And God lets His plan fail.  It is a bit of His greatness.  He will let a plan fail before He will be untrue to man’s utter freedom of action.  He will let a man wreck his career, that so through the wreckage the man may see his own failure, and gladly turn to God.  Many a hill is climbed only through a swamp road.

God cares more for a man than for a plan.  The plan is only for the sake of the man.  You say, of course.  But, you know, many men think more of carrying through the plan on which they have set themselves, regardless of how it may hurt or crush some man in the way.  God’s plan is for man, and so it is allowed to fail, for the man’s sake.

Yet, because the plan is always made for man’s sake, it will be carried through, because by and by man will see it to be best Many a man’s character has been made only through the wrecking of his career.  If God had had His way He would have saved both life and soul, both the earthly career and the heavenly character.

Let us stop thoughtfully, and remember that God has carefully thought out a plan for every man, for each one of us.  It is a plan for the life, these human years; not simply for getting us to what we may have thought of as a psalm-singing heaven, when we’re worn out down here.

It is the best plan.  For God is ambitious for us; more ambitious for you and me than we are for ourselves, though few of us really believe that.  But He will carry out His plan—­aye, He can carry it out only with our hearty consent.  He must work through our wills.  He honors us in that With greatest reverence be it said that God waits reverently, hat in hand, outside the door of a man’s will, until the man inside turns the knob and throws open the door for Him to come in and carry out His plan.  We can make God fail by not working with Him.  The greatest of all achievements of action is to find and fit into God’s plan.

The Church Mission.

Now, God had and has a plan for His Church.  That plan is simply this:  The Church was to be His messenger to the nations of the earth.  There are other matters of vast importance committed to the Church, without doubt:  the service of worship and the training and developing of the life of its members.  But these, be it said very thoughtfully, are distinctly secondary to the service of taking the Gospel to all men.

These two, the chief and the secondary, are interwoven, each contributing to and dependent upon the other.  But there is always a main purpose.  And that here, without question, is the carrying of the message of Jesus fully to all the earth.  In each generation the chief plan, to which all else was meant to be contributory, was that all men should hear fully and winsomely the great thrilling story of Jesus.

Shall I say that that plan has failed?  It hurts too much even to repeat such words.  I will not say the Church has failed.  But I will ask you to note God’s plan for the Church, and then in your inner heart to make your own honest answer.