Living in Plan A — Teresa Conlon

Living in Plan A — Teresa Conlon

This message is one of the Times Square Church pulpit series. It was recorded in the sanctuary of Times Square Church in Manhattan, New York City. You're welcome to make additional cassettes of this message for free distribution to friends.

However, for all other forms of reproduction or electronic transmission, existing copyright laws apply. Praise God. Hallelujah.

Welcome to our visitors. And if you're visiting, then you have really no idea how long it's been since I preached in this church. But I believe it, I think it was June or so. Maybe some of you thought I was fired.

But it it ended up that Pastor Carter and I were able to do minister in Latvia and Ireland in June and I was privileged to go with Pastor Dave to Brazil in July and then we were gone in August and then I got the month of September off to write a book.

I really need your prayers. It's a tough go for me. It's really hard for me to get down to it. And I just feel such an opposition and I think that's a signal that God really wants that book written. And so I'm trusting him with that and I ask your prayers for that, but it's going to be written.

It's going to be done. So I'm trusting him with that. What are you trusting him for today? Trust is a great word. It's a scary word. It's a very sisting word. But I'm trusting him for that. And if you're visiting with us today through Exit 8 and 9, we have a place for visitors to go and that you'll be able to get a gift from the church.

And we'd love to be able to just meet you firsthand and give you that gift. So if you're visiting with us, you're welcome. I'd like if you would turn with me in the book to Jeremiah in the Old Testament, the book of Jeremiah.

Living in Plan A: God’s Highest and Best

And the title of today's message is called Living in Plan A. Living in Plan A. And if you pray with me. Father, I come in Jesus name. Lord, I pray for the ability to deliver your heart. God, these are your people.

And Lord, I pray that I could disappear and that Holy Spirit you would come and just like a free flowing fountain, Lord, your thoughts and your heart would wash over us, oh God, and find a lodging place.

Lord, I thank you. We are a blessed people to be able to live, oh God, in the light of your love, your presence, and your word. Lord, help us, oh God, not to take it for granted. But Lord, help us to live in the privilege that we have in Christ alone.

In Jesus name, I pray. Amen and amen. Living in Plan A. When I mean Plan A, many of you know, but for those that don't, that really means living in the first plan, the best plan, the highest plan. Not unlike living and playing on the A team.

Where you truly get to be in the, where you have that confidence that what God has called you for, what God has intended for your life, you're living that life. And you know, it was so strong in my heart because the the truth is that most of us, no, all of us, at some time get totally convinced that we're living in Plan B.

And there are some people that actually end up living their life in Plan B. Where Plan B is substandard, it is lower than God intended. And in some cases, it is so living apart from what he intended for us and what he's, he has for us that we end up actually living under his wrath.

That there is this struggle within us because when we come to Christ and we hear that he is our life and that we read these promises in the Bible and we hear that they are for us and that by faith that the Spirit will quicken and say this is for you and we walk with Christ.

And if we begin to say, God, oh God, give me the grace to believe that. Give me the grace to trust that. The enemy rises up. You want to know why? Because the devil lives nothing but Plan B for his life and worse.

The devil's definition is a creature that lives Plan B and lower. You know, when he was standing in the full glory and revelation of God, he blew it big time. When he had everything and he knew everything and he was without excuse except that his pride and except for his beauty and himself rose up higher than what was right and he chose another path when he was cast from the glory of God in the presence of God.

I tell you there is something I feel in his heart that is full of rage that is fueled with regret and self-loathing. I feel that that creature is so animated by what he has forsaken not that he could repent or wants to repent.

But there is something that is about the enemy that anybody and anything that he can take from the full plan and glory of God. He wants to lower to his level and he wants to keep them there because he's the epitome of Plan B or lower.

He's the epitome of a blown life of a wasted existence. One that abides under the wrath of God. That's who he is and that's what he's about. And he's so full of malice and envy against the children of God.

Anything he can do to convince us that we live in Plan B or anything he can do to take us and have us live there, he would do. That would be his delight to do. You know, today God has been speaking to me that so many of us live with a fear that God...

I have done something in my life. I have caused something that I feel I battle all the time that I'm really missing your best for me. That there are some today that they feel that somehow through a wrong decision, something in the past or something that they're battling with right now, and they're not getting victory over, that it is disqualifying them from God's best.

