Julius: First reading which will also serve as the sermon text this morning from Proverbs chapter sixteen. A person may have thought things through in his heart, but an apt answer from his tongue comes from the Lord. All of a person's ways are pure in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs motives. Commit what you do to the Lord, and your plans will be established. The Lord has made everything for his own purpose, even a wicked person for a day of trouble. Anyone with an arrogant attitude is disgusting to the Lord. Be sure of this, that person will not go unpunished. Through mercy and truth. Truth, guilt is atoned for, and through the fear of the Lord one turns away from evil. When the Lord is pleased with a man's ways, he causes even his enemies to live at peace with him. Better a little with righteousness than a large income without justice. A person's heart plans his way, but the Lord makes his steps secure. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Grace, mercy, and peace are yours from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. We pray. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. See if my little clicker will work here. It's not. I'll have to ask you up there to click for me if you're able to do that. Thank you. All right. I'll tell you when. John had rehearsed his speech ending their relationship. He was twenty two, she was eighteen, and so he was gonna say things like, It's not you, it's me. He was gonna say things like, We really need to see the world, in other words, see other people. And so he drove to her house and he was ready to go. And when she opened the door and he opened his mouth, the words that came out of his mouth were Do you want to get married? And he was just as surprised as she was. And she said yes. And now John tells this story after 54 years of happy marriage. He thought things through in his heart, but a different answer seemed to come from the Lord. Has this ever happened to you? You're thinking things through, but when your thoughts and plans meet reality, you think, wait, that didn't come out the way that I wanted it to. It points us to a way that the Lord wants us to plan our lives. If we can think things through, but it doesn't always work out that way, then what that does is it keeps us humble. And that's how Proverbs tells us to plan our lives. He says to plan our lives with humility. We'll look first at the first three verses. We can get those up there. There we go. A person may have thought things through in his heart, but an apt answer from his tongue comes from the Lord. All of a person's ways are pure in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs motives. Commit what you do to the Lord, and your plans will be established. Now the first verse there isn't saying that you can plan things, and when you go to talk, the Lord is going to take over your brain and make you say something you didn't want to say. But what it's Telling you is that you should be humble because when your plans and your thoughts meet the real world, they don't always work out the way you thought they would. How could they? You're only human. You can think through as much as you want, but when your plans, when your words meet not only reality, but the God for whom and to whom and through whom all things are, plans can change. Plans can change. And so that's why when Proverbs tells you how to plan, and it does give you a lot of practical advice, most of all it focuses at the heart. It focuses at the motivation of your plans. And we see that here in the second verse. All of a person's ways are pure in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs motives. Motives. It's the motives that matter. And it's the motives that we are very poor at judging. So why does the Lord need to weigh motives? Because we're very poor judges of our own motivations. The Bible says the human heart is very deceitful. We can talk ourselves into anything. John, in that proposal story, he actually had thought through that this is a really good thing. It's good for her. But years later he admitted the only reason he was breaking up with her is because he thought, I'm twenty two years old, I should play the field a little more. I need a little more excitement. And that's a bad motive. We need the Lord to judge our motives because we're not great at judging our own. So, how does the Lord do that? Well, He does it through His Word. He doesn't make you guess. The Lord weighs your motives shorthand through the Ten Commandments. So if you ever have a plan, you think you're gonna do something, how about weighing it through the Ten Commandments first? Does it show that kind of love for God and love for neighbor? Or run your plans through the Lord's Prayer to see whether you're really focusing on spiritual things and God's things. Or whether you're focusing just on selfish things and physical things. Is this a plan that's all about God's name and God's kingdom and God's will and forgiveness and avoiding temptation and being delivered from evil? And to him be the glory and the power. Think about that. And another way to weigh your plans is a way that a professor gave me in college, I still use today. I really like this one. It's based on Colossians 3:17. It says, And everything you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus. Giving thanks to God the Father through him. Now, his shorthand way of seeing if one of his plans lined up with God's plans was seeing if he could say, Thank you, Jesus, before or while doing something. Thank you, Lord, for this. And you could do this for short term decisions or long term decisions. You think about