God's Will

I had a long talk with a friend yesterday who was contemplating life, and she was asking me how I figured out God’s will for my own life! I kind of chuckled at her, thinking to myself, “She’s asking me?!” I have been where she is before, thinking that God has this specific roadmap written out for my life, and for fear that I may make the wrong turn, I become immobilized and don’t do anything… or I just wait for Him to miraculously tell me what I should do through signs and wonders. “OK God, if the phone rings within the next ten minutes, then I’ll know You want me to do this.” Five minutes later, the phone rings and I wonder, “Was that really from the Lord or was it just a coincidence?!” Oh, the foolish games we play (or maybe I’m the only one who has played that game)!

A verse that my friend brought up and shared her frustration with me was, “Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.” (Psalm 37:4). I think we often look at verses like this and Matthew 7:7, which says “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”, and think that God is some genie and will give us whatever we want. Yet when He doesn’t, we think that we must be the exception to the rule. Of course that is not true, and what we are missing is the preface of that verse that says, “Delight yourself in the Lord”. So what does it mean to delight yourself in something? According to Roget’s New Millennium Thesaurus, some synonyms for “delight in” are: admire, cherish, feast on, indulge in, revel in, savor… and there were others, but those were my favorites. If I am going to indulge in anything, I am going to put forth all my energy towards that thing, whether it be an activity or a person. To delight in the Lord means I’m going to love on Him, I’m going to indulge in His Word, I’m going to revel in His Spirit, and simply become intimate with Him. When we do this, a funny thing happens. All of the sudden our eyes are no longer fixed on our wants and desires… but they are totally fixed on Him, and all of the sudden the desires of my heart align with His. Therefore, it is not until we are in a state in which we are delighting in Him... that His ways become our ways... that the things that burden Him, burden us.

I also believe that finding God's will for your life is a process, and it is only through constant prayer that we will know whether we are in His will or not. He promises to lead and guide us... but we have to be in communion with Him in order for Him to do that. I think one problem we have when trying to determine God's will is that we think in future tense, but I believe in order to find His will for our lives, we must look at the present. Ultimately God may want something really big out of my life down the road, but to get there, I must stay in His will today. That may require me to simply turn away from a TV program that is not appropriate for me to watch in order to stay pure and holy, it may be that I am to avoid a tempting situation that will compromise my moral beliefs, or it may be me simply choosing to spend the day with a friend that does not know Christ in order to share the Gospel with her. My point is, finding God's will is walking every day in communion with Him, making wise choices, and being obedient. It is TODAY that we need to choose to follow Him... TODAY we need hear His voice and live accordingly.

I will end with this verse taken from the New Living Translation:

"For the Lord grants wisdom! From his mouth come knowledge and understanding. He grants a treasure of common sense to the honest. He is a shield to those who walk with integrity. He guards the paths of the just and protects those who are faithful to him. Then you will understand what is right, just, and fair, and you will find the right way to go." (Proverbs 2:6-9)