There is a cry in your heart. God, have I missed you somewhere? God, am I missing you somewhere? God, you know, I want you. I want your will. But if I look to the left and I look to the right, I don't see blessing.

I don't see where it's easy. I don't see... I want to know why I seem to have like this low grade depression, this low grade fever of living displeasing you. There are some, beloved, that's here. And we've all known what it is.

That there is a fear that can grip us. That God, I'm not going to make it. I'm not going to be able to live the way I want to live. And beloved, there is... we live there and we, in that lower place, we become very, very vulnerable.

In our mind. Now, I want to talk about a time... I want to talk about a time when Israel, the chosen of God, truly did live in Plan B. And I want us to look today at what happened to these people when they started living Plan B.

Israel’s Descent Into Plan B

When God's incredible plan for them as a nation, as individuals, somehow slipped through their fingers and something happened in the life of that nation that infected the people of God that they began to think and move and live in another way that was moving so far from what God had for them and what God had intended to them that God had to do an incredibly drastic thing.

I want to look into their lives, the lives of a people of God that started living in Plan B. And I want to look at somebody in that time that took another path. There was a time when Israel, in a nation that tells us in Jeremiah, it was in Jeremiah's time of prophecy.

You see, he lived the last 40 years. His ministry was the last 40 years that the nation of the southern kingdom of Judah was as a people. He prophesied to this group of people. And the end result was that about 600 years before Christ, after hearing...

Let me start by saying he started his ministry under King Josiah, and King Josiah was a good king over the king of Judah, the southern kingdom. But Jeremiah had a word, a warning, and Jeremiah had a word that sounded so full of judgment and wrath on the surface.

But he began to speak to a people who are living under a very godly leadership, and he began to speak to them of their heart and how God was saying, I'm seeing right into the center of who you are, and in the center of your thought life, into the center of your battles, into the center of your struggle, and I have a word for you.

And it was an incredible word because it was truth, and it was always full at the beginning of endearment, and of full of love, and saying, turn to me, return to me. I'll restore you. But you see, when the people were living under Josiah was a good time.

They had godly leadership. They had a king that loved God with all their heart, and they felt safe. They felt secure, and it's almost like we were living our relationship with God through this man. In other words, we'll know a blessing.

This man is a good king. We have godly leadership over us, and having that godly leadership almost allowed a false covering over their heart. Because when the Word of God came to them, there was no genuine change in them as individuals.

And then when Josiah was taken, and there started to be king after king that lived on a lower level, didn't have the heart for God, all of a sudden the judgments that Prophet Jeremiah began to speak about began to be fulfilled.

And about 600 years before Christ, under another king, the start of judgment against Judah, the southern kingdom, started, and Babylon invaded Egypt in the year 612 BC, and in the same year later, they invaded Palestine in Jerusalem.

And they deported the choicest of youth from among them, and Daniel, the prophet Daniel, was taken with them. And Jeremiah kept prophesying. And ten years later, Babylon came again, swept down into Israel, and again plundered and took people, and removed them.

And Jeremiah kept speaking God's Word to them. And finally, a third time, Babylon came, destroyed the nation, destroyed the temple, took the people, and the southern kingdom ceased to exist. And when Jeremiah began to speak to them, we see in chapter 2, talking to a people who were moving in plan B, he says in verse 7,.

And I brought you into a plentiful land, he's speaking with the Lord's voice to them, into a good country to eat fruit and the goodness thereof. But ye, when ye entered, you defiled my land and made my heritage an abomination.

God spoke to them, when I took you out of Egypt, he says in verse 6, and what all I did for you, I brought you and rescued you out of Egypt. I delivered you. This is my heart for you, deliverance. I would be God to you and bless you.

But it was falling on deaf ears. And he says in verse 5, he says,. Thus saith the Lord, what iniquity have your fathers found in me, that they have gone far from me, and they have walked after vanity, and they have become vain?

What, what is your controversy with me? That when I speak to you, your, your minds and your hearts are full of vanity. Means vain is light and empty things. How is it that you can't hold a word from me?

How is it that my heart is life for you? He was saying to these people who were moving into a plan B, where their lives were gonna fall so, fall, far short of, of what he had purchased for them, what he was giving them.

