Plans

 

“Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”

—Philippians 1:6

The teacher lives by his or her plan book. If the teacher has done a good job, inside each plan book you can find day-to-day lessons. Each individual lesson will have an individual goal. Monthly or unit lessons that relate to the individual lessons will have a larger, more encompassing goal. Year-long plans for a specific grade level, or subject, will reflect the goals of the curriculum for the particular subject area.

Some teachers, once they have achieved mastery of all of these levels, begin planning “longitudinally.” This is the practice that I followed. I had music students from Kindergarten through Grade Four, so I looked at my students with the strategy of a five-year plan. How rewarding to see the skills these children acquired over those years and to know that I, in large part, had taught them and watched them grow in their proficiency.

We use a theological term for this kind of progress in our spiritual lives: sanctification. It’s important to note that sanctification follows God’s longitudinal design for us. And, rather than planning for a whole group of students—or disciples—God specifically designs a customized plan for each of us. He measures our individual progress against His long-term goals, which He has formulated for each of us since before the foundation of the world.

Joni Eareckson Tada, who became a quadriplegic as a teenager—on the day the doctors moved her in the hospital from “acute care” to “chronic care”—learned the very hard lesson of looking into God’s plan book. She knew then that this “lesson” of growth would become a long-range process. Here’s how she put it:¹

The core of God’s plan is to rescue us from sin and self-centerdness. Suffering—especially the chronic kind—is God’s choicest tool to accomplish this. It is a long process. But, it means I can accept my paralysis as a chronic condition. When I broke my neck, it wasn’t a jigsaw puzzle I had to solve fast, or a quick jolt to get me back on track. My paralyzing accident was the beginning of a lengthy process of becoming like Christ.

As we consider God’s work in our lives, we should ask ourselves what God uses to teach us short lessons, longer chapters, or life-lessons, and how He masterminds all of it for His long-range good purposes in our lives. And, we should remember that lessons always go best when we cooperate!

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1 Tada, Joni Eareckson. Pearls of Great Price. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing Company, 2006. Devotional for February 17th.