Desires

I at times find the pure desires of my heart turned into selfish desires.  Then the battle rages.  The desire to have God grant the desires of my heart.  I seek, pursue, and refuse to allow them to go away.  Is this wrong?  Is there a time to forget the desires of our heart, to just let them fall away with no resolution?  If they are no longer pure in intention, yes!  How quickly I lose sight of my purpose.  Anything that is not drawing me closer to God, is in essence wrong, because it's keeping me from experiencing everything God desires me to experience.  "Sometimes God doesn't give you what you think you want, not because you don't deserve it but because you deserve more."  Sometimes our pure desires turn into obsession and drive us away from our purpose.  Sometimes we limit God by our desires and He calls us to dream bigger.  Sometimes we seek to fill the void with things other than God and God desires us to know wholeness, and will not grant us these selfish desires.
Then you throw in the fact that God has given us free will.  Maybe our desires are pure, and continue to center on growing closer to God, but these desires might hinge on other people.  This gets tricky, cause now we may be pursuing pure desires and come up short.  But God is faithful and will bring good out of any and every situation, IF WE LET HIM.  That is the tough part.  Sometimes we must wait and rest in the Lord.  Don't get so busy that we fail to listen to what God is saying.  Don't forget that it's a relationship with God, that it takes time, and that to imitate Him (Ephesians 5:1) we must study Him, spend time with Him, and pursue Him!

100 Post

100 post later, and almost 3 years later, this blog has seen me through good and bad.  Started as a way to help me process my thoughts, it has helped me to express myself and to analyze what God has been teaching me.  This blog really has helped me get through some rough times.  It has drawn me closer to God and has been a huge part of my adventure.  I hope it will see me through many more adventures in the years to come!

Taming the Tongue

James 3:5-6

"Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark.  The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body.  It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell."

James 1:19

"Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry."

"Be Holy as I am Holy"

"Be perfect therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."  -Matthew 5:48

"If we could manage to eradicate one of our faults every year, how soon it would make perfect men of us!  As things are, it is just the other way round; we often feel that our lives were better, and more free from taint, when we first turned to God than they are now, after all these years spent in religion." Thomas a Kempis

Waiting

We are a society that hates to wait! We constantly maneuver our cars so we can get ahead, we switch lines at the super market to get through quicker, and we plan our days to the t so that we can spend every minute.  Yet God ask us to slow down.  He ask us to wait patiently!  This week I have struggled with where I'm at, where I'm going, and why the promises God has made to me haven't come to fruition.
A passage that I have been focusing on this week is Psalm 37:3-7.  It says, "Trust in the Lord and do good; dwell in the land and cultivate faithfulness. Delight yourself in the Lord; and He will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord, Trust also in Him and He will do it. He will bring forth your righteousness as the light and your judgment as the noonday.  Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him."

This week I have struggled in thinking about my own desires.  Are the desires in my heart pure and is the purpose of my desires to honor God or to seek selfish gain?  This is a tough questions because so often I find my pure desires become selfish desires.  But we must delight ourselves in the Lord and give everything up to Him. And then we must wait patiently.  When we look at the promises God made to Israel, we see that they had to wait years to see these promises come about. So often we skip over the time it took and we just see that God promised them something and they received it.  We then wonder why we don't see God's promises come within days, weeks, or even a year.  But when we look at the time that some people had to wait, it took so many years.  Look at Sarah and Abraham.  They were 90 and 100 before they received their desires.  As hard as it may be too wait, God is faithful and will provide if we delight ourselves in Him. Never give up, wait patiently, and continue to seek God.  He is faithful!