Imagine being God. I know that’s a stretch, but just humor me for a minute. Imagine having cultivated people for centuries to know you and love you, even clothing yourself in flesh and dying on their behalf to establish an unbroken relationship with them. You’ve even put your Spirit inside of those who are willing to receive you. You’ve done everything necessary to bring them into close, intimate union, and many have accepted your invitation.
Now, how would you prefer to motivate those people? How would you like to get them in sync with your plan? How do you work with them and draw them into your purposes? Do you motivate them with guilt? With pain or the fear of adversity? With rigid commands? Or is there a better way? Clearly there is. If your Spirit is in them, you can move them from within, and not through shame or guilt but through desires and dreams. This is how all relationships ideally work.
That’s what God intends, yet many who have come to him still function out of a desperate need for affirmation, a superficial attempt to soothe deep wounds, a desire to feel righteous and therefore act like it, and so on. God prefers to heal us of all wounds and fill all needs, and then to move us through the desires and dreams he has put within us, if we can ever be convinced they are his.
It is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. (Philippians 2:13 ESV)
How does he do this? Ask him. Offer him full freedom in your heart and mind and see what happens. Get rid of expectations and let him take you on an adventure. This is how he prefers to lead—and how he takes you places you never thought you would go.
