Driving Force

10/30/2006

The Lord directs the steps of the godly. He delights in every detail of their lives.
Psalm 37:23 (NLT)

What is the driving force behind all the decisions we make on any given day? Why would God not put it on our heart when it is time to clean, or do the laundry, or visit a friend, or volunteer on a Sunday, or make a phone call? If He truly does know and care about each detail of our lives, why should we not ask Him how we should spend each day? Why would we not trust God with the details of each day when He already knows where we are going, what we will be needing, and what unexpected things we might experience along the way? Are we practicing the presence of God each day in this way?

Although this can never be perfected on this earth, each day with prayer we can continually move in the direction of our Lord--we can come to know Him more and learn to listen to His gentle whispers with greater clarity. We still cannot know what it will be like to stand in His presence and see Him face to face but each day we are called in God’s direction, and His desire for us is to rest in His will for our lives and follow wherever He leads. It is the best way for us to live, and yet we find it so, so difficult to do…

Instead of just plowing into each day with our list of “to do’s,” our Lord would like us to give Him some thought, to ask His advice, to embrace His way of being in this world instead of our way of doing. He’d like us to think about why we do what we do, and even deeper still, He wants to know if we will give up doing what He’s not asking us to do.

If the enemy, Satan, can keep us occupied in the battle of busyness of life each day, we will miss the peace being offered by our Lord. If we are not willing to raise the white flag of surrender and submit to our Master and His plan for our lives, we will be marching to the beat of our enemy, and it will wear us out.

God’s law of love is written on our hearts and we can follow it through our days, sometimes without even being aware of where those thoughts came from. Perhaps the hard part is being God conscious enough to realize it’s of Him and not us. To realize that He is the Driving Force behind all that we do when what we do comes out of a heart of love. Maybe practicing the presence of God is really that simple.

If we say we are too busy to listen to our Lord, and hurry on our way, the burden eventually becomes too much because we are no longer allowing God to direct our steps. We have stepped into the enemy’s camp and we are following his commands! The enemy’s backpack of things to do is usually too heavy for us.

The choice is ours to make, really it is…we can choose a hectic life filled with things God never asked us to do in a day, or we can follow our Good Shepherd through each day and live a peaceful existence while still accomplishing plenty! Everything we need to get done, will get done, just maybe not today…we won’t know the best plan for each day until we give God a chance to work out the details, while we wait upon Him.