The Invitation
Scripture: …How shall he not with him also freely give us all things? (Romans 8:32)
Imagine God, your loving Father wants to do something for you or in you or through you. Imagine that you have thoughts that make you wonder if it’ll stick, if you’ll succeed or if it’ll work out. That dialog between your spirit and the potential negative outcomes can often feel tasking and draining. Often this is when people use the escape route of saying to themselves (and to God): “It’s ok if it doesn’t work - After all God has done for me, I don’t need anything else.”
If God seems to be saying that something is on offer to you please feel free to say “No, thank you” to God. It is just as acceptable as “Yes”. Remember, When God gives you eternal life and you stop being yours but God’s, it is not to take away your volition - it is to restore it. To let your yes be yes and your no be no as it were, so please feel free to interact with God as a loving creator and not as some manipulative boss or parent figure.
What God is telling you today through me, however, is the “No, because I don’t need anything since you’ve done so much for me”... especially the above response crouched consciously or subconsciously in a sense of fear of failure is not how this relationship between you and God is going to work. You don’t get to say “yes” because you don’t think you can say “no” to God; and you don’t get to say “no” under false pretenses of humility.
If God is offering a next step that triggers a weight or feeling of uncertainty, you’re invariably going to feel a certain tension between staying as you are and where you are; and the fear of both great success and great failure. Welcome the tension, nonetheless. Don’t run from it. It is relatively easy to say, you don’t need X or Y from God and, technically, you would be right. If God never did another thing, He has still done a whole lot for humanity (of which you are a part). However, God cares for you. In many ways, you are God’s responsibility. The tension between your fears and God’s hopes and ambitions for you are natural. Even in human relationships we ask, “Is this what ‘I’ really want?” when we come up against the desires of others for us.
The good news is that this is what God would like you to honestly ask. “Is this what I really want?” Many times, you will find that in answering that question you are plumbing the depths of the desires God put in you and uncovering the power of vision by finding the pictures within your private imagination and bringing them up before your conscious mind, examining them, acknowledging them, and re-presenting them before the God who put them there in the first place. Understand that you are looking for a place within yourself where you agree with you. What you will find there is rest. It feels like a sigh of relief and looks like that look you give when you have figured something out about your world and yourself. Throughout this process, God is at work in you both to “will” and to “do” that which will be best for you and your sphere of influence and the world He loves so much.
So, live your life like the stakes are high (Why lie? You matter. Your choices matter. Your life matters. There’s no need to shrink from it). Live your life like your voice matters to the Lord your God. “Come,” He says, “Let us reason together.” There will be times when God instructs you the way the greater commands the lesser. And you obey because you accepted “the” Lord as “your” Lord. But, far more often there will be the still small voice, the invitation that seems to well up from within, the gentle nudge and the quiet call. With this the invitation is to dialog, to come to consensus… to come to agreement. And whatever you bind on earth, will be bound - habits, ways of thinking, sickness, or poverty; and whatever you loose, will be unbindable by any force in the world. Happy walking with God.