Copyright 2014 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
The Christian believer is someone who has likely come to grasp the importance of knowing that there is something or, more importantly, Someone profoundly greater than themselves. To have at least this level of humility is primary to possessing any real understanding of who God is and what our position as creatures is before Him. However to have such a basic understanding is only one component in coming into right relationship with the Divine. What is still needful is to grasp that what He desires is vastly more important than what we desire for ourselves. Our wants for our lives can never rightfully be allowed to supersede His will for our lives.
It is not enough to accede to the fact that God almighty is the Ruler of all things. We must go beyond that and specifically include our very selves, and all we hope to be or have, as rightfully His. We can intellectually accept that our small lives are dwarfed by the immensity of the divine Being and still not want our desires for ourselves to be the same as His. We often do not realize how badly we need our wants and His to be one and the same.
A great part of sanctification is concerned with coming to the place of surrendering our wants, old and new, to the Lord of our lives. It is not a quick or easy process because, at least in our time and place in history, we have been conditioned to think that no one knows what is better for us than we do. Of course the idea that what someone else wants for us is vastly superior to what we do has always been an alien concept to fallen men and women, but perhaps never more so than in the culture of the 21st century West. “Surely”, we think, “no one knows what is better for me than I do?” yet, the Bible tells us that there is a way that seems right to a man and ends only in death.
The “disconnect” for earnest Christians here can be disturbing in the extreme. We say we want our lives to be in harmony with God’s will. We often declare, in fact, that we want to be at the very center of His will, yet we have trouble wanting what we say we want. We may discipline ourselves to seek to be in harmony with our Lord’s purposes, but it is a difficult realization when we discover that, even years into our walk, we still do not viscerally, voluntarily desire the same things for our lives that we know He does.
What are we to do with this stubborn resistance to harmonizing our desires with God’s? One of the most powerful ways of breaking down such resistance is to spend prolonged periods meditating on the perfect attributes He possesses. It becomes easier to align our wants with God’s as we come to have a deeper understanding of His flawless nature, especially compared to who, and what, we know ourselves to be by comparison. His perfect truthfulness, goodness, faithfulness and love are just a few of the qualities that, once we begin to deeply trust in them, can ease our transition from primarily wanting what we want to wanting what He wants for us.
(In my own experience A.W. Tozer’s book “The Knowledge of the Holy” has been a great help in internalizing a right understanding of why the best thing I can possibly do for my life is to completely surrender it to Christ. I recommend it highly. There are other books written by great saints down through the centuries which can serve the same purpose, although all such works are secondary to the Scriptures as the primary source of such knowledge.)
Once we cross the threshold of truly adopting God’s desires as our own one of the rewards will be a much greater level of peace in our lives. Beyond such blessed peace we can expect our lives to be deeply and positively transformed in other ways as well but all this will happen only as we come to want, first and foremost, what our perfectly loving Lord wants for us. This is the primary goal for Christian growth and, as such, we cannot set too high a priority on its accomplishment.