Seeking God's Will for Your Life...
So many of us claim to be doing just that. We say we want God's will for us, no matter what the cost. Is that really true? I mean does that statement bear out in our daily decisions and lifestyle? I'm wondering that for myself. I know somewhere deep down, I want to please God and glorify Him with my life, but on the day-to-day, what am I really doing to that end? Perhaps I being too hard on myself? Perhaps I'm being too easy. At the end of the day, what we do reflects what we truly believe.
If we believe that God is good, we will surrender our hearts, our possessions and our time to Him knowing He is going to make it all work together for our good. If we don't truly believe He is good, we will try to keep running our own lives, making tons of mistakes along the way and potentially doing some major damage.
If we believe God loves us, we can surrender our relationships, our self-image and our view of others to Him. A person who knows they are loved behaves drastically differently from a person who thinks they are unloved or doesn't know they are loved. The Bible says that we love because God first loved us. We are able to understand and feel the love of others and reach out and give love to others when we know we are loved by God. If we don't believe God loves us, we may try to earn His love with empty works or with a check list for life. We may become bitter about hard times or even little things that would normally not affect the secure believer. We will see ourselves as unworthy scum that no one can love and is not able to love others right. And we'll feel badly about the latter, but be powerless to change it.
If we believe that God is all powerful, we will be able to hand over the reins and allow Him to drive the daily as well as the big decisions we make. We will pray more for others and trust in the outcome of those prayers. If we don't believe in His power, we will not surrender our lives to Him because we will feel we need to maintain control. We will live by the philosophy that if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. We won't let others in and give them opportunities to serve and grace to grow and make mistakes.
If we believe God is Holy, we will seek to be holy ourselves. We will cringe and the thought of sin. We will be offended by the things He is offended by. We will know how to handle different convictions on the part of others, not becoming tainted by them, and at the same time, not judgemental of them. If we don't believe in the holiness of God, the world will stain and spot us with it's filth in the name of entertainment or fun. We will fail to please Him with our personal lives and begin to rationalize the injunctions of Scripture saying they are outdated or culturally bound.
Back to the title. Seeking God's will for your life means seeking to know and believe the truth about God and allowing it to change who you are and in turn, what you do. God's will for your life is all over Scripture. He wants us to be holy, pure, empowered and effective for Him. Bottom line: God's will is that you glorify Him in every thought and action by understanding who He is and letting that guide your thoughts and actions so that people see Him, not you.
Sunday, January 29, 2006
Friday, January 13, 2006
Disillusionment
In college, we had a Christian illusionist come do a show on campus. He made a point to tell us that the tricks he did were not "magic." They were simply his developed skills at fooling our eyes and hence our minds. Also in college, our pastor preached a sermon I'll never forget. He was talking about the reasons we struggle in the Christian life. The main reason, he said, is that we believe error instead of truth. In short, we are deluded, illusioned, tricked by our own desire to be in control or by the Enemy's desire to steal, kill and destroy us. Illusion is not a good thing. Basing our lives on false beliefs about ourselves or the world around us is not only dangerous, it can be life-threatening.
Disillusionment, by definition, is "freeing from false belief or illusions." Only, we tend to think of it more as disappointment, making it to our confused minds, a bad thing, rather than a good one. I venture to say, we should pray daily for disillusionment. There is a Christian author I like named Grace Livingston Hill. She's written over 100 short romance novels. In one of the first I read, there was a mother praying for disillusionment for her daughter about the man she was dating. When I read that, something clicked in my head. I finally got the fact that disillusionment is so very important and vital to our faith. Who wants to walk around believing falsehood his or her whole life? I guess some people do.
Remember in the Matrix when Neo is given the choice to take the red pill or the blue pill? I can't remember which was which, but one would let him forget he'd ever met Morpheus and go on living in his illusionary world created by the Matrix. The other would open his eyes to the real world, ugly though it was, but would also give him the opportunity to do something about that ugliness. We all know which one he chose. But remember the traitor? There was a guy on the Nebuchadnezzar with Neo and Morpheus who, though he'd taken the disillusionment pill, prefered the illusion to the truth and was willing to give up the fight for truth in order to go back to his illusionary world. How dangerous that was for all involved. How dangerous is it for us to do the same?
