Writing Our Own Future

 Posted at Reformation Scotland:

When we plan for the future, we tend to overestimate both the stability of our circumstances and our ability to forecast accurately. The result is that we gain false optimism from the imaginary future which we have projected for ourselves. Much as we may flatter ourselves by giving ourselves the starring role in the unfolding story, the script is not ours to write. Long ago, the wise man advised, “Boast not thyself of tomorrow, for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth” (Proverbs 27:1). In the following updated extract from a sermon on this saying, Hugh Binning exposes the dangers of boasting or glorying in an unpredictable, speculative future, and outlines a better way to live.

What is the way that most people take to mitigate and sweeten their present hardships? Only what the fool did in the parable (Luke 12). They either have something laid up for many years, or else their projects and plans reach to many years ahead. The truth is, they have more pleasure in the expectation of such things, than in the real possession, but even that pleasure itself is only imaginary also. How many thoughts and designs are continually turning in the heart — how to be rich, how to get greater gain, how to get more popularity? They build castles in the air, and fancy to themselves, as it were, new worlds of mere possible things. In this work of the heart, there is some poor evading of present sorrows, but at length they recur with all the greater force.

Everyone makes romances for himself, pretty fancies of his own fortune, as if he had the power to bring it about himself. We sit down, as it were, and write a series of forecasts in our own secret thoughts. We design our own prosperity, gain, advantage, and pleasures or joys. Then, when we have ranked our hopes and expectations, we begin to take satisfaction in them, and give our self-confidence a boost as if it was all really going to turn out like that, as if there were not a supreme Lord who regulates to our affairs, as immediately as He does the winds and rains.

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