it. So you got your phone out. Can you say, Thank you, Jesus? I'm about to watch this mind and soul melting reel. Mmm, maybe not. Or thank you, Jesus. I'm gonna turn into a blob for three hours as I mindlessly scroll or watch this show. in the name of the Lord Jesus, I'm not sure. And you think about long-term plans too. Think, thank you, Jesus. The Lord has brought this person into my life. He's obviously a bad influence and is gonna lead me away from the Lord, but I like the sense of danger. I should date him. Mmm. I'm not sure you could say thank you, Jesus, to something like that. And so you think about this when it comes to college choices and job choices and spouse choices, all of these things. Can you say, I'm doing this in the name of the Lord Jesus, and I can say, Thank you, Lord, for this opportunity. The Lord weighs motives. And when we're doing this, we're doing nothing else than what Proverbs says here in chapter sixteen, verse three. Commit what you do to the Lord, and your plans will be established. Commit what you do to the Lord. Now you could see this as a command. You better hand in your lesson plan to the Lord and He's gonna check over it. But you can also see this as a promise. It's kind of like God's word when He says, Cast all your anxieties on Him because He cares for you. That's more a promise than a command. And here what the Lord is saying is when you do your best, when you follow His guidance, follow His commands, and make a decision, that's your responsibility. God's happy to give it to you. When you do all of those things and say thank you in the name of the Lord Jesus, then yes. Humbly hand it over to the Lord, acknowledging that you are very small, and God is very big, and that you can think through everything really, really well, and it still might turn out differently, and that's okay, because he's God and you're not. When you plan your life, plan it with humility. And then also with something very similar, don't just plan it with humility, but plan it with Trust. We see that in the next three verses. The Lord has made everything for his own purpose, even a wicked person for a day of trouble. Any one with an arrogant attitude is disgusting to the Lord. Be sure of this, that person will not go unpunished. Through mercy and truth guilt is atoned for, and through the fear of the Lord one turns away from evil. Just looking at that first verse there, the Lord has made everything for his own purpose, even a wicked person for the day of trouble. You know, sometimes it happens when you make plans that they don't turn out better than you expect, they actually turn out worse than you expect. And that's actually a normal thing because we live in a difficult, sinful world. And why do plans sometimes not work out? Well, because there's other people in the world. And they have plans too. And sometimes they are evil people. But here the comfort from the Lord is that you can trust. Him. Even when other people's plans run into your plans, wicked plans run into your plans, and it seems to turn things for evil, the Lord is still in control. He says, Trust me, I can use this. Think of Pharaoh in the Old Testament. God's plan was to take the Israelites out of Egypt into the promised land. Who was standing in their way? Pharaoh. A very evil person. A wicked person. And he said, No, I will not let you go. Did the Lord throw up his hands and say, man. Now I can't carry out my plan. No, the Lord said, Hey, Pharaoh, careful, I can use this. And he let Pharaoh get more and more stubborn, and he made Pharaoh more and more stubborn, so that when the Lord finally carried out his plans, it would be even more glorious, and show just how good God is. God can use any wicked person and any wickedness and fold it into his good and gracious plans. This is nothing else than the comfort of Romans chapter 8, verse 28, a passage that many of us know well. For we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. Yes, even in evil, even when bad things seem to be standing in your way, the Lord is working. But notice for whose purpose? It says for his purpose. For his purpose. And this is where we run into trouble, and we find that sometimes we're the evil, arrogant persons standing in God's way. You see that in the next verse here. See if we can get that highlighted. There we go. Anyone with an arrogant attitude is disgusting to the Lord, be sure of this, that person will not go unpunished. Sure, we can think of people like Pharaoh when it comes to an arrogant attitude, but a lot of the time the Bible talks to people like us when it warns us about this. Jesus' brother James in his letter says that when we go through life thinking, I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna do that, without consciously thinking, if it's the Lord's will. That's arrogance. We don't have control over much. How can we say I'm gonna do this without first trusting in the Lord? And so the Lord turns to us and he says, Sometimes you're the one standing in the way of my good plans. Think about it with the Israelites. So God's good plan for the Israelites was not just to take them out of Egypt, but also to lead them to grow in trust in the desert. And so he took them on a detour. After escaping Egypt, he trapped them by the Red Sea. And they said, Lord, what are you doing? And they started to grumble. And they said, We're never gonna trust the Lord again. Look what he did to us. what arrogance. And they followed God's commands, and it didn't turn out just the way they wanted. They started grumbling at him. And this can happen to us. We can try to follow the Lord's commands. You say, Okay, God, you told