Why is it that you can't retain what I'm speaking to you and live in the strength and the power of it? And he says to them in verse 9, I'm, I will plead with you, he says. Wherefore I will yet plead with you, saith the Lord, and with your children's children will I plead.

He says that, be astonished, verse 12, O ye heavens at this, and be horribly afraid, and be very, very desolate, saith the Lord. For my people have committed two evils. They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and have hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water.

And he's saying, be as anything, trees, heaven, angels, be astonished if anyone can see what's happening here. He's saying, I have a people, and I gather them from all nations, and I promise to be their God.

And he said, what I'm asking of them is they give me their heart and give me their mind, and I will do for them that will be an astonishment through all the earth of what I will do with a people that will acknowledge me as their God.

Cry out to me, and ask for my ways, ask for my thoughts, ask for me. And he said, I'll make you an astonishment and a praise throughout the whole earth. But he said, look, be very afraid, because for some reason these people can't hold my word.

In their thoughts, they're vain, and they're empty, and nothing settles, and nothing grips. And he said, here's the relationship I had planned, that I would be like to them a fountain of living waters.

And a fountain is easy. A fountain bubbles up all the time. It's springing fresh, and it's springing new. And he's saying, here are these people that I'm offering them this kind of relationship with me, if they will listen to me and obey me in what they hear.

And he says, in other words, instead of this kind of relationship where I spring up in them, and I will make them clean, and it will be a living thing. He said, no, what they're choosing is they want to cue out out of a rock.

They want to carve out of rock a place where water flows into. But everything they set their hand to, it's hard, it's strenuous. It's like where they've got this thought. Now, here is how we please the living God.

It is nothing but hard work. It is our effort. This is how we come to Him. He's a God of commandments, and here's what we must do. And in their mind, the relationship with God was like cueing out of a rock.

Sweat, work, and what they built with their own hands, what they thought would be wholly unacceptable to God, was like a cistern that was broken, and it couldn't hold the living water. So there were people always thirsty, because, beloved, in their minds had formed an opinion of God that was not true.

In their minds, they thought religion was going to be something that they put their back to and hew it out. Now, when they heard the commandments and when they heard all that they had to do, the sacrifice, their natural mind sprung up and said, OK, I get it.

I'm understanding what God wants us to do. We're going to work, work, work. We're going to, like, cue out of rock. And we all know that it's hard to please God for any length of time, and the living water will run out, and we'll always be a thirsty people, but we'll work.

God said you couldn't get it farther, farther away than what I planned for you. And what happens when we begin to work, and what happens when we have wrong thoughts at the base of it, is that, beloved, we're beginning to build commandments of men and tradition of men, and we begin to trust that more than the Word.

And, beloved, God's Word starts competing against our own thoughts of Him. And our thoughts and our experiences and the neediness of our own heart, we begin to think this is who God is, this is what God wants, this is what I must do.

The next column, of course, is what I can't do. And it's work, work, work. And God is saying, in Jeremiah 31, what He's saying is that you've got these thoughts of Me, and they're competing with what I'm trying to tell you, but your heads, your religious heads, are so full of what you think I need, what I want, and what I'm asking you.

And in verse Jeremiah 3, God says, I'm going to keep sending My Word to you. And this Word is going to expose what really is going on in your thought life and what is going on in your heart. Because you're building your own system of what you think I want, because you are now, in your own flesh, trying to form your own religion with your hard work, and you're trying to please Me.

He says that it's going to take you to places you don't intend to go, because man has to find satisfaction somewhere. And the Scripture tells us in Jeremiah 3, they say, If a man put away his wife, and she go from him, and become another man's, shall he return unto her again?

Shall not that land be greatly polluted? But thou hast played the harlot with many lovers. Yet return again to Me, saith the Lord. And God is saying, you put away the relationship that I'm offering you, and you are running now to find satisfaction in places, in many places, where I want to satisfy you.

And you, because you need that satisfaction, you need relief in your souls. God's saying, I know that, My people. You need that sense of peace. You need that sense of release and that relief. I know that.

But because you have a wrong conception of Me, and because your own hearts will always be springing up, and wanting to lead in the flesh, it's going to lead you to places where you're going to find satisfaction that will cause Me to have to put you away.

