God Hates Visionary Dreaming

What does God think of our big dreams and visions for our lives and the world?

In the shadow of Hitler’s Nazi party, a group of Christians gathered for theological education and training just across the Polish border in Finkenwalde. Finkenwalde was established by leaders of the Confessing Church, a group of Christians who refused to conform to the state church’s capitulation to the Nazis. The program immersed the seminarians in a whole-life rhythm of community and education. A young, brilliant theologian and pastor led the subversive education effort. Before long, though, Hitler’s Gestapo shut down the seminary, ending the experience in 1937; and eventually that theologian was executed, eight and a half years later.

In between the seminary and his hanging, that young man wrote a number of books that we still treasure today, including one about his experience of Christian community in leadership and training of the seminary. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together brilliantly and briefly explores the nature of Christian community. In the first handful of pages, he makes a bold statement:

“God hates visionary dreaming.”

In context, he’s referring to the ways that Christians and pastors can idealize a church and Christian fellowship such that it becomes an idol. But the phrase also provokes a broader question: what does God think of our big dreams and visions for our lives and the world?

The Bible answers this question, as it so often does, with texture and nuance. It doesn’t provide a unisex, unisized approach, but offers principles based in covenant relationship with God. That is, the Bible provides us a pathway of wisdom. For example, James, the half-brother of Jesus, chastens our cultural impulses to dream big and shoot for the stars.

What does God think of any dream or wish that our hearts make?

James cautions us that sometimes God really does hate them. We should dream and plan in humble submission to God and his sovereign ordering of the events of the world—his providence.

Every culture has good things and bad things. Ed Stetzer says that we can celebrate good things from common grace, we must reject bad things corrupted by sin, and we should reform and renew good things that sin has twisted. This third area gives us the most grief, because it requires wisdom and nuance. It requires contextual approaches. It requires the Spirit and the Word.

In our culture, we can celebrate good things like freedom for our faith or respect for all kinds of human persons. We must reject bad things like the destruction of human dignity and identity. We need to redeem all sorts of things, here especially our impulse to DIY our lives.

Americans love the “do it yourself” mentality.
We love the the myth of the self-made man.
We love the Home Depot and Lowe’s and home improvement projects.
We admire bold entrepreneurs who discover new lands and expand organizations.
We love planning trips, and adventures, and projects, and careers, and collections.

We love visionary dreaming.

For just this reason, we should be careful.

We must chasten our impulse to plan and dream with the counsel of God’s word about the providence of God. The Lord counsels us over and again about this reality. “A person’s heart plans his way, but the Lord determines his steps” (Prov. 16:9), is the Lord’s wisdom. So is the counsel from James in the fourth chapter of his little book at the back of the Big Book.

People make plans

We can see right off that James pushes back against those folks in the community who have a plan: “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will travel to such and such a city and spend a year there and do business and make a profit”” (James 4:13). People are natural planners. Some more than others. But everyone wants to have some kind of plan. Even if the plan is not to have a plan.

New Testament scholar Douglas Moo explains that James is addressing people from his church within “the relatively well-to-do merchant class.” Everyone of us reading this is part of a “ relatively welll-to-do merchant class,” in global and historical context. We have upward mobility. We can make money, move, travel, plan, change. If you’ve ever moved out of the town where you were born, started a new career, in a new place—you’re James’s audience.

Now James does not rebuke profit or planning per se, but the arrogant, self-sufficient attitude of those who plan to profit and profit to plan (as Moo again points out). Such arrogance makes little sense in light of the actual reality of life.

Life is unpredictable

James says our lives are as stable as smoke, as permanent as passing mist: “Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring—what your life will be! For you are like vapor that appears for a little while, then vanishes” (James 4:14). We can make a year-long plan. In 2015, Laura and I decided to sell our house in Hollywood, Florida and move into her parents house for a year. We have never left. We made a plan, but God had other plans.

Businesses have plans, and usually they go awry.

Coaches have game plans, but great coaches adjust when the plan fails.

Churches printed Vision 2020 plans like a cheap flyer, and then Covid hit.

In 1987, boxer Tyrell Biggs was going to challenge heavyweight champion Mike Tyson. He had a plan, he said. Tyson responded, ““Everybody has plans until they get hit for the first time.”

God repeats himself on this point: “Don’t boast about tomorrow, for you don’t know what a day might bring” (Prov. 27:1). Jesus told the story of a wealthy man who planned to build bigger barns for his crops to preserve wealth and luxury (Luke 12:16-19). Here’s how that went: “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is demanded of you. And the things you have prepared—whose will they be?’” (Luke 12:20).

