How Can I Know What God Wants Me to Do?
Do you ever look to the heavens and ask, What do you want me to do?
I remember many years back I was in a difficult situation; it felt hopeless. I needed a word from God, so I begged and pleaded with Him to just tell me what to do. As I cried out to Him, pleading for help, I ran upstairs, grabbed my Bible, and flung it open. The words in my New King James translation confused me at first. It started, “Therefore gird up the loins of your mind,”. As I read the next few scriptures and studied the commentary, I knew what God was asking me to do.
This is what He is asking us to do today – regardless of our situation. Let’s look at this passage in the New Living Translation to make it a bit clearer…
So prepare your minds for action and exercise self-control. Put all your hope in the gracious salvation that will come to you when Jesus Christ is revealed to the world. So you must live as God’s obedient children. Don’t slip back into your old ways of living to satisfy your own desires. You didn’t know any better then. But now you must be holy in everything you do, just as God who chose you is holy. For the Scriptures say, “You must be holy because I am holy.”
1 Peter 1:13-16
Why am I sharing this passage today? Because so often we are not doing what God has asked us to do. We are weary and distracted and possibly being led astray. We are focused on our feelings and not standing strong in our faith. What would happen if we shifted our perspective and complied with the instruction found in this passage?
3 Things God Wants Us to Do…
1. Put ALL your hope in Jesus.
We say we do; but do we? Where is our godfidence? You know, our confidence that God will accomplish all that He promised He would do? Yes, life here on this earth is hard. We struggle and experience pain and fall prey to our disappointments. But still we have hope because our hope is found in Jesus. This life is temporary, just a blip of time before Jesus comes to take us to our eternal home.
In the meantime, because our hope is in Jesus, we must prepare our minds for action. How do we do that? Well, we stop giving into our feelings and let our faith in Jesus guide our thoughts and align them with the truth of God’s word. We exercise self-control, we become sober-minded, and of good judgement. We behave as daughters of the King, who reflect His light, love as He loves, and share Him with those around us.
2. Live as God’s obedient child.
To obey God’s word, we must know what it says and learn to apply it. When we create a rhythm of studying and applying God’s Word, we are put on a path of transformation – experiencing spiritual maturing. We are not to look like the world – doing all the things they are doing, behaving the way the world behaves. We are to be set apart.
This passage warns us, Don’t slip back into your old ways of living to satisfy your own desires. It is so easy to blend in – to do what everyone else is doing. If we are not careful, we look just like the rest of the world; we want what they want. Suddenly things become important to us that really have no eternal importance.
What are you making important in your life that is not important to God?
(Yikes! There is no judgement here. We all do this. But right now is a good time to realize it and reprioritize what is important in our life. Nothing matters more than our continuously growing relationship with Jesus. Amen? Amen!)
Think of it this way – we have 2 choices – to live for me or to live for Him. Every day we get to choose whether we are we going to live for our personal desires or are we going to live to please God? With every decision, action, or thought, we are either stepping toward Jesus or away from Him. His way is always best. Let’s start living as His obedient daughter.
3. We must be holy because God is holy.
The thought of being holy is intimidating. We want to just brush this off because we know we can never be holy. God is holy. Yet, this phrase is listed multiple times in the Bible. We can never be as holy as God is because absolute holiness belongs to Him alone. Raise your hands in worship and declare that He is holy.
Yet, His word tells us that we are to be holy. So, we are to be growing in personal holiness as we grow to know our Holy God. It is a process. It requires surrender – a continual surrendering of our flesh, our desires, and our ways and instead stepping into a new way of living with Him.
This holy way of living means to be dedicated to God. This is where it gets a little blurry for us. We are dedicated to a lot of things and God is one of them. But remember “God is a jealous God” – so we are to be dedicated to Him. And when that is our core, it impacts everything else that we do. Because we are dedicated to God, we do not make the same choices as those who are not. We become separated from the sin of this world.
Pow! That is a lot. Yet – honestly, it really is so simple. We need to stop conforming to the world. We cannot honor God and fit in with the crowd at the same time. It may be uncomfortable. We may lose a few friends. But, doing what God wants us to do leads us into an intimate relationship with our Savior. There we find everything we have ever wanted and everything we need. Jesus is our Hope and He will return in all His glory and we will experience complete deliverance from our sinful natures.
I can’t wait until that day! In the meantime, let’s focus on doing what God wants us to do.
Note from Pam:
Thank you for reading this blog post. I hope it blesses your heart and encourages you in your walk with God - no matter what is going on in your life. Won’t you give Him your struggle today?
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