“Therefore settle it in your hearts not to meditate beforehand on what you will answer. For I will give you a mouth and wisdom which all your adversaries will not be able to contradict or resist.”
How opposite from my thinking.
From my society, where it is responsible and good to analyze and over-analyze every word you say and prepare your speeches in detail and plan for every possible outcome. Yet this verse offers a challenge:
Don’t plan.
Don’t prepare.
Don’t think ahead.
For once, just be where I am and trust Him to give me what I need when the time comes. Settle it now, that this does not and will not depend on me. Get my heart to a place that I am okay with that; that I am ready to step forward, watching, waiting for my God to come to the rescue; placing myself totally at His mercy; banking on His faithfulness by refusing to build a back-up plan for if He doesn’t come through.
Let this be my preparation rather than crafting clever words for a situation I haven’t even seen yet.
There are times where planning is appropriate and good. But there is never an appropriate time to plan for His failure.
He never fails. And that means He will never fail me.
Lord-
Help me to check my heart: is it preparing to depend on You? Or is it preparing itself to not need You, just in case?
The latter is a poisonous thought that sends me spinning into countless anxieties. It feeds the conviction that I must prepare for and manage anything and everything possible in order to guarantee a certain outcome . When you strip it down, this very responsible-looking mindset is really just a decision to live in fear.
It is the tragedy I become when I have set aside the precious promise that You will take care of me.
But You will take care of me. Whether I believe it or not. So how will I prepare my heart?
Will I train it to gaze bravely ahead because help is coming?
Or to constantly scan, warily check over my shoulder, furtively glance and jump at every shadow because I’m never sure that I’m safe; never sure that I have accounted for everything; always haunted by the nagging suspicion that I have missed something vital and this will all fall apart.
I have lived too much of my life this way.
So, Lord, in all my preparations, let the most important one be the settling of my own heart.
I can scrap any just-in-case plans for if You don’t help me. Those are a waste of time and energy.
“Because he has set his love upon Me, therefore I will deliver him;
I will set him on high, because he has known My name.
He shall call upon Me, and I will answer him;
I will be with him in trouble;
I will deliver him and honor him.”
dig deep | draw close 