Have you ever had the urge to do something and then NOT do it because you don’t know if God will be behind you? If it’s in His will? If you are acting out of selfish ambition instead of pre-purposed obedience? Have you ever wondered why you feel restrained within your own Christian life? That there has to be more than just doing the same thing that you KNOW He called you to do? That the dreams of your heart will never come alive because you refuse to ask if He will partner with you in them to completion? Have you ever assumed that because you love God you’ll live a boring, safe life?
Before I trusted God with my LIFE, I asked these things to Him daily.
Before I accepted Jesus, I assumed God wouldn’t want me living for Him because of the extravagant life I already imagined myself living. To me it didn’t match up, I struggled to see where God, let alone a relationship, fit.
I knew I was special. (Don’t we all?) I knew life was rare. I knew the quality of life I wanted was nothing short of a novel worthy storyline.
I have asked all of those above questions internally pretending like God cannot hear me begging and pleading with my own thoughts, as if He’s not already there. And initially these are reasons I found God as a distasteful, bossy, and characterless authority to submit to.
But then I was told something this weekend at a conference I attended in a little tiny corner of the Cambodian map, a weekend filled with grace, mercy, redemption, healing, divine praise, and all forms of worship called “the Awakening.”
Gary Black, a man who advocates for millennials and their callings and purposes, a man who tells us he “will die serving your generation,” said this:
“Love God, and do what you want.”
Initially I fought my spirit on this, a statement like that couldn’t be right.
That’s something I have never heard a sermon preached about.
That’s something not bluntly written out in the bible.
But it was a fact that I did and do believe God Himself gives a big thumbs up to.
Tune your ears to this. It wrecked my world.
Essentially this means that we agree with God first and foremost by loving Him with a radical sense of passion, and a deep craving for intimacy with WHO He is. But what that action packed statement hides within the tale end of it is a direction telling us as Christians to move, to refuse to remain stagnant and to go places even if it seems that He’s not giving an inclination. To simply do what you want.
Do we forget who MADE us? Do we forget where we came from? Do we forget that even if we fail to acknowledge God He still exists in every cell in our body and can reveal Himself to anyone amidst ANY or every word we say? Do we forget that He gives us free will but can control anything in our lives if we ask Him to?
Life is not a waiting game.
Life is a trusting game.
Loving God means you trust that He will be evident in all that you choose to do because He chose to die for you and never left you since.
God’s word says: “In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.” {Proverbs 3:6}
It couldn’t match up more perfectly.
“In all your ways acknowledge him” = love God in everything you do.
“and he will make straight your paths.” = in whatever you choose to do, wherever you proclaim your love for Him, let alone the name of Jesus, He WILL MAKE your paths good. Holy. Of Him. Straight. He can turn every single thing we do, everything we strive towards, and everywhere we go something that relates people back to God.
I am in awe of that statement and it has never been clearer.
How often do we wait around for days, months, and years for God to speak to us? For Him to give us a divine revelation about our next move? The city we live in? When the perfect time to plant the new church is? When we should get pregnant? Become an entrepreneur? Donate all of our money to saving women who have been trafficked? When we should go back to school? Or quit our job? Or start a new hobby? Or take a mission trip? Or tell that person we love them for the first time?
We sit back in submission, which is good, but in that we waste our life praying to FULLY know the answer to that question.
But we forget that God is a God of mystery and uncertainty, He never promises the answers and we need to stop waiting around for them. Stop using “I am waiting on God” as a cop out.
HE IS WAITING ON US. He is waiting for YOU to move forward and to trust that exactly where you plant your foot, He’s planned it.
It’s a simple unveiling but it’s teeming with truth.
It’s something I needed to hear.
It’s permission for me to cast all of my anxiety, worries and cares straight to the heavens and to just do what I want.
“God is within her, she shall not fail.” {Psalm 46:5}
He is within us. He is with us. We shall not fail no matter the decision we make or path we take.
This is the point in my writing where I am sure the Lord is stirring a conviction in you. Do that thing you’ve always wanted to do and know that He’s smiling and waiting to agree with you fully. There’s no right or wrong in the courts of heaven, there’s merely compliance or defiance. Just choose Him!
