Oh my, I’m 30 years-old and not married. God must want me to be a nun-“But Lord, I’m not even Catholic!” If I lose this job, I’ll never get another one. If that person gets elected or Congress passes this law, our country will never survive. Assumptions run the gamut from the totally illogical to simple second guessing. They range in scope from the personal to wide scale. They can take us down roads we were never meant to travel. In Israel’s case, quite literally…
When the twelve spies returned from checking out the Promised Land, all but two (Joshua and Caleb) made a dismal assessment. Although the land looked good, they reported that the giants living there would be impossible to defeat. They assumed because the Amalekites and Canaanites were bigger and stronger, Israel didn’t stand a chance. The spies’ fear ran so rampant in the camp that the whole nation was ready to turn tail and run before there was even a skirmish! They assumed God had brought them out of Egypt to let them die in the desert. Forget God’s promises; forget his miracles; forget his looming presence on Mt. Sinai. Fear-fed assumptions overtook faith.
In the end, their assumptions determined their fate. They wandered in the desert forty years until that generation did, in fact, die there. That’s what makes assumptions so dangerous. If we’re not careful, they will undermine our faith and sabotage our destiny.
Assumption-making feeds our fretting. And fretting leads only to evil (Psalm 37:8). Worry undermines our trust in God and provokes us to take matters in our own hands-or minds. We jump ahead of God because we don’t want to wait on his timing.
I don’t know about you, but I have to fight against making assumptions. It takes effort for me not to fall into pessimistic worry. The only antidote I’ve found lies tucked away in the 37th Psalm… “Trust in the Lord and do good…” (verse 3). Trusting and fretting can’t inhabit the same space. Nor can faith and fear. So join me in releasing those troublesome circumstances and voice a new assumption-God’s got it!
It’s the only assumption that takes us to the right place.