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Think You’re Strong Enough to Fulfill God’s Will for You? Really? Still?

Think You’re Strong Enough to Fulfill God’s Will for You? Really? Still?

Last updated on: July 29, 2007 at 3:47 pm by John Shore

Think You’re Strong Enough to Fulfill God’s Will for You? Really? Still? 2007-07-29T15:47:22-08:00 John Shore

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I tend to think that I have all the time in the world to become the person God wants me to be–or to at the very least do the things that I have every last reason to understand God intends for me to do. The underlying reason for which I tell myself that I have all the time in the world to do what God wants me to do is because I know that what God wants me to do is going to be difficult. And I don’t like to do difficult things. I like to do easy things. So I figure I can wait to do God’s difficult things. I figure that God understands how challenging the things he’s given me to do really are–and that, what with him being such a forgiving God and all, he will certainly understand if, on any given night, I choose to watch my new Nexflix movie that just came in, rather than get up off the couch, splash a little cold water on my face to refresh myself, take a deep breath, and get busy logging in some real time doing His very real work.

It’s only one day gone by, I think, as I crawl into bed. I’ll start doing better tomorrow.

And then, of course, there’s always another tomorrow.

And then another one.

And then one more.

You know what I think? I think God filters into our hearts and minds the totality of what he wants us to do–and that, in his eminent genius, He makes it so that that load or challenge is exactly formidable enough to make us feel that if we ever really took control of our lives, we, in and of ourselves, could muster the strength and will necessary to do it.

But (as we find) we never do gain that much control of our lives; in the end, we somehow never quite muster the will and strength to kick our lives up to the next level–to the one where we actually do what, for all we know, God created us to do.

And I think the reason God does that is because eventually it forces us to either take what he wants us to do with exceedingly seriousness, or to dismiss it altogether. It’s like a little pebble in your shoe when you’re out having a wonderful time hiking: You can ignore it for a very long time, but eventually you have to flat-out decide if you’re going to finally stop what you’re doing and deal with the thing, or not.

Which, of course, never turns out to be any choice at all.

We must, finally, deal with–we must finally face–what exactly it is that God wants us to do.

And when we do that, when we take seriously the purpose or mission for us that God has all along been waiting for us to take as seriously as he does, what we find is that, in fact, we’re nowhere near capable of fulfilling that destiny on our own.

That can’t happen. It never could. We were never anywhere near that strong.

The bottom line is that if we’re ever going to become the person God wants us to become so that we might do the things God wants us to do, then we’re going to have to break ourselves of our will, and learn to depend wholly upon His will.

Our lives are not about doing what God wants us to do. Our lives are about letting God use us to do what he wants to do.

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