God has a plan for your life but sometimes we think we have a better idea.  Common sense dictates that we need to have a detailed plan and build safeguards into our lives.  Planning is important and the Bible does not call us to be presumptuous but many people have gone to an extreme.  Western society has become so self sufficient that they believe they can do quite fine without God. 

People reason that God can’t possibly expect me to give up my comforts and security.  God is concerned with my happiness isn’t He?  Here’s the encouraging truth:  God is more concerned with your holiness than your happiness.  Jesus said, “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:35).  Ralph Winter trenchantly observes,

America today is a “save yourself” society if there ever was one. But does it really work? The underdeveloped societies suffer from one set of diseases: tuberculosis, malnutrition, pneumonia, parasites, typhoid, cholera, typhus, etc. Affluent America has virtually invented a whole new set of diseases: obesity, arteriosclerosis, heart disease, strokes, lung cancer, venereal disease, cirrhosis of the liver, drug addiction, alcoholism, divorce, battered children, suicide, murder. Take your choice. Labor-saving machines have turned out to be body-killing devices. Our affluence has allowed both mobility and isolation of the nuclear family, and as a result, our divorce courts, our prisons and our mental institutions are flooded. In saving ourselves we have nearly lost ourselves.1

Perhaps you’re not caught up in following the “American dream” maybe you’re even in Christian ministry – but you can still be led astray.  Jonah is an example of someone who was serving God as a prophet and God had a special plan for him, but he thought that he knew better.  We must realize the truth of Isaiah 55:8-9:

For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,” declares the LORD.  For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.

God knows what He is doing!  Jonah almost missed a great revival but God redirected his journey.  We see from the life of Jonah that it is better to obey God the first time than to have Him redirect you later.  Are you following God’s plan for your life?   Be encouraged that, “The mind of man plans his way, But the LORD directs his steps” (Proverbs 16:9).

1 Ralph Winter.  Perspectives on the World Christian Movement. “Reconsecration to a Wartime, not a Peacetime Lifestyle” p. 706.