What Does God Want?

01/28/2007

What does God want from us in this life? It can be stated very simply, God wants a devoted heart. And why would God want that? Because out of that should flow a happy person. Notice the word, should, because it is not always so.

And why would that be?

Not because of who God is, but because of who we are and what we do with a heart that is devoted to Him—we mess things up. We get tangled in our own web of confusion, and in trying so hard, and in the mistakes we make, and then we miss the simplicity of our Father just wanting the best for us in our lives. Our Father loves us, and we are His children, and He longs for us to be happy children.

Romans 12:2 says, “Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will know what God wants you to do, and you will know how good and pleasing and perfect his will really is.”

As I read that this morning, I noticed the good, the pleasing, and the perfect part of what Paul was saying here. And then I especially noticed the pleasing part, because as I read it I realized that sometimes we so long to please God in our devotion to Him, we forget that He longs to please us even more. His will in our lives is not there to make us miserable; it’s there to make us happy. Not happy as in the surface things of this world, but happy because all that He asks us to do is good, and it not only pleases Him, it pleases our inner being, and we see God’s perfection in it.

Sometimes we complicate things, because that’s how our mind works. I know I think things to death sometimes—and although in being a writer that helps in the processing and then in the expressing of so much of the stuff we all struggle with—I find in that, that the controlling nature that God has been working out of me for years sometimes still gets the better of me. And at this point in my life, it seems God sort of sits back and waits for me to “come around,” until I acknowledge that I’ve got my hands on the steering wheel again, and that He’s been relinquished to the back seat. Then I’ve got to put on the brakes, go back to square one, which is mostly praying and not thinking so much, and give the control back to Him.

Why? Is it because God is a control freak and He just wants to run our lives? No, it’s because God’s will is good and pleasing and perfect, and He wants what’s best for us. He doesn’t want us taking things too fast and driving our lives over a cliff when He knows the way we should go and would be glad to take over at the wheel if we will only let Him.

We have work to do—sure we do—but we are to be honest in our estimate of ourselves, and measure our value by how much faith God has given us. (Romans 12:3) “God has given each of us the ability to do certain things well.” (Romans 12:6) And we are to use those things in our devotion to Him, but mostly, the bottom line is, we are not to get distracted with them—and that’s so easy to do.

“For the Kingdom of God is not a matter of what we eat or drink, but of living a life of goodness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. If you serve Christ with this attitude, you will please God.” Romans 14:17-18 (NLT)

The Kingdom of God is not full of rules and regulations, it’s not full of lists of things to do, the Kingdom of God is about having a relationship with our Lord and being at peace, living a life filled with goodness, and knowing true joy in our hearts. God didn’t create us to be miserable!

It is said that a parent is only as happy as their saddest child. That’s probably very true. So, how happy of a Parent does that make our Father in Heaven if we are miserable in our devotion to Him? That’s not what He wants. Although many tears are cried on this earth, and many trials are gone through, that is not how God created us in the Garden. The Garden was a perfect place, with perfect relationships, and with an ease in living that is beyond what we can imagine now.

Our Father literally walked in the Garden with Adam and Eve. He talked with them and provided for them, and their “job” was to tend to the garden. (Genesis 2:15) Not toil in the soil with thistles and thorns—that came after things got messed up, and we’ve continued to mess many things up since then.

Man fell, sure, that we all know, but man was given a fresh new start in Jesus Christ. The slate is wiped clean when we embrace our Savior—and even though we still live among the thorns and thistles—we can find a life of joy and peace and one that pleases God when our hearts belong to Him. That is His desire for us because He wants His children to be happy.

Paul prayed, “…that God, who gives you hope, will keep you happy and full of peace as you believe in him.” (Romans 15:13 NLT) So why do we so often drive ourselves crazy in this life? Why are we not able to just be the children of God we’re called to be, and let Him be our Father? I know part of the reason is that the enemy lies to us and says that if we don’t do something great, then our lives have been wasted and we haven’t served God as we should have. But also buried in those lies, is the lie about what “great” actually is, and I think God has to weed that out of us. The Bible says, “Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world...” There’s a different scale in the enemy’s camp, than there is in God’s. In God’s camp, some of the very least will be the greatest. How can what God has called us to do be measured on any human scale of understanding? We can’t see what God is creating from the minutest details of our lives, the way He can.