But God is pleading with His people, and He says, you know, in the natural, an unfaithful wife would be turned away, but He said, I'm asking you, return to Me. Return to Me. He says, I have things to speak to you, and I want you to listen to Me.

But beloved, they couldn't hear Him. And I kept thinking, God, what are you speaking to these people? What is it that you want to say about people who can move so far from you, and so far from your plan and your will for their life?

And God says in Jeremiah 3 .14, He says, Turn, O backsliding children, saith the Lord, for I am married unto you. In verse 22, He says, Return, ye backsliding children, and I will heal your backsliding.

And I just keep hearing this appeal of God in Jeremiah to this thing, because He says, I know your end from your beginning. And I tell you something, you have separated yourself from Me, and now the sin in your heart and the lusts, which are unsurrendered desires, are the ones that are springing up in your lives, in your minds, and you are so unsatisfied with Me, and I know it.

And you know, all through Jeremiah, like for example, Jeremiah 4 .14, God says, O Jerusalem, wash thine heart from wickedness, that thou mayest be saved. How long shall thy vain thoughts lodge within Me?

Competing Thoughts and Spiritual Strongholds

And I began to see that the Lord was trying to speak to me, and He was saying, Here is the root. There are competing thoughts. There we form a thing about who God is. It can be absolutely contrary to what He is saying to us.

But the depth of the stronghold is such, beloved, that whenever we get into trouble, whenever we sin, whenever we fear, whenever we fail, what is lodged there at the stronghold automatically springs up into our minds and our thoughts and starts competing with what God says He does for us, who He is.

And it begins very hard for us to hear. And we need to begin to recognize these thoughts, that we may take them into captivity by the power of Christ and offer them to Him and say, Lord Jesus, right now the turmoil in my heart, the confusion that's facing me, show me what is truth.

And speak Your Word to me. God, let me turn to Your Word. God, let me turn to You in prayer. And You speak a word that You will witness to me as Yours. And then, God, give me the grace to exalt it higher than my feelings and higher than the thoughts I have at this moment.

Jeremiah begins to say all through it. He talks about, you don't need to turn there, but in verse 519, he says, You have forsaken me and You've served strange gods in Your land. He says in Jeremiah 6 .13, You're given to covetousness.

You're always wanting something and you're never fully satisfied. In Jeremiah 11 .7 and 8, he said, You've not obeyed me, but You've inclined thine ear. And everyone walked in the imagination of their evil heart.

And, beloved, you see, God now, He's beginning to show them what is in their heart, what is the sin there, but what is the root, why they can never hear Him. When He speaks, they're going deaf to the voice of God.

There are competing thoughts and God's saying, I have to get to the root and bring down a wrong conception that you have of me. And because you have a wrong conception of me, and you're trying in your own strength to please me, there is no covering because I can't bless what is not of me.

I cannot reinforce and tell you, yes, you're on the right path. This is truly who I am. Because He can't bear witness to a lie. And the only way that He can begin to show us what are strongholds in our minds and our thoughts concerning God, and we are so firmly entrenched in them, we can't even see that it's not Him.

And then we wonder why we're so unsatisfied. And finally, God is saying, You have walked in the imagination of an evil heart. And Jeremiah says in verse 12 too, Thou art near in their mouth. He's talking about this people living in plan B, but are far from their reins.

God is saying, I'm in their mouth, but I'm far from the reins. In other words, what is happening now is that I've got a people who live the way they feel is the best way to live. However that lines up with my word.

They're going to tell me they're trying. They're going to tell me that God, you know I'm doing my best here. That God, you know I struggle in certain areas. But their faith and their trust is ebbing away.

Because there is no change. And what is happening, God says, is that I am in their mouth, but I am far from the reins of their heart. In other words, I can't direct their lives, but they will come to church and they will praise me and they will say, God, we love you.

But beloved, you want to know some evidences if that is true. It's because when we come into His presence, when it comes to worship, all of a sudden that kind of heart can't worship. The thought life is being dominated by conversations of the week.

The thought of being dominated of this relationship or what needs to happen at work. There is no ability to worship. There is never any rest in the mind. All of a sudden the mind is racing. And when you know it is time to worship, there is no sustained ability to worship.

There is no rest in the spirit. There is no rest in the heart. God is saying, I've got to speak something to you. It's like there is... Let me explain it this way. I read a book this week. It's a very popular book.

