FROM THE PASTOR’S HEART OP-ED BY DR. ROBERT KENNEDY
Deo Volente is a Latin phrase that I used to hear all the time when I was growing up. In those times, people wrote letters they would close with the capital DV. Their readers would understand that it means – “God’s willing.” The phrase comes from the Bible in the book of James.
Please take notice of the instruction that James was giving to those to whom he was writing:
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit” – yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin. (James 4:13-17 NIV, Emphasis mine).
It is pathetic that we in this contemporary world have become so secular that we have forgotten the phrase or the idea that we still need Deo Volente. Yes, it is pathetic that we have come to think of ourselves as independent of God. We have forgotten much of God’s providential protection and direction in our lives, in so much that we fail to use the DV.
I am not asking that we need to go back and study Latin and use the phrase in any perfunctory way. But I think it significant that we need to become more conscious that our lives are in the hands of God. And we need to constantly commit our ways to God. Or let me put it the way that the apostle Paul did to the Athenians who were worshipping their “unknown gods, by suggesting that we need to return to putting our trust in God, who alone “gives us life and breath and all things.” (Acts 17:25). We need to lay our daily lives and decisions before God and pray as Jesus prayed to the heavenly Father, “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” (cf. Matthew 6:10)
We do not need to be like “the rich fool” who Jesus described in one of His great parables. Here is how it is recorded in Luke 12:13-21:
Someone in the crowd said to him (Jesus), “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” Jesus replied, “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?”Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ “Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’ “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.” (NIV, Emphasis mine).
If you have confronted as much sickness, death and grief, as I have since the start of this pandemic, and I am sure you have, noting the 750,000 + persons dead in the United States alone and the millions across the world, you must agree that you are mortal. If your immediate family or friends or neighbors have not been touched by the deaths I will say to you, hold tight on your seats, maybe you have been living on some lonely island, without any other being. But, I am sure, if you are on planet earth, you surely have heard of the rise in sickness and death.
If at all you must be feeling the kind of anxiety and vulnerability that comes with the constant news of death, you must be saying at every turn, “If God wills.” Maybe you had not been thinking often that your life is as tenuous as it is. Well now you cannot avoid it. Our present situation is speaking to us loudly. We are not here to live eternally, not on this planet.
If you are understanding what I am describing, then accept that I am giving an invitation that you need to be asking God on a daily basis Deo Volente. We need to pray it. We need to remind our friends of it. We need to make our plans with it.
Deo Volente does not stop us from making future plans. It encourages us, but it tells us that God needs to be included in those plans. Think of what might be if we would plan our marriages with Deo Volente. Think of what our business decisions would be like if we placed Deo Volente in the midst of them.
On the negative side, think of what happens when God is not in our plans. We make foolish steps. We fall into sin. We confuse ourselves and, live in darkness.
Thus think Deo Volente – include God in your plans.