My Grandma had her days of serving on a seemingly larger scale—one that we can measure. She had a beautiful voice and she used it to serve the troops during World War II by visiting the hospital wards and taking requests. She would stand at the soldiers’ bedsides and sing their favorite songs to them. Also during the war, my grandparents would invite the soldiers into their home and record their voices on the latest equipment at that time. The soldiers’ recorded messages were then sent to their families far away. It seemed my grandparents were using what God had given them to serve others, and that’s a good thing.

But, what I remember most about my Grandma was her heart—her simple way of serving others every day. I didn’t think of it as a ministry, although it was. I didn’t see it as anything huge on the grand scale of things, but it was. She touched lives wherever she went, simply because she loved God and it showed. In her later years, although she baked the birthday cakes there in her Senior Citizen’s village, and delivered their little paper to each door, there was nothing grandiose about the life she lived for God. I think she had finally gotten it pretty close to “right,” by just being who she was in her Father’s eyes each day she lived.

When my parents owned a restaurant that had an outside garden area, I remember her tending to that garden under the walnut tree for hours. Raking up all the leaves and making sure the plants looked nice. She was in her 80’s by then, and probably had all the aches and pains any 80 year old would have, but she never complained, she just quietly worked along doing what she could. Those that ate under that walnut tree never would have known that my grandma had a ministry there in the garden where they enjoyed their meal. To them it was just a restaurant, to my grandma; it was where she spent her serving heart during her final years.

When we think about the people who influenced us, or showed us how it’s done in “God’s book,” these are usually the people who influenced our walk with God the most. Oh sure, we’ll remember the Billy Grahams of this world for their greatness as people of God, but most times they won’t have touched our hearts like those with the simple calling, those that weave their way in and out of our lives almost unnoticed at the time.

Have you ever heard of a man named Tertius? God brought him to my attention just now. He’s the one who wrote for Paul in Romans. He wrote in Romans 16:22, “I, Tertius, the one who is writing this letter for Paul, send my greetings, too, as a Christian brother.” (NLT) Who was Tertius? Why was he with Paul, and why would Paul not pen these writings in his own hand? I’m sure there are answers for these questions in History that can be found, but I think the point that God was making in drawing my attention to his name was that this man goes mostly unremembered for his service to our Lord. Paul we know, Paul we revere, Paul was truly a man who honored and served God—but was Tertius any less a servant of God? Was he not doing exactly what God was calling him to do in his life? Who will be seated closest to our Lord in Heaven? Paul or the man who was so devoted to God that he was there to serve a servant, to help in any way he could, even if no one ever remembered his name…

We battle against that, at least, our flesh does. We think it should be so much greater, the things God calls us to do, but what if it is simply serving a servant of our Lord. Would we be willing to spend our lives doing that, to go seemingly unnoticed and not lose our focus on what God was calling us to do? Maybe it was easier for Tertius, without all the huge ministries that are happening around us, the large churches, the speakers and the conferences and the book writers and the musicians and the ways to feed the poor, help the homeless, the list could go on and on. Maybe it was simpler back then for the Lord’s servants, to focus on just one thing, like penning the words for Paul. It seems now if we aren’t called to do something “great,” we’re not called at all, but I believe that is a lie from the devil himself.

First and foremost, God says, “Here I am. Spend time with Me. Get to know Me. Learn to listen to Me.” Secondly, God says, He will show us the way. It may be penning a letter for someone in a nursing home, it may be raking up leaves in a garden, it may be speaking to thousands of people, or leading worship for the Billy Graham crusade. We can’t know the heavenly value of our earthly calling in God’s eyes just yet.