Forgive my continual movie references, but I'm also reminded of The Truman Show where Truman, played by Jim Carey, has been raised on an elaborate television set created around him to broadcast his entire life to the world. He has no idea that he is not living in the real world. He thinks the people and things around him are it. Until one day things stop making sense and he realizes that something is very wrong. In his quest for the truth, he makes the ultimate discovery that there is more out there and that he has been a prisoner all this time, confined to the bubble the producer had made as his world.
Let's not accept things at face value and believe what we hear on television or what we see in magazines. Let's read our Bibles prayerfully, asking God to open our eyes to the falsehoods we've been operating under. Let's ask Him to show us things in our lives that are deluding us and keeping us from knowing and operating under the Truth. Let's pray for disillusionment. Sure, there might be disappointment along with it, as we realize that we have been duped all this time. Sure, we might struggle with the ongoing battle to allow the renewing of our minds to transform our lives and behavior. But, Jesus promised that if we were really His disciples, then we would know the Truth and the Truth would set us free.
In college, we had a Christian illusionist come do a show on campus. He made a point to tell us that the tricks he did were not "magic." They were simply his developed skills at fooling our eyes and hence our minds. Also in college, our pastor preached a sermon I'll never forget. He was talking about the reasons we struggle in the Christian life. The main reason, he said, is that we believe error instead of truth. In short, we are deluded, illusioned, tricked by our own desire to be in control or by the Enemy's desire to steal, kill and destroy us. Illusion is not a good thing. Basing our lives on false beliefs about ourselves or the world around us is not only dangerous, it can be life-threatening.
Disillusionment, by definition, is "freeing from false belief or illusions." Only, we tend to think of it more as disappointment, making it to our confused minds, a bad thing, rather than a good one. I venture to say, we should pray daily for disillusionment. There is a Christian author I like named Grace Livingston Hill. She's written over 100 short romance novels. In one of the first I read, there was a mother praying for disillusionment for her daughter about the man she was dating. When I read that, something clicked in my head. I finally got the fact that disillusionment is so very important and vital to our faith. Who wants to walk around believing falsehood his or her whole life? I guess some people do.
Remember in the Matrix when Neo is given the choice to take the red pill or the blue pill? I can't remember which was which, but one would let him forget he'd ever met Morpheus and go on living in his illusionary world created by the Matrix. The other would open his eyes to the real world, ugly though it was, but would also give him the opportunity to do something about that ugliness. We all know which one he chose. But remember the traitor? There was a guy on the Nebuchadnezzar with Neo and Morpheus who, though he'd taken the disillusionment pill, prefered the illusion to the truth and was willing to give up the fight for truth in order to go back to his illusionary world. How dangerous that was for all involved. How dangerous is it for us to do the same?
Forgive my continual movie references, but I'm also reminded of The Truman Show where Truman, played by Jim Carey, has been raised on an elaborate television set created around him to broadcast his entire life to the world. He has no idea that he is not living in the real world. He thinks the people and things around him are it. Until one day things stop making sense and he realizes that something is very wrong. In his quest for the truth, he makes the ultimate discovery that there is more out there and that he has been a prisoner all this time, confined to the bubble the producer had made as his world.
Let's not accept things at face value and believe what we hear on television or what we see in magazines. Let's read our Bibles prayerfully, asking God to open our eyes to the falsehoods we've been operating under. Let's ask Him to show us things in our lives that are deluding us and keeping us from knowing and operating under the Truth. Let's pray for disillusionment. Sure, there might be disappointment along with it, as we realize that we have been duped all this time. Sure, we might struggle with the ongoing battle to allow the renewing of our minds to transform our lives and behavior. But, Jesus promised that if we were really His disciples, then we would know the Truth and the Truth would set us free.
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