't have the inherent capacity within us to actually know which way is good or right for us.

You may think you're choosing a career, but you think about what's going on around you.

A million possible scenarios have all happened in your life that brought you to the place where you chose your career.

Millions of things have been shaping you, moving you, so that you didn't choose anything independent of anything.

You were given the exact parents that you have, the exact education that you have, the opportunities that you have, the gifts, the personality, the limitations that you have, the economy you were born into, the era that you live in, the country that you live in, the doors that have been opened and the doors that have closed.

None of that was you. In some ways, you've pinball machined through life, like me.

None of it was held together by us, and in our decisions, we're only responding to what the

Lord has already done. You may think you're choosing your spouse. Who gave you the attractions that you have?

Who gave you the opportunity to meet her? I met my wife in jail. Who would have wrote that story? We were both guards, just in case there's someone

I haven't told that story to. You're not in control of anything.

Everything you have is a gift. You may think you're choosing where to live, but your job opportunities, your family needs, your health issues, housing markets, visa restrictions, unexpected crises,

God's subtle and silent provinces are shaping your steps more than your decisions ever could.

Again, this is not fatalism. This is not saying that your choices don't matter. What I am giving you is a kind of theological realism, recognizing that you are a being of contingency

You're a contingent creature living in a universe of a necessary being, which means that you can plan, but it is

God who directs your steps. And the moment that you and I will surrender our sovereignty is the moment that we actually begin to gain true freedom.

The moment that we would say, I am weak, He is strong. He is big, I am small. He is God, I am not.

That's when we gain freedom. Because if you don't, you'll be enslaved to anxiety or you'll be one fall away from your next failure, your next collapse.

But if you'll trust the Lord with your outcomes, you will be the one who is free. You'll be free from the crushing weight of trying to be your own

God. You'll be free of the anxiety, of the uncertain outcomes. You'll be free of the bitterness and the unmet expectations.

Why is my marriage like this? Maybe you should receive your marriage as a gift and say, thanks

God. Thank you God for giving me this particular spouse on this particular time so that I could love her in this specific way.

You've given her to me because there's something in me that needs her in order to be sanctified according to your will and your good pleasure.

Instead of complaining about her or complaining about him, embrace the fact that it is a gift by God given for you for him.

Stop complaining about your job, God gave it to you so that you could use that for the building of his kingdom and for Christendom.

Stop complaining about your circumstances. They're a gift from God. It doesn't matter what you're going through right now in the ultimate scheme of things because you are exactly where God wants you to be.

Living the exact life that God wants you to live with the exact circumstances God intended to give you so that he could be glorified through you.

Why would we complain about that? And why would we try to plan our way around that?

His plan is better than our plan. We plan, he directs our steps. That's where you have freedom.

And the reason that that's true is because there's only one man who's ever done that. And that's Jesus Christ. The only man who's ever lived

Proverbs 16 without fail, that didn't stumble in his calling, that walked it perfectly, that set his face even towards Jerusalem and spoke of his coming hour and moved with deliberate obedience to the cross, not as an anxious victim of chaos and also not as an arrogant zealot with presumptions.

He's the son who submitted to the father's ordained will and for the joy set before him, he endured the cross.

From Bethlehem to Egypt, from Nazareth to Jordan, from Galilee to Gethsemane and from Gethsemane to Golgotha, no step that Jesus took was accidental.

Not one turn was miscalculated. Not one sorrow was outside of the father's will. He even tells us that he was delivered over by the predetermined plan and the foreknowledge of God.

The cross was not God's divine improvisation. It was his eternal design.

And the weight of that design pressed him down in the garden where he is crying tears of blood.

He is not unsympathetic to our pain. He was crushed for our weaknesses and for our sins.

And he's the one who said, not my will but your will be done. And he didn't do that in order just to model for us an example because you can never live it.

He modeled that. Yes, he lived that, yes, but he did it as a true head, the head of a new covenant so that he could become the true and better Israel.

You remember earlier when I said to you that Israel in the wilderness wandered through the wilderness, taking the most indirect route that you've ever seen?

Left and right, zigzag, they're all over the place. And yet it was

God who was directing their steps. The word in Hebrew for spirit is ruach.

It means wind or breath. What was it that was leading the people of Israel in the wilderness?

The cloud, the breath of God. What is it that the spirit of God hovers over the heads of the believers in Pentecost but tongues of fire and wind rushing in?

What you have, brothers and sisters, is the angel of the Lord leading them through the Red Sea and the spirit of the

Lord leading them to the promised land, which is a great picture of what Christ is doing for you. Christ led us to the place where the walls of God's wrath would come down, crushing down on him so that you and I could walk away free, led by the spirit.

And here's the glorious good news of the gospel that it is no longer hovering somewhere in the distance ahead of us.

The spirit of God has come into us. The fire of God has come into us. That same fire that leaped off Mount Sinai and flung itself down before the tent of meeting and consumed the burnt offering hole, the same presence of God that lived in the temple that was so dangerous the high priest would wear a rope around him so that they could yank him out if he died in the presence of God.

That same presence, the same presence that raised Jesus from the dead, the same presence that made Jesus follow

God's steps in every single thing that he ever did, that same spirit now is alive and at work in you so that you can live and so that you can work and make your plans for his good pleasure.

Make your plans, but remember that he directs your steps. Make your plans, but remember that Christ, through his spirit, is the one who will lead you left or right until you get home to the promised land with him.

Let's pray. Lord, help us in this little small area of our life that controls so much of our emotions and our heart and our anxieties, which is planning events and calendaring and schedules, and especially for a culture like ours that is constantly moving and working and doing everything we can to thoroughly exhaust ourselves.

Lord, help us to submit our calendars to you. Help us to submit our schedules to you.

Help us to submit our plans to you. Help us to submit our will to you.

And Lord, help us to realize that we don't gain freedom by white -knuckling our life. We actually gain freedom by letting go and by trusting you.

Lord, I pray that you would help us to see that. And Lord, I pray that the spirit would author the courage inside of us to do that so that we could say with Horatio, it is well with our soul.