Skip to main content

Wanting God


            If God wants what is best for me, then why do I have a hard time wanting it too?  Our minds have definitely been damaged by the fall.  Even though I know better than to want what I want, I can’t stop myself.  I find it difficult to transform my mind from wanting what I want into wanting what God wants.

            Wanting God isn’t easy.  It’s only the seasoned saints who truly breaks through to fully wanting God more than their selfish desires.  They don’t want God on their own.  They need help just like I do.  To want God is to want His will. In the Christmas story the Virgin Mary seemed so prepared to do God’s will, more than Zachariah.  Eventually they both wanted God’s best; it just took a few months of speechlessness for Zachariah to come around.  This means there is hope for me.

            The main reason that it is so hard to want what God wants is because God’s wants are so much higher than my wants. I want the easy way.  I want the instant way.  God has better plans than I do.  St. Bernard of Clairvaux explains it this way, Life is in his will.  That would be the way a saint would see the will of God.  How did he come to see this?  Life experiences most likely taught him.  I’m sure he had a lot of opportunities to see that not doing God’s will brought the opposite of life a time or two.  Eventually he got it.  He fully submitted himself to God’s will and found in doing so that real life was not denied him in any way.

            That’s the kind of life I want to live.  I want to want God.  Paul described how God saw David in Acts 13:22.  God testified concerning him: I have found David son of Jesse, a man after my own heart; he will do everything I want him to do.  I wish those words could be said of me one hundred percent of the time.  I think God could say that for the majority of the time, but God and I do get in squabbles when I resist doing the seemingly impossible action or thought He asks of me.

            What if I did everything God wanted?  I would be really living, according to St. Bernard.  God wants a lot better for me than I want for myself.  For instance, He wants me to be more thoughtful toward others than I am to myself.  Where’s the fun in that?  I like to be self-focused; it is fun for a season, but there is no life there.  It eventually wears me out.  However, when I want what God wants and discover the joy of self-sacrifice, I realize that I am really living.

            I can share with you from my own experience that when I finally give up my wants for God’s, then and only then do I find the utter joy of wanting what God wants.  There is truly a battle of the wills until I turn mine over to do God’s will that is better even though it is uncomfortable. 

            What keeps me from wanting what God wants?  It’s my fallen mind that doesn’t remember how empty my own wants leave me. 

Copyright © 2012.  Deborah R. Newman www.teatimeforyoursoul.com  All Rights Reserved.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fifth Monday in Lent through Palm Sunday

Fifth Monday in Lent: Righteousness Needed Jesus is all about bringing us righteousness yet we are too worldly focused to think we have much of a need for righteousness. Most of us think we need healing or exciting miracles. We might try to get a little righteousness by going to church on Sunday and giving some spare change to a beggar. God sees the bigger picture and knows that there is nothing which we are more bankrupt than righteousness. He sees that we are totally incapable of getting the righteousness we need through our own actions, so He sent Jesus to give us His righteousness through His sacrificial work on the cross. Lent is a season of repentance and preparation for the Easter celebration. No matter how sacrificial your Lenten fast, it could never be enough to earn your righteousness. I have been practicing Lent for   years, and every year at the end of my fast I come face to face with how far I am from righteousness. Some of the first recorded words of Jesus in th
Post a Comment
Read more

A Pilgrimage that Started with Tears

                Who would think I would shed tears deciding to set out on a wonderful journey that I have longed to take for many years?   Before I was ready to fully accept God’s invitation for a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, I had to journey to a place of agreement between what my soul wanted and what the Lord wanted for me.   For years I have been declining opportunities to travel to Israel—not because I didn’t want to go but because I wanted to go with my husband by my side.   I know that God could have arranged that for me, but instead He asked me to accept that He wanted me to be willing to go and leave everything behind.   When I was asked to make a decision about going on a Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, God gave me this verse in answer to my prayer -- Debi, observe therefore all the commands I am giving you today, so that you may have the strength to go in and take over the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess (Deuteronomy 11:8).   I decided through tears that I would go on
2 comments
Read more

The Troubled Christian Life

              When I surrendered my vocation to God back when I was seventeen-years-old, He called me to a life of walking through the most broken realities that people face in a first-world country.  The verse that led me to this life was 2 Corinthians 1:3-4.  Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort,   who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God .  I began counseling others at the ripe age of 23.  I looked like I could have still been in high school, and the patients given to me rightly had their doubts.  I had my doubts too.  I knew that I didn’t have the wisdom to counseling people double my age.  I didn’t have a lot of experience of deep wounds either so I couldn’t talk to them from my own experiences of deep brokenness.  I was only helpful to them because I relied totally on the word of God and the presence of the Holy Spirit
Post a Comment
Read more