God's Questions make us think about His Plan
March 19-23, 2024 | Always Peachy Devotionals | God's Questions Week 3
Have you ever visited a friend who lives in a different city?
Maybe a city like London. Let’s just say that as an example. You’ve always wanted to go to London, but you’re only going to have a day to spend there while you’re waiting on a connecting flight.
It’s an easy ask to meet a friend at a café or coffeeshop outside Heathrow airport. From your research, you know you can get from Heathrow to Victoria Station or Euston Station pretty easily, and there are lots of places to eat and catch up there.
But as you’re planning, you see a whole bunch of things you can do and see in the area around Victoria Station. Westminster Cathedral. Big Ben. Parliament. Buckingham Palace! And the famous Borough Market, the oldest open air market in Europe, is only three miles away!
You have all day. Surely you can meet your friend for coffee and then pop into all of those sites in a few hours. They’re all very close to each other.
So you make your plans to hit all the attractions in London that you think are going to be easy to reach. And when you tell your friend what you’d like to do, there is silence on the other end.
Until your friend asks you a simple question: “How much time do you have here?”
Why?
Because your friend lives in London. Your friend knows that even though it is three miles from Victoria Station to the Borough Market, it will take you more than 20 minute to drive there. It’ll take about the same time on public transportation.
And even though all those sites are in the same area, they take hours to reach. There’s no way to do everything you’ve planned to do and still get all the way back to the airport in the time you’ve allotted.
It’s not your fault. You wouldn’t know, especially if you’re American and think you can navigate a city like London the same way you get around at home.
So instead, your friend makes a suggestion of what you can do in the time that you have. It’s up to you to do what your friend suggests, but you’d be pretty silly to pursue your own plans in spite of what you now know.
You can make as many plans as you want, but if you’re operating from a false set of expectations about your environment, your availability, or your capacity, you’re going to be disappointed. The truth is, you can’t get from Heathrow to the Borough Market and back again in any sort of effective time, but you wouldn’t know that unless you lived in London. The truth is, you don’t know how many years you’re going to live on earth. You don’t know how long you will be healthy enough to be active. You don’t know if you will get to live in the same place for any meaningful amount of time.
So, yes, make your plans, but be sure that you submit them to God before you start working on them. Because you don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.
God’s plans are always better than ours. Always. Because He knows the future, and He knows you. He knows me. He knows our limits. He knows our capacity. He knows how far we will try to get through life on our own before we ask Him for help.
He knows, but He isn’t going to make our choices for us. The difficulty is that sometimes He needs to shake us up a little bit for us to even realize we’re arguing with Him.
That’s why He asks questions, my friends. This week we’re going to look at the questions He asked that ultimately point back to the beauty and perfection of His plans.
Mar 19 - Elijah: “What are you doing here?” (1 Kings 19:8-9)
Mar 20 - Hagar: “Where have you come from and where are you going?” (Genesis 16:7-8)
Mar 21 - Joshua: “What are you doing down on your face?” (Joshua 7:10-11)
Mar 22 - Mary Magdalene: “Why are you crying?” (John 20:14-15)
Mar 23 - The Religious Expert: “What is written in the law?” (Luke 10:25)
Remember, if you’d like to see all the verses from this month’s study, you can download them in this handy-dandy PDF!
Something I love about this week, which I actually just noticed, is that in each one of these scenarios, God is speaking to an individual. Because God has an individual plan for each of us. But here’s a kicker: Can you tell who Jesus had a relationship with and who He didn’t?
Only four of them have names that we know. And the one who we don’t know is the expert in religious law. Isn’t that interesting?
God has been making plans since before He set the Earth in space. He’s a planner, Our God. And because He is good, all of His plans are good. But sometimes His plans are so big and so scary and so much more than we can handle, He can’t tell us what they are. They’ll blow our puny little human minds.
So this week, our memory verse is an important reminder about God and His plans, 1 Corinthians 2:7.
God used to be a mystery, and in many ways He still is. We won’t truly be able to understand Him until we are in eternity, and even then I’m not sure we’re “understand” Him. He’s God. And even when we are “like” Him, I think He’ll still be so much bigger than we are.
But He has revealed the parts of His plan that we need to know, the pieces of His great, glorious redemption story. Jesus. He died to save us. He lives forever. And because He lives, so will we.
Love you guys.
Amy
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