Have We Replaced Prayer with Planning?
About one third of the Bible deals with dreams, visions, and prophecies. Some people feel uncomfortable with the idea that God reveals his plans this way, but the Bible shows that he’s done this throughout history… and there’s no clear statement from God saying he’s stopped.
God often calls us to significant endeavors with a personal dream or vision of what could be, should be, or will be. This might be a vision for providing beds to children sleeping on floors, feeding the homeless, opening a school, planting a church, honoring God through business, sharing the Gospel in your neighborhood, starting a Bible study, launching a prison ministry, reconciling a relationship, ending a war, or fighting human trafficking.
Of course, not every dream, vision, or prophecy comes from the Lord. It’s easy to mistake personal desire for God’s calling. That’s why the first response should always be to filter the ideas we receive through Scripture, prayer, and wise (spiritually mature) counsel. God never contradicts himself. So, one should pause if these three litmus tests contradict or fail to align with one’s dream or vision.
Once one is confident that it is indeed God calling you to engage his will in a specific direction, there are four potential first steps:
Pray
Plan
Act
Ignore
Pray
Prayer invites God’s guidance, power, and ability directly into our calling. In Scripture, God rarely asks people to do things they can accomplish on their own. Instead, He usually calls us toward goals that we can only achieve with him and his involvement. What’s humanly impossible becomes possible only through God. That’s why prayer—not planning—must be our first step in turning a God-given vision into reality.
Plan
Planning means figuring out what we can realistically do with our abilities and resources to pursue our calling. It may be a vital part of our calling. But when we plan before we pray—or plan instead of praying—we unintentionally shrink God’s calling down to only what we can accomplish on our own.
Throughout Scripture, we see examples of people who missed or delayed God’s best because they relied on planning rather than first seeking Him in prayer. Planning or preparation is most often essential for pursuing God-given callings—but only when it flows from and remains connected to prayer.
I’ve seen too many God-sized dreams shrunk down to ordinary ideas because well-meaning people skipped prayer and jumped straight to planning. When we do this, we limit our expectations to what we can accomplish ourselves. We forget that God never gives a vision without also providing the means to make it happen.
Act or Ignore
When it comes to answering God’s call, acting or ignoring are often the first steps of those consumed with pride and fear.
Pride and fear are the two greatest obstacles we’ll ever have to pursuing any God-given calling. Why? Because pride and fear are indicators of our placement of trust.
Pride indicates that one is trusting oneself. Prideful people tend to act without prayer or planning. They determine an objective and trust themselves to reach it. They may miss what could be achieved through collaborations and the contributions of others. Though more importantly, they always miss what could happen with God’s guidance, power, and influence.
The prideful person may pat oneself on the back for an achievement far short of what God intended or blame others or circumstances when one’s efforts obviously fall short.
Fear indicates that one is trusting the power, influence, or control of whatever or whoever one fears. Fearful people may simply think, “I could never do that,” or “I don’t have the time,” and simply ignore the calling.
More often, fearful people bog down in the question, “What if…” overthinking all the potential ways they could fail. We refer to this as “paralysis by analysis.”
If pride and fear are misplacements of trust, the antidote for pride and fear is the correct placement of trust – faith. Biblical faith is a dependent trust in God.
Therefore, if one who has a dependent trust in God discerns that God is calling him to anything specific, he starts with prayer, prays through the planning and preparation, prays throughout the pursuit, and ends the endeavor with prayer.
Have you replaced prayer with planning?
What might happen if you consistently invoked God’s guidance, power, and capacity in the most important callings on your life?
“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”
Philippians 4:13
Thanks for Reading,
John
I love this powerful message. I often get ahead of myself with planning and it is a great reminder to always pray about it first. I occasionally order something that has to be assembled. I usually think how hard can it be, so I begin trying to assemble the item without reading the directions. As you can imagine, I always end up needing the directions. We need to pray about everything and always ask for God's guidance - WE NEED HIS DIRECTIONS in every aspect of our life.