Time and life are unpredictable, like a vapor or smoke. Like smoke from Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen 19:28), the cloud over mercy seat (Lev 16:13), smoke from a window (Hos 13:3), smoke in judgment (Joel 3:3) or incenses (Ezek 8:11). A stiff breeze can blow it away before a blink.

When I was 9 or 10, we woke up one night to thick, choking smoke in our house. We all got out, safely, and called the fire department. Prepared for the worst, the fully suited responders went into our house, coming back out in a few minutes carrying a metal pot. The pot had been left on the stove with water boiling to sterilize the rubber nipples for my baby sister’s bottles. The water had melted the rubber, smoking us out of the house.

The smoke seemed all consuming when we were inside. We thought it was going to make a permanent mark on our lives. Instead, the firefighters brought out a big fan, and we were back inside within an hour.

Our lives can seem inevitable and permanent, but they can be blown away in moments. In light of our impulse to plan and the unpredictability of life, we must have a better response.

Two responses to our desire to plan and life’s unpredictability

James provides a positive response and a negative response in light of our impulse to plan and the unpredictable, passing nature of life.

Response 1: Submit to God’s providence

Positively, we must submit to the plans of God, as our plan: “Instead, you should say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that’” (James 4:15). Again, the Bible repeats itself:

Commit your activities to the Lord,
and your plans will be established.
Many plans are in a person’s heart,
but the Lord’s decree will prevail.
Proverbs 16:3

A person’s steps are established by the Lord.
Psalm 37:23

Paul asks, rhetorically, “Who resists his will?” (Rom. 9:19).

Thus many Christians say, “Lord willing,” to chasten their plans. Now, it isn’t the words like a magical spell that matter, but the heart. John Calvin says we should approach everything that “we promise about the future” with the knowledge that we “could do nothing without the permission of God.”

Notice that James says we should say, “Lord willing,” not merely, “God willing.” The “Lord” rather than God alludes to the covenant name Yahweh, rather than a generic slogan of paganism (as Moo says, again). We submit to the personal Lord, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the triune God (Matt. 28:19). We don’t resign ourselves to fate, like someone I know who would say, “Everything happens for a reason.” We don’t attribute some circumstance to “the universe.” We trust the sovereign plans of the providence of the Lord.

Response 2: Brag About Your Plans

The negative way to approach planning in light of life’s unpredictability is arrogance and bragging. “But as it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil” (4:16). This was the fundamental problem of the merchants under James’s spiritual authority. They had sent out their slide deck on how to make some money for a year, but arrogantly. Remember, these folks had been scattered because of persecution, away from Jerusalem, into a new city. They were leveraging the opportunity, arrogantly assuming that they could succeed and profit in their new town. They were planning without the Lord. Boastful. Arrogant.

The Lord rebukes such arrogant boasting, consistently.

This is what the Lord says:
The wise person should not boast in his wisdom;
the strong should not boast in his strength;
the wealthy should not boast in his wealth.
But the one who boasts should boast in this:
that he understands and knows me—
that I am the Lord, showing faithful love,
justice, and righteousness on the earth,
for I delight in these things.
This is the Lord’s declaration.
Jeremiah 9:23–24

Boasting is ridiculous for anyone who lives in a world filled with grace. We all live in that world. Everything is a gift. Boasting is especially ridiculous for anyone who lives a new life saved by grace, “not from works, so that no one can boast” (Eph. 2:9).

Still do good things

Providence should not paralyze you, but chastise you. It should chasten your work, but it should not make you passive and inactive: “So it is sin to know the good and yet not do it” (James 4:17). We plan, but we plan in humble submission to the Lord who loves us.

We confess with Paul in Ephesians 2:9 that our salvation and God’s work is “not from works so that no one can boast,” and we notice that in the next stroke of the quill in Ephesians 2:10 that Paul calls us to work according to God’s preparation and plan: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time for us to do.”

God has planned our work, so we follow him as we do good works. Because “that servant who knew his master’s will and didn’t prepare himself or do it will be severely beaten” (Luke 12:47).

When I was a kid, there was a show called McGee and Me about a cartoon character drawn by a kid named Nick. In one episode, Nick’s dad was coaching Nick’s baseball team. They had a stud on the team named Thurman, who they were sure would take them to their dream: a regional championship against their nemesis, coach Harvey Stover. With the game on the line, Thurman, in Casey at the Bat style, arrogantly takes two strikes, and then strikes out.

Nick’s dad teaches him the lesson at the end. “It seemed like we had all the ingredients,” he said. “

Yeah,” Nick responded, “Especially Thurman.”

And then the lesson hits.

“Well, pal, I guess we both learn,” Nick’s dad says, “If you dream without the Lord, you better dream again.”