God Has A Wonderful Plan For Your Life
Cain. Balaam. Korah. Judas. What do these four biblical characters have in common? They are the worst villains in the Bible. Cain out of envy murdered his brother. Balaam in greed seduced Israel into self-destructive sin. Korah rebelled to overthrow Moses. Judas driven by resentment betrayed Jesus.
How did they end up this way? Instead of respecting God, they became God’s critic. They believed that their ideas were better than His. Hence, they became ungodly.
Calling them ungodly does not mean that they were irreligious. They were very religious. Cain offered sacrifices to God; Balaam was a spokesperson for God; Korah aspired to be God’s high priest; and Judas was one of the Twelve Apostles who had preached repentance, cast out demons, and healed the sick (Mark 6:7–13).
But for them, God was a means to an end (1 Timothy 6:5–6). Religion was a program to be worked, not a relationship to be developed. Unlike the Apostle Paul whose driving passion was for an ever-deepening relationship with Christ, regardless the cost (Philippians 3:10), their drive was to grasp power that would enable them to fulfill their own definition of greatness, not God’s.
Wanting to be great, glorious and noble is not a bad thing. God has placed within every one of us the ambition for significance. But we get in trouble when our ambition turns into selfish ambition (Philippians 2:3; James 4:14, 16). It’s not the passion that is wrong; it’s the path we choose. We rely upon our own definition of what makes for greatness, instead of God’s.
Jesus defined greatness as coming through channels that are counter-intuitive to our human nature; being least instead of most, being last instead of first, and being slaves rather than masters (Luke 9:48; Matthew 20:16, 26). In His Kingdom, significance is found when we “deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow Him” (Matthew 16:24) without regard to where that might lead.
In contrast, Cain, Korah, Balaam and Judas were unwilling to accept what God had planned for their lives. They were determined to follow their own plan, which invariably led them further and further away from God and the greatness they so desperately desired. Rather than becoming great, they became small, petty, and ultimately pathetic.
What they never understood was that God had a wonderful plan for their lives; He created them for greatness (John 14:12), for glory (Romans 8:17), and for nobility and dignity (Ephesians 2:6). But they simply didn’t trust God.
Why not? Because His plan rarely looks like anything we would design. It usually involves unwelcome loss, pain, disappointment and failure. Yet within those bad things, there is a strange kind of pleasure. His presence transforms our humiliation into honor, our shame into glory, and our insignificance into greatness. But it is only found when we “humble ourselves before the Lord” and allow Him to “lift us up” (James 4:10), rather than trying to do it ourselves.
Pastor Ken Ortize
December 23, 2014