If there is anything we all want to know as followers of Jesus it is the will of God for our life. The problem as I see it is “Knowing” is often very difficult to identify. Why is it so hard to discern the will of God when both the Lord and we want it badly? Something similar could be said about the 10 commandments in which we are told to love the Lord with all our heart, mind and strength and yet if we struggle to identify what love is we may never really reach the goal of consistently doing so. Knowing the will of God has so much to do with how we “Hear” God or don’t.

I have heard many sermons about the desire of Jesus with regards to going to the cross, as he was in the garden of Gethsemane just before the cross. The topic explores his obedience to God’s will in that it was even hard for Jesus to do the Father’s will in this case.  Did Jesus have second thoughts about his purpose for coming to earth as a sacrifice?

Ever since coming to Christ in 1969 I have been hunting for “WISDOM” because I realized how deficient I was without it. I discovered early in life that in order to survive in this world you need wisdom. Unfortunately I learned how to be street smart but not God smart. In other words, I could get away with dishonesty and lack integrity and yet fool people into believing me and trusting me so I could get what I wanted. In the end my success was always bittersweet and not what I knew I was made for. I gained “Fools Gold,” not real success.

If you have lived for any length of time as a true follower of God you will encounter periods in life when it seems your sense of God and his will are gone or at least obscured. These times can be caused by our own doing if we have drifted away from God but they can also come because God is removing his presence, or at least the awareness of his presence, to develop our inner self because the heart is so easily fooled and so easily twisted.

It is so easy to read scripture with a blank stare and think you have edified yourself with the word of God even though you don’t understand what God just spoke to you. Simply reading God’s word doesn’t change us until we have understanding and even then change doesn’t happen until we surrender to God’s will in the thing he is speaking to us about. There are a lot of religious people in the world who are fooling themselves that God loves who they are and what they live for.

It is amazing to me how mixed up many Christian concepts of heaven are.  They seem to be a blend of what the world believes, what superstition says and what they might have been taught at church or in bible study group.  I think the average believer spends very little time in scripture and consequently they don’t voice their beliefs with other Christians because they can’t defend those beliefs. We live in an age where the average person, whether Christian or secular, has access to many different translations of the Bible and yet we still seem to know so little of what the word of God actually says about the subject of heaven….other than it’s preferable to going to hell.

Honestly, I must admit that I don’t always love fervently nor do I always do so with sincere love.  In this life, I have found that it’s very easy to become deceived or misled by emotions and other desires that literally wage war against the soul. My walk in Christ is not always what I want it to be and thus I know I must pursue the Holy Spirit daily if I am ever to hope to live how Jesus intended for his followers.  

Hope is an indispensable value in life that we all need, but too often we fail to acquire it nor to strengthen the hope we have. Hope is the force that propels us to overcome obstacles in life and enables us to accomplish unimaginable things like discovering a medicine like penicillin that cures a multitude of sickness, or maybe building something that changes our life like cell phones. It use to be that those who had hope in God’s loving kindness were among the leading scientists who discovered cures and medicine that changed our lives for the better. Today greed and money seem to be the drivers for discovery, and there is often a big price tag for those of us on the receiving end.

Today, many preachers refer to the body of Christ as “Sinners” while Paul refers to believers as “Saints”. Is it because our loyalties are divided and we don’t seek to walk as saints or is it because we have been taught a lie about our new nature? Whatever the reason behind this bad teaching, it moves believers farther from Christ instead of closer to him.

I have no idea what 2025 holds for you.  It may be a year where you reach your goals.  If so, it will have more to do with your attitude than your circumstances.  Success in life is mostly about our perspective on what’s possible or impossible and what’s valuable to us.