Years passed and you wonder why you did not get what you want in life.
What you are asking is not too much and nothing is wrong with it. In fact, your ambitions may be in line with God’s will for you.
Perhaps you may wish to have enough money in the bank to give you a feeling of safety, but so far you have no savings and you have debt instead. Anxiety makes you agitated. You are not enjoying life as you should. You believe if you could just pay the debt and have some money in the bank you will breathe and life will be enjoyable. Until that time, you are stressed out.
Or perhaps you are searching for your life partner, someone with whom you want to have mutual love, admiration, support, and encouragement; mutually dependent and dependable while free to be yourselves. Feeling safe, enriching one another’s spirit, making you feel like you have a guardian angel by your side. Both of you cannot tolerate the pain of losing one another therefore you are quick to forgive one another when disappointed. Nobody fits to the bill so far.
Is there anything that may need to be changed to release God’s blessings in your life? Here are some words from the scriptures to consider:
God speaking, “Ialone know the plans I have for you, plans to bring you prosperity and not disaster, plans to bring about the future you hope for. You will call to me. You will come and pray to me, and I will answer you. You will seek me, and you will find me because you will seek me with all your heart. I will show you great and mighty things that you know nothing about yet.” (Jeremiah 29: 11-14; 33:3)
What we love the most and what we seek with all our heart matters. You may have ambitions and purposes in life that are in line with God’s will. But when we love these “blessings” more than God, it becomes idolatry and we find ourselves in opposition to God.
It is said, “If you become Christian you can have personal relationship with God.” But, God does not want to have personal relationship with you. You can have personal relationship with your lawyer. The nature, the substance of God is Love and it is natural that God wants to have “love relationship” with you. Therefore, the greatest commandment in the Bible is “to love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.”
It is not easy at all to love and seek God more than our ambitions. That’s because in our minds God is not that much lovable. Human beings use their reasoning, imaginations and assumptions and shape God’s character somewhat in line with their own heart when in the scriptures God says that His ways are not our ways. God is Love and we are human beings. We do not know how Love can be a being, and how Love can feel, think and act. Therefore we imagine that God is like us.
It is written only in the Bible who God truly is. We need to give up believing our speculative thoughts about God which seems right to us and replace them with what God teaches about Himself in the Bible. When we begin to truly understand who God is and what He has done for us and how much today He loves us and right now how much He cares about us, we can replace our guesses about God with these. Then when we submit to the truth about how His heart is pounding by love for us all the time and how He feels for us this very moment, we increasingly fall in love with Him.
God is like an ocean of love. Our deceitful assumptions and thoughts about Him are like rocks on the shore. Something happens as we commit ourselves to replace our own reasonings with the Biblical truth about God. Waves of love keep hitting the rocks of common sense in us and slowly in time turn them into sand. So, those sharp-edged hard rocks gradually turn into a welcoming, embracing beach of sand where lying down and resting in peace and joy is possible.
As we gradually embrace the truth about God and cherish it in our hearts and worship Him with devout hearts full of love and gratitude for who He is, the Holy Spirit at times touches us and we experience God’s presence. Therefore God’s love can be tangibly felt quite often when believers get together for worship and prayer which can also happen in solitude.
As we sail along in our journey of loving God, our God with whom we are getting in love with holds our hand and leads us into the future He has for us as He did with the people of Israel and brought them to the land He promised; not merely a bare land in the wilderness, but to a land of milk and honey. He does this not because He owes us anything, but He loves to bring a smile to our faces.
Murat Kuntel is the pastor of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church.
