God's Plans Are Better Than Ours
A Christmas Eve sermon.
Merry Christmas! Below is a slightly edited version of the Christmas Eve sermon I preached this morning from 2 Samuel 7:1-6, "God's Plans Are Better Than Ours." Thanks to each of you for reading this little, intermittent newsletter. I hope you get some time of rest and rejoicing before the year is out.
Our passage, if I'm not mistaken, has some humor running through it. Here we see David, the newly anointed king of Israel. He’s recently made Jerusalem his capital, the nation’s enemies have been defeated, the ark has been brought into the city, and David is comfortably settled in his palace. And then, as though a cartoon light bulb appeared above his head, David gets an idea: I should build a house for God! What’s funny to me is God’s response which, in my paraphrase, was something like: David, do you think the Creator and Sustainer of the universe needs some human-built, rinky-dink house? I promise, I’m good.
In these verses, God instructed David to forget building God’s house because God was building David’s house.
Silly as David’s plans for a God-house were, we can relate. The instinct to do something grand, to make impressive plans, to write the script for our future is a standard human intuition. For example, this is yearly planning season for me. I love sitting in front of my calendar spreadsheet, plugging in my plans and projects and programs. It feels good to imagine all that could be accomplished if it all works out. Not that it ever has, but maybe 2024 is the year when everything comes together. Probably not.
On this last Sunday in Advent, as we prepare our hearts to celebrate the incarnation of God’s Son tomorrow, I want to reflect for a few minutes on this one claim: God’s plans are better than ours.
Borrowing from God’s response to the eager if naïve king, I’ll suggest two ways that God’s plans are better than ours: they are complete and they are certain. God’s plans are better, because unlike ours, they are complete – they leave nothing out – and they are certain – they will happen.
God plans are better than ours because they are complete.
In March 2020, many of us realized that our plans weren’t complete- we hadn’t accounted for a global pandemic. Of course, we can only prepare for what we imagine which means that our plans will always be incomplete.
David seems to imagine God as a bigger and better version of himself. God must need or want a house. After all, David is enjoying his new home, wouldn't God? David’s lack of imagination mean that his plans overlooked a lot.
To David’s incomplete plans, God responds with some “I haves” and “I wills”: I have brought you from the pasture to a palace. I have been with you. I have cut off your enemies. I will make you a great name. I will appoint a place for my people. I will plant them in their own place. I will give you rest from enemies
While David planned a house, God was planning salvation. David’s plans were limited; God’s plans were complete and comprehensive. God’s plans left nothing out, including the salvation of his people.
We plan calendars; God plans galaxies. We plan timelines; God plans lifetimes. We plan appointments; God plans seasons. We plan long-term strategies; God plans from alpha to omega. We plan tasks and to-do lists, God plans the overthrow of sin, death, and the devil.
Do you ever feel like you’re forgetting something? You don’t know what you’re forgetting, but you know it’s important. God has never known that feeling because God never forgets, overlooks, or gets distracted. God’s plans are never too small, too narrow, or too self-interested. God’s plans are purposeful and powerful, they are whole and holy. The plans of God are complete because with God there is no such thing as an impossible plan, a maybe plan, or an if-we-get-lucky plan. No, God’s word is always an accomplishing word which means there is nothing in your life that is exempt from the effective plans of your God.
Is there anything in your life you have believed to be outside of God’s good plans? Is there anything in our groaning world that you assume has escaped the redemptive plans of God? If so, listen to how Mary responded when reminded of the immensity of God’s agenda. Believe this young, vulnerable woman who sings from a forgotten and occupied backwater of the Roman Empire as she proclaims, He has looked with favor on the lowly state of his servant. The Mighty One has done great things for me. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones. He has filled the hungry with good things. He has come to the aid of his child Israel… according to the promise he made to our ancestors.
Before January 1, review your plans and confess: God, your plans are better than mine because they are more complete than mine. I surrender my plans to yours. Help me to align my good-enough plans with your much, much better plans.
