One of the cool things about God is that He really knows us and knows what we are capable of. He is also not in the least bit unreasonable. I have learnt that one of the smartest things I can say to God is ‘Yes, Lord’. In saying yes Lord, I set myself in agreement with Him and open the way and my heart for Him to bring change and transformation and enable me to be and do what I never imagined I could be and do.
For instance, many people get scared about following God because they are thinking it’s going to be very hard to live by God’s exacting standards, very hard to fast, very hard to pray, very hard to go to church, very hard to share their faith, very had to do business with integrity, and this is a biggie, to love everybody. They think how can I give up sleeping with my girlfriend, getting drunk on Saturday nights and cursing and lying.
And we can easily mortgage our eternal destinies just so we can keep playing in the mud of life. Yet it need not be so. It need not be so because of the awesomeness of what Jesus did on the cross and the power that He has made available to those who believe in Him; the power to live according to His heart. When you stretch out your hand and put it in His, you commit your heart and life to Christ, He saves you and literally destroys the power and influence of sin over your life.
And as you walk with Him you continually experience His overcoming power in your own being. He puts you in a place where you can do what you could not do before, where you can say no to what you could not say no to before. The Bible says that the same power that raised Jesus from the dead works in us. The power of God is available to us if we want it to obey Him. Salvation is supernatural and makes supernatural power available to us. But we must choose to tap into it.
Yet God goes even further, He even changes our hearts and our desires. The Bible says that He enables us to will and to do according to His good pleasure. So whatever God says He wants, all you need to do is say Yes Lord, change my heart, my desires so that I too will want what you want and then enable me to do it. That is why Isaiah says if you are willing and obedient, you will eat the good of the land.
The question is not ‘Can you do it’? The question is ‘Are you willing?’ and ‘Are you willing for Him to make you willing’? If you are, He will change you, you will find yourself loving the things you were worried you could not do, and hating those things you thought you could not live without. You discover you are more than you thought you were, you can do more than you thought you could do because the divinity of God comes upon your humanity. You step into destiny.
He grows, you, develops you, expands your borders, destroys your limitations, and turns you into another man, another woman. He can and will do it, if you let him. And the first step is surrender. But does it matter enough? That’s what it boils down to really, ‘What really matters to me, what is the supreme value in my life’? Do I want to fulfill God’s original purpose for my life above all, or do I want to hold on to trinkets while He is offering me precious stones? What I hold on to is my god. Question : given my current life choices, who then is my god?