RMC #39- God’s Will
I started thinking one morning about being in God’s will. Here it is we say: “Thy will be done.”, yet since everything is all and all in God isn’t His will always done?
I started thinking about this as I struggled with a question in my life. It had turned into an anxiety. I worried.
I know the belief in Jesus means I am not to worry, but I did and I do.
One of my favorite things to say to myself when I am worrying is:
“Be not anxious, but in all things trust in the Lord.”
But still I worry. Is this bad? Or, is this just my human-ness?
So here I am struggling with some human worry, not able to sleep or not able to not worry about what is to happen. When I reach the point I am spinning around in indecision, frustration and conflict. When I get to that point I will say to God: “Thy will be done.”
But what I think I really say is “I surrender to you.” I can’t figure this particular problem (one in a long string of problems) out by myself. So I give up, I turn it over to His will.
For I know deep in my soul that God’s solution is always better than my own. My “ego” tries to intervene, but deep inside, in the quiet part of my soul that always knows right from wrong, there is no hesitancy. I accept I can’t do it. I surrender.
And I always find out that I am better off when I do so. Surrender may seem difficult at first, but in seeing the results of the conscious effort of surrender, the active choice of surrender, I can tell you that the results of allowing God to take over my life have produced far better results that anything I can do.
I can tell you an example that happened just this week. I had a really wonderful client, someone I wanted to do a really good job for. Initially the client requested a designer of their choice to work with me on the project. We did not come to an agreement on the direction and procedure for completing the project. It was not that he was a bad designer or that it was his fault, we were just different. He resigned from working with me. So I went and got my normal designer to do some samples. I submitted them to the client, they seemed happy with the result. Then I didn’t hear from them for almost 10 days. I started worrying… and worrying… and worrying.
I don’t know that I did anything, but somewhere along the way, I stopped worrying. I gave in to whatever would happen.
Last week they emailed me. It was a simple miscommunication on their part. We got everything straightened out and are proceeding with the project, full steam ahead.
So I think it’s more about surrender.
And I love that word, since it is so hard for this human to do. For that matter I think it is hard for every human to do.
The human thoughts of surrender mean defeat.
The Godly version, I believe, is the recognition of our inability to control life to exercise any control over or future, and that surrender to God actually is required to produce victory. For God is always victorious. He can not lose anything that is always His, so our surrender allows Him to help us… in spite of our human selves.
This life lesson was also brought clearer to me when the sermon today at the Vail Church revolved around John 6:22-71.
In these verses Jesus confronts the Jews at the Temple at Capernaum. In his discussions he talks about being the bread of life. It is an extremely challenging verse made only slightly easier since we have experienced through Scripture the Last Supper and the Resurrection of Jesus, so that we have a historic perspective of a reality the Jews of the time did not have the ability to understand or see.
But in these verses, for this writing in particular, Jesus says in verse 65:
65 “He went on to say, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled him.”
As I heard this, I wrote the following in my sermon guide:
“Even though we may be enabled, we may still choose the life that leads to death.”
We may choose to follow our own advice, we may choose to listen to the voice of the world, and when we do we fail. We may have been enabled, but we have only been enabled to follow God, to listen to Him and to pray that His will is shown to us that we may follow.
For I am convinced that when we follow God our life is enriched beyond our own ability to envision the wonder of what is to come when we do so.