Christian Masculinity, Adventure, and the Danger of Self-Made Theology

And I've been told that it is one of the best sellers that's going through Christendom right now. And it's a man, he wrote this book and he was writing to Christian men. And he is saying that he finds most Christian men are bored in church.

And the reason why he feels that way is because he says that every man really wants a battle to fight. Every man wants to learn to be aggressive. That every man wants to find an exciting adventure in life.

And that every man wants to find a beauty to rescue. Now beloved, he could be speaking for men. But when he says he is speaking for Christian men, when he says he is speaking for God, when he says this is what's in the heart of godly men, I take issue.

I take issue because when I was reading this book, at first when I got upset, you want to know all the sources, he was talking in this book, this Christian best seller, about all the movies he had seen.

And he was drawing from the main character of those movies. And he was going, you know, like as you find in Braveheart, and like what you find in Gladiator, and like what you see the guy in Top Gun. And I was talking about Christianity.

And beloved, what he was doing is that he was taking what the natural thoughts out of his own heart was, and he was taking those thoughts of the natural man, and the natural man will learn something from fables, will learn something from stories.

We know this guy had integrity, this guy had courage. True. But the guys in the movies aren't real. You can't base your life. What's not true through and through, sure is what is truth. And every born again Christian has a spiritual man and a natural man.

And only it's the spiritual man who speaks for God. It's the spiritual man that has the mind of God. It's the spiritual man that has the understanding of what God wants to do in him and for him. It is the natural man that has the ability to see the truth and how it applies to his life.

But it is the natural man that has natural desires, and this man was speaking right out of his own natural heart. But he wanted to give a Christian covering over it. And he wants to sell it to this generation, and say this is what you're about, and this is how you satisfy it.

And as I was reading that book, I was getting a little agitated, and I was thinking, how can people read this? It takes no discernment whatsoever. And I read it to the end, I grew very sad. Because by the time you read that book, right to its conclusion, you see a man who revealed himself, I think, more than he ever intended to do it.

He revealed because it kept cropping up, especially towards the end of the book. He says, just even a few weeks ago. So in other words, he's written this whole book, and now he's testifying of something that's currently happening in his life.

He talks about when he and his wife get into an argument. In his mind springs up, I never should have married you. I could have married someone else. I could have done so much better. And beloved, I'll tell you something, he's a man totally unsatisfied in his marriage, totally unsatisfied in his ministry, totally unsatisfied with his walk of God.

And in that satisfaction, he turned to his own heart. And the needs of his own heart began to shape his theology. Because he says, God, I worship you. I sing the songs of Zion. I'm a leader in the body of Christ.

And what he's doing is all his unsatisfaction and unmet needs, he's covering it over. He's covering it, he's bringing it into the house. And he's saying, I love you God, but he's totally unsatisfied. And God is trying to get to the root of every person in the house of God like that.

Because beloved, in our natural, we're all like that. There is something that God needs to get a hold of and speak to us in our unsatisfaction, in our unmet needs. You see this man here, beloved, I don't know his full story, but I could see how the enemy, you know, he felt he made a wrong choice.

And now what is happening in his heart is that he, in his own flesh, there is a flesh battle going on and he regrets the day he married her now. And from it has grown a contempt for woman. And you see it in his writings.

And you see now when he began to interpret the book of Ruth, he said that the primary purpose of women in the church is to be seductive. And he backs it up by the book of Ruth. And I'll tell you, his theology has taken such an evil turn because he has unmet needs.

And yet we have a God in heaven that says, I will meet every need. But God will take us where our turmoil is in our mind or where we are unsatisfied. And he will begin to lean on that. And he's going to say, look into your heart.

No running away. Why are you unsatisfied? Beloved, that is the love of God doing that. And if that man would open up and say, God, go and speak whatever you have to speak. You see, every time there was an argument, every time there was something, he told us in the book that he didn't leave his wife or he hasn't left circumstances because he says, my good heart keeps me on track.

You know, because he could make an honest attempt at his marriage. He could say, okay, I'm going to be loving with her. I'm going to try, when she goes through those bouts of depression, when she acts like I don't want her to act, I'm going to try to be loving.

I'm going to try to be understanding. I'm going to reach out to her. And a natural man can, one, two, three times. But I'll tell you something, if it's not from the Spirit of God, we start keeping count.

