Don’t Plan Without God
Psalm 37:5
The Big Idea
“Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass.”
Psalm 37:5
Chambers identifies three specific planning errors that followers of Jesus must guard against: planning without including God, planning with evil in mind as a controlling factor, and planning defensively against a feared future. All three reveal a trust deficit that genuine commitment to God resolves.
The Simple Takeaway
Two people are both making significant decisions about their next steps in life.
Person A prays about spiritual matters but compartmentalizes practical planning—mapping out finances, relationships, and career moves as a separate domain where God is consulted only if things get desperate.
Person B treats every planning decision as a spiritual one, bringing God in at the beginning rather than as a last resort—not as a formula for success but because they genuinely believe God is the vital living factor in all of life.
Chambers calls readers toward a seamless integration of God into the practical details of daily planning, refusing to treat the spiritual and the practical as separate spheres.
One Question to Sit With
In which area of your current planning have you most noticeably been leaving God out—and what would it look like to commit that area to Him today?
Read the original devotional at utmost.org. This is independent analysis and commentary on Oswald Chambers' work.
Commentary
“God seems to have a delightful way of upsetting the plans we have made, when we have not taken Him into account.”
God disrupts plans made without Him
Chambers observes this pattern with almost cheerful directness: when we plan around God rather than with Him, He tends to unmake those plans. This disruption is not divine interference in our autonomy but the natural consequence of building on a foundation that excludes the architect of our lives.
“We have not even considered Him to be a vital, living factor in the planning of our lives.”
God as vital factor, not occasional consultant
The problem is not that people exclude God from prayer or Sunday worship—it is that they treat Him as optional in the practical, everyday business of making decisions. Chambers calls us to recognize God as the most essential element in every planning conversation we have.
“In spiritual issues it is customary for us to put God first, but we tend to think that it is inappropriate and unnecessary to put Him first in the practical, everyday issues of our lives.”
The spiritual/practical split is a false division
We have inherited a cultural assumption that ‘practical matters’ operate by their own logic and God’s input belongs in ‘spiritual matters.’ Chambers dismantles this division entirely: there is no category of life where God’s involvement is inappropriate or unnecessary.
“If we have the idea that we have to put on our ‘spiritual face’ before we can come near to God, then we will never come near to Him. We must come as we are.”
God invites us in our ordinariness, not our piety
One barrier to including God in practical planning is a kind of spiritual performance anxiety—the feeling that practical, mundane concerns are too lowly to bring to God. Chambers clears this away: come with your spreadsheets, your schedules, your uncertainty. Come as you are.
“‘Love thinks no evil.’ Love is not ignorant of the existence of evil, but it does not take it into account as a factor in planning.”
Planning from love, not from fear of evil
This is a challenging and important distinction. Chambers is not advocating naivety about the existence of evil—he acknowledges love is aware of it. But there is a difference between acknowledging evil and allowing it to govern our planning decisions, to become the controlling factor around which everything else is arranged.
“When we were apart from God, we did take evil into account, doing all of our planning with it in mind.”
Fear-based planning belongs to the pre-Christ life
Before knowing Christ, it made sense to plan primarily around self-protection—to build defenses, secure advantages, anticipate threats. But this orientation belongs to a pre-redeemed way of living. The life of discipleship calls for planning from a different center: trust rather than fear.
“You cannot hoard things for a rainy day if you are truly trusting Christ.”
Hoarding against future uncertainty betrays present distrust
Chambers does not condemn prudent planning but the anxiety-driven hoarding that reveals we have not truly entrusted our future to God. The question is not whether to save wisely but whether our saving is motivated by faith or by a secret conviction that God’s provision cannot be relied upon.
“Continually pick yourself up, even if you fall a hundred and one times a day, until you get into the habit of putting God first and planning with Him in mind.”
Consistency in God-first planning is a habit built over time
Chambers is realistic about the difficulty: including God in planning is a discipline that must be practiced repeatedly before it becomes second nature. He offers no magical shortcut—just the practical wisdom that even a hundred daily failures are worth persisting through until the habit takes hold.