The way we see things, most times, does not match up with how God sees things. Just this morning I was reading in Genesis about God saying, “’Let there be light,’ and there was light.” But then in reading on, the sun and the moon were not made until the fourth day. Wait, here I always thought that the sun gave the day light and the moon gave some light in the darkness, but God’s word says that the “sun, presides during the day” and “the moon, presides through the night.” It is true that God, “set these lights in the heavens to light the earth,” but maybe they are not the light that God created on day one, maybe they are merely an instrument that God uses to disperse that light over all the earth—just as the pen that moves while listening to another speak.

This may be confusing, I know, but I write this simply to say that we can go through our whole lives thinking things are one way—what we view as great is great, and what we view as small is small—being satisfied with our understanding of it, until God intervenes in our thinking and shows us a new way of looking at it. I mean, I’ve read this chapter in Genesis numerous times, but it wasn’t until this morning that I noticed this part about the light, the sun, and the moon. When we spend time with our Lord, He can transform us into a new person by changing the way we think. (Romans 12:2) We can’t do that on our own because most times we’re too set in the way we’ve always done things, and the way we’ve always seen things, and the way we’ve always heard things should be. We get locked up, and Jesus has come to set us free from all of that!

The Jews were locked into their laws from Moses. That’s not a bad thing, in itself, because it pointed out the way that God would like all of us to live our lives. Wouldn’t this be a different world if we all followed the Ten Commandments to the letter of the law, but we can’t, and our Father knew that. That’s why His plan was always to send Christ to save us from our misery in falling short of those commandments. God didn’t want to leave us there, in our miserable state, after He created us for so much more. That’s why He had to get Adam and Eve out of the Garden before they ate from the Tree of Life. They had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, and that messed things up, but if they had then eaten from the Tree of Life, we would have all had to live in this messed up world forever, and we really don’t want that…really, we don’t. God wants so much more for us!

God wants us to be happy! If we’re not, we need to go back to square one and start over. I’m not talking about the times when the fiery trials are at their worst. Those times are difficult, to say the least, and we learn so many things as we travel through them, but I’m talking about the day-to-day way of being when life is just moving along and we’re looking for some direction for what comes next. What comes next, or should I say first, is to be with the One who knows us best and wants us to know Him. Why is that the hardest thing in the world to do? Because it is the most important, and the enemy will distract us with everything under the sun to keep us from knowing God. He’ll even use the ministry we believe we’ve been called to, and that’s one of the trickiest deceptions of all. Next he’ll use the responsibilities we have been given, helping us move quickly into them so that we don’t have time to pray. And when we are reminded to pray, as we hurry on our way, he’ll tell us that those prayers don’t count so don’t even go there, we better wait until we have the proper time to do that. Lies, upon lies, that’s what the enemy is made of, and we fall for them until we work ourselves up into a miserable example of what this life looks like. Then he tells us the best thing to do is just to isolate ourselves so that no one else knows of our pain. Do you see the pit getting deeper as we’re being sucked into it?

How do we put a stop to it?
We can you know…because that’s what God desires for us to do.

“Don’t let evil get the best of you, but conquer evil by doing good.” (Romans 12:21) And the “goodest” thing we can do is to spend time with our Lord. Bottom line. Keep coming back to our Father until He makes all things right and clear and peaceful. He has all the answers, if we will only take the time to ask. He wants to share them with us, if we will only take the time to listen. He wants to bask us in His love and warmth and care if we will only let Him. The enemy wants us to push God away for one reason only, so we’ll be miserable while we’re here. We may be saved, we may be going to Heaven when we die, but he wants to make the journey as tough as it can be before he gets left behind forever.

We can all get caught up in the enemy’s web of deception, but as long as the end result of that is learning and growing closer to our Lord through it all, the enemy still loses. God will always take what is bad and turn it into good, when we love Him.

Does the Lord want our whole-hearted devotion?
Yes, He does.
Why?
Because He knows in that, it is the closest we can get to His original design on this earth—simply tending to His garden and walking with Him each day. In that there is hope, there is happiness and there is peace. Who wouldn’t want that?

If we’re only as happy as our saddest child, but the saddest child of God is happy, what joy it will bring to our Lord!

Diane