March 12

 

THE SOURCE OF PLAN B

 

James 1:7, 8

Let not [the doubting] man expect that he will receive anything from the Lord, being a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.

 

When you continue to vacillate between God's Plan A and your Plan B, your spiritual growth will be stunted, your maturity in Christ will be blocked, and your daily experience as a Christian will be marked by disillusionment, discouragement and defeat. Where do Plan B thoughts come from? There are two primary sources.

 

First, your flesh still generates humanistic thoughts and ideas. Your flesh is that part of you which was trained to live independently of God before you became a Christian. At that time there was no Plan A in your life; you were separated from God, ignorant of His ways, and determined to succeed and survive by your own abilities.

 

When you were born again, God gave you a new nature and you became a new person, but nobody pressed the CLEAR button in your brain. You brought with you into your new faith all the old Plan B habits and thought patterns of the flesh. So while your new self desires to live dependently on God and follow Plan A, your flesh persists in suggesting Plan B ways to live independently of God.

 

Second, there is a person active in the world today who has opposed Plan A in God's human creation since the Garden of Eden. Satan and his demons are relentless in their attempts to establish negative, worldly patterns of thought in your mind which will in turn produce negative, worldly patterns of behavior.

 

The essence of the battle for the mind is the conflict between Plan A, living God's way by faith, and Plan B, living man's way by following the impulses of the world, the flesh and the devil. You may feel like you are the helpless victim in this battle, being slapped back and forth like a puck in a match between rival hockey teams. But you are anything but helpless. In fact, you are the one who determines the winner in every skirmish between Plan A and Plan B.

 

Prayer: Thank You, Lord, that I can live above the world, the flesh and the devil as long as I choose Your plan for my life.