God plans are better than ours because they are certain.
This week my neighbor and I went to the bank to get him put on our condominium account. There weren’t any bankers available but the teller said we could make an appointment for that afternoon if we were willing to come back. Considering this, my neighbor said, “Let’s go ahead and make the appointment so that we have the option even if we can’t come back.”
If we’re honest, all of the plans we make are kind of like that. We know there’s a good chance something will keep us from finishing what we started. Sometimes, in fact, we kind of hope the plans we made earlier will fall through.
Friends, God is not like us. Each of his plans are certain.
In addition to everything else God says to David in our passage, he promises the king that his household would be established forever. David must have imagined God’s plans as a particular kind of kingly lineage. And from this perspective, God’s plans fell through. David’s line seemed to end in occupation and exile. Did God fail to keep promises?
Do you know what that’s like? The thing we were so certain about crumbles. God, we cry, this wasn’t how this was supposed to go! This wasn’t how this career, this marriage, this ministry was supposed to go!
We are especially aware of these heartbreaks this time of year. One of the Christmas cards our family received this month contained a letter. In it the family recounted a year full of one painful surprise after another: death, sickness, loss. Reading that letter, I could feel the grief they are living through. In this life, we live in the gap between God’s promises and the final fulfillment of those promises. This just is the life of faith. We step into God’s trustworthiness even when we cannot see it.
From one vantage point it may have appeared that God’s promises to David fell through. In reality, though, God’s promises were simply too good for David or his immediate descendants to grasp. The angel explains to Mary,
31 And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. 33 He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” (Luke 1:31-33)
David’s imagination was too small. So are ours. When compared with God’s plans, ours are tiny and timid. Mary realized that whatever her wildest hopes for her life had been, they had been far too small. Can we admit the same? On the eve of God’s manger-birth, can we joyfully confess that God’s dreams are better than ours? Can we trade the pressures of our own half-baked plans for the certain and beautiful future God has guaranteed through the life, death, and resurrection of the child we welcome tomorrow?
The birth of Jesus means many things to us: hope in despair, comfort in affliction, love in isolation. But before anything else, Jesus’ birth is God’s faithfulness, God’s yes and amen to every single one of his promises.
Yes, when Jesus was born that Bethlehem night, hope pressed through despair, comfort overcame affliction, and love broke into our isolation. But what we cannot miss is that the birth of David’s descendant, the incarnation of the pre-existent Son of God, was God’s complete and certain plan for our salvation. Redemption was born into the world.
A couple of weeks ago I was walking the three blocks from our apartment to our youngest son’s elementary school to pick him up. By 3:30, as I left our building, dusk had already settled on the neighborhood. Typically, as I walk, my eyes are drawn to the street-level activity taking place in the creeping shadows: dodging cars in cross walks, dog walkers on the way to the park, other parents on the way to school pick-up. But for whatever reason, on this afternoon my eyes wandered up, beyond the shadows, into the bare treetops which line the streets. And when I did – and this is the truth – I stopped and muttered, “whoa.”
Just above my head, poking through the shadows, silhouetted against a blue December sky, was this beautiful tangle of branches and limbs illuminated by the golden light of the setting sun. I slowly turned around and noticed that, in every direction, there were others of these glowing groves, dark from the waist down but positively radiant through their upper reaches. I noticed too that I seemed to be the only person captivated by this late afternoon display of glory; everyone else, as I had been moments earlier, walked to their destination, heads down and eyes forward enveloped by shadows.
How often, I wonder, do you and I walk through life fixated on our own agendas and priorities, unaware that glory is just above our heads? How often does the disarray of our own plans distract us from the complete and certain promises that God is speaking into existence all around us?
God’s plans are better than ours, more complete in their scope and more certain in their finality. Today, let us have eyes like those Bethlehem shepherds, eyes which peer past the darkness to behold that glory being announced among us: I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. (Luke 2:10-11)
The View From Here
