When shortcuts miss God's plan

Ryan Brown Dec. 10, 2024

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God designed the human brain in amazing ways. It can process tremendous amounts of information. One of the ways it does this is by looking for mental shortcuts. Our brains are always looking for ways to process information more efficiently or reduce the amount of information we're needing to process.

For example, when an individual is looking to hire a new employee, one of the first things they will look at will be the resume experience. The thinking is logical, if other people have hired a person to do similar types of work in the past, then it's more likely they will be able to accomplish the task being hired for now. Rather than spending time to meet with everyone that has applied, that hiring manager will often use the resume experience to create a shortlist of applicants they will meet with. Again, the brain has made a logical connection that will save time in the hiring process.

While these logical and reasonable practices can be a great time saver, we can't assume that God's will is always revealed through these time-saving practices. First Chronicles 17:1-4 gives us a great example of that.

After David was settled in his palace, he said to Nathan the prophet, "Here I am, living in a house of cedar, while the ark of the covenant of the Lord is under a tent."

Nathan replied to David, "Whatever you have in mind, do it, for God is with you."

But that night the word of God came to Nathan, saying: "Go and tell my servant David, 'This is what the LORD says: You are not the one to build me a house to dwell in."

1 Chronicles 17:1-4

This Scripture helps highlight a couple of important things.

First, our shortcuts may help us save time, but they don't necessarily give us insight into God's will.

David was God's servant. Referred to as a "man after God's own heart" (1 Sam. 13:14), God's hand was upon David. God was present and working in David's life in obvious and powerful ways. Yet God had not specifically called David to build the temple. For that task, God had selected David's son.

God had selected David for a number of other important assignments, and David certainly had some pretty amazing resume experiences (slaying a literal giant is something very few of us have on our LinkedIn profiles). Nathan had assumed that because God was with David (or perhaps because he had great resume experience), that David was also an obvious choice to build the temple. That was not the case.

Even with the benefit of thousands of years of additional history, if we place David and Solomon in a side-by-side comparison, most of us would assume that David should have been the builder of the temple. David was the man after God's own heart. He was referred to time and time again as a key part of the Messianic heritage. Solomon on the other hand, was wise, rich, and had a heart that wandered from God.

Again, looking at their track records, it would be so easy to assume, like Nathan did, that David would be God's chosen servant to build the temple. If we leaned entirely upon our shortcut of relying upon track records to discern God's chosen servant, we would end up selecting the wrong person.

Second, because our shortcuts don't necessarily reveal God's will, we need to be prayerful in our decisions.As we pray, we also need to recognize that God is willing to speak, but He doesn't always speak within the limits of our time-saving, decision-making techniques. Our prayers shouldn't be seen as a tool we yield to coax God into speaking. Our prayers are a tool to open our hearts to listen to what God might say.

The truth is that we end up making decisions all the time without ever having the certainty of a burning bush or an audible voice from heaven to give us crystal clarity of what God is planning. In those moments, we move forward in faith and prayer. We move forward in faith that as we are increasingly being conformed to the image of Christ that our decision-making increasingly reflects that Christlikeness. We move forward in prayer so that our hearts are open to when the Holy Spirit is prompting us to make decisions that might not be intuitive.

Let's prayerfully humble ourselves so we recognize that our timesaving techniques and reasoning may not always align us to God's will.

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Ryan Brown serves Open Doors US as Chief Executive Officer. Learn More »

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