We start keeping a record. We start becoming blinded to all that I'm doing and all that she's not doing. But, beloved, we drag it into the house and we say that, God, you are in my mouth, but you are far from ruling my life.

Failure Does Not Cancel God’s Plan

And, beloved, this is what's happening in Plan B life. Come to church, and we will sing the songs and we will go through the motions, but deep down, we are so... There is an area of deep discontent. There is an area of pain.

There is an area of questions. And the enemy now, the enemy will come in, and he will take that situation and that area, and he will begin to say, you've crossed a line with God. You've made such a wrong choice back there, that really, you are now living on the lower level of God's plan for your life, and it can't be turned about.

Even in the time of Jeremiah, is that God kept sending a word, my people, turn to me, return to me. You think that this relationship, that you understand me, but I've got something to say to you. You need a right understanding of my heart towards you.

Beloved, we have to understand one thing. Failure never puts us on the B plan. Failure never... God knows this is flesh. Flesh and failure begin with the same letter. It's like God needed to reinforce something.

Whenever we trust flesh, there is going to be fear and failure operating. He said, I knew that from the beginning. That's why I sent my son. It's because when we trust him, he gives us a new spirit, and that spirit man in us, who is Jesus Christ, begins to confront everything that is flesh and failure in us.

He says, turn to me. You can't do it. I alone can. And that becomes the hope. But so many times, we let the flesh, and that has the enemy as a direct voice to come and begin to shape our theology. Between our experience and the popular word out there, we begin to...

We don't understand how deeply embedded we have of ideas of God. And beloved, failure never puts us on the plan B road. Making a wrong choice does not put us on the plan B plan. What does, is when God can no longer speak to us.

Because if we can't hear him, we can't obey him. If he can't lead us, if he doesn't have the range to our life, how can we be on plan A? We say God's best and highest. We're being led to... Beloved, the only thing that takes us from plan is if we can't hear him anymore in the areas where we need to hear him.

Because our torment, or our anguish, or our pain, or our confusion, or what's at the deepest part of our heart, we feel for whatever reason, we can't bring to the light, or we won't deal with it. You know, maybe this man has thought, I have dealt with it.

I have given her to God. Beloved, the issue is not giving her to God. The issue is God, tear open this heart. Go to the depths of it. Whatever it is you need to speak to me. Whatever it is, I am open to it, because we are immediately in the will of God.

If God can speak to us, we're in plan A. He creates the life in us. His word creates the desire in us. His word puts us in another direction. It is his voice that is life to us. And when he speaks to us, his word creates faith, and we have a desire to start to say, Oh God, give me the power to obey you on this now.

But we can't obey him, but we don't hear him. Plan B is when we can't hear him anymore. When Jeremiah, God is saying to Jeremiah, you have, tell these people, you have broken covenant with me. Tell them they have broken covenant with me.

And beloved, we break covenant. God says, you break covenant with me when I can't talk to you anymore on that area. And Jeremiah 7 .30 says, they have set their abominations in the house that is called by my name to pollute it.

And it's saying that we come to the house of God and we set all that's in our mind, a racing mind, a mind full of torment, a mind full of pain, a mind whatever, and we cannot say, God, at this moment, I'm going to exalt you.

And in exalting you, I exalt the truth that God, you are higher, you are greater, you see, you know, you alone have the plan, you alone are the way out. God, at this moment, when I come into your house, I am going to, I purpose in my heart to worship you at this moment.

Beloved, that is how we break, begin to break the strongholds. When we come in with a mind full of anguish and torment and our heart and our spirit say, I can do anything but praise, we say, God, give me the grace now to exalt you at this moment.

Because the Plan B people came and set their abominations, all that their mind was full of, all their mind was racing, all their anxiety, to the point, beloved, that God couldn't speak to them. Whether he was full of entreaty and full of love with a return to me message or a message of judgment, they couldn't hear.

And beloved, I believe that God is saying, I want an altar. And I want you to put on that altar all that is your torment, whether you know the source of it or not, all that is your anguish, all that is that racing, all that would want to take you from hearing me.

That we say, God, when we gather in your name, it is the most precious time. Because I'm going to hear from you. I say, I'm going to hear from you. And when I hear from you, the strongholds come down.