me I'm gonna be as good a Christian spouse as I can. And then your spouse isn't reciprocating, isn't being Christian back to you, and you say, See, Lord, I followed your plans, but my life isn't being blessed the way I want it. Well, that's arrogance, isn't it? When we treat God's word like levers that we pull, I'll do this so that you do something for me, so that you make my plans go well. Proverbs here tells us that when we act like that. We're really only pulling one lever. It's like a trapdoor beneath us into punishment. And so when the Lord has to work through evil when it comes to plans, he's not just working through wicked people out there, he has to work through our evil. But he's able to do that. That's really what Proverbs is pointing us to. It's not just a book of good advice about how to plan your life. It points us to how Jesus is able to overcome our evil and do all the things that we couldn't do perfectly. And that's what it talks about. In the next verse, it says, Through mercy and truth, guilt is atoned for, and through the fear of the Lord, one turns away from evil. Through mercy and truth, guilt is atoned for. You know, the Israelites often in the Old Testament they would take God's laws and the all those sacrificial laws, and they'd say, Okay, I'm doing all of these things for God to bless me. And the Lord would say, That's missing the point. I don't just want the sacrifice, I want mercy, I want truth, I want your heart to And that's what the Lord wants from us. What does He want from you when you make all of your plans? Your heart, your trust, mercy and truth. And that atones for guilt. That takes away the evil in our lives, and only Jesus is able to do this perfectly for us. Through mercy and truth, your guilt is atoned for. That points us to our Savior. Through the fear of the Lord, our lives are turned away from evil. It's like another verse in Proverbs that kind of gets to the Heart of it all, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. You know, Proverbs isn't going to tell you exactly what decisions to make in every situation. The Lord has given you so many gifts and given you the ability to make those decisions, but it does tell you the starting point that makes everything else make sense. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. That's where it starts. Trust in God, whose mercy and truth is actually able to work through me and work through my plans and work despite my evil because of his grace and work good things. That's what Jesus does. We'll look back at that. Verse six: through mercy and truth. Guilt is atoned for, and through the fear of the Lord, one turns away from evil. Think about how Jesus did this in his life. Nobody planned on Jesus, he showed up. He broke into everybody's plans. But what did he do when he broke into people's plans? He always brought mercy and he always brought truth. John chapter 1 tells us Jesus is full of grace and truth. And he changed everybody's plans for the better through his grace. He did that, even though it meant that following God's will, following God's plans, would mean that he would have to die on the cross. When it says the arrogant one won't go unpunished, Jesus said, actually, I'll be punished for them, for their arrogance, for their sin. Punish me instead, so that they won't be punished, so that instead you'll work through their lives and always work for good. That's what Jesus did for us. He's very good at it. You think of Caiaphas, one of the guys who planned to get Jesus killed. He said, It's better that one man die for the people. And God said, Ooh, I can work with that. And Jesus died on behalf of all of the people so that our guilt could be atoned for and that our lives could be turned away from evil. This is why the Lord says, Trust me. Trust me. I'm the one who works through your life. Yes, even through your imperfect motivations, I make it good, I make it pleasing to the Lord through trust in Jesus. And when you trust in Jesus, really, the plans always do work out better than you could imagine. Have you heard of Spencer Silver? He was a scientist for 3M. And his plan was to come up with an adhesive that was strong enough to work in space. That was his plan. You know what he came up with? An adhesive that was so weak it didn't work for anything. The exact opposite. He said, Who's gonna use this? But for years he said, okay, I'm gonna try to get somebody to use this thing, and nobody would listen to him until finally a coworker. A coworker randomly got tired of all his bookmarks falling out of his book, and so he took some of Spencer's adhesive and he put it on his bookmark and he stuck it in his book and it worked. And then he peeled it off and it didn't rip the pages. And he said, Hey, this is pretty handy. Well, pretty soon other people around the office started seeing that, and they started using that adhesive and putting it on little sticky pieces of paper and putting it in their books, and it was helpful. And six years after Spencer Silver set out with a plan and utterly failed. Post-it notes were born. And today, 50 billion Post-it notes are used in over 150 countries around the world. Spencer planned one thing. The Lord had a better plan. How do you think it's going to work for you? When the Lord is your good father, when he says, I work things especially for the good of those who love me, when he shows you mercy and truth through Jesus. Proverbs chapter three says, Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding, and all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight. With humility and with trust, make your plans. And then commit it to the Lord. Amen.