Many church and ministry leaders have committed themselves and fought for countless years in the pursuit of laudable tasks. Yet, many have found themselves at the mercy of these very pursuits and far from the grace which God extends to those who assert His will for their life.
It seems a trend in the community of believers to take our own dreams and aspirations as the appropriate motivations to pursue a goal in our life. Finding our innate passions and abilities as the foundation upon which we build our lives. We fantasize about our ideal ministry, career or organization and retrospectively redeem those desires to match the gospels imposition upon our life. The question we must ask ourselves is if the very origin of our model is God breathed. Are we truly striving to discern God’s desired plan and role for our lives.
It is easy for our own strengths and passions to cloud our pursuit of God’s will for our lives. Certainly God desires for us to excel in our aspirations and utilize the talents which He has imparted, but are we asking Him to redeem our own selfish indulgences, or are we genuinely yielding ourselves to His authority and requesting for Him to be the Lord of our dreams.
A popular trend in our community is to derive pleasure and purpose from the aspects of our daily ambitions which are aligned with the role of the gospel. Searching through our past and looking to the future for ways in which the manor of our actions have and will bring glory to the kingdom. While this pursuit is laudable, it should come as a means of grace poured upon a life in which we have already found conviction in living.
The greatest temptation of a motivated believer is to take the gift of our creativity and abuse it to execute our own desires. We can quickly fall into a model of living in which we become masters of ‘redeeming’ our personal goals. Scripture mandates that we seek to pursue God’s will and adopt His own plans for our lives. How then can we excuse a life in which we are scrambling to seek God’s blessing for plans which are not His, but we have already rebelliously set into action.
I think many times we can find ourselves, confused and disheartened when tragedy befalls our pursuits; asking God why He has not blessed our work. When our plans become frustrated by the tumult of life, it seems natural to identify those frustrations as a failure in execution, a reflection of our own inability to complete a task with the diligence and attentiveness with which we have been tasked.
However, our success should serve as poignant a reflection of our subjection to God as are our failures. Yet, we readily find ourselves preserving vestiges of self lordship, which belong solely to our depraved origin.
The beautiful freedom which God provides as master of our life, is His compassionate mediation between our labor and results of our labor. Our successes and failures are no more deserved then is God’s grace to save us from their penalty. In the realm beyond a relationship with the Lord, individuals rightly find their identity in the results of their labor, gauging their commitment and ability by the success of their pursuits. We as believers can enslave ourselves to a similar model, one which is close to that of the world yet slightly modified, but still severely short of the model we are mandated to adopt in scripture. We pursue our own interests in the hopes of bringing glory to the kingdom and chose to gauge our results with a myriad of perspectives. Some chose to see failures as a clear declaration of our inability to follow God’s principles and thus a failure to reach the goals and standards which we set for ourselves, communicating to us that we are a failure as a Christian. Others still chose to see failures and success as a way to gauge the path which is laid our for their lives, successes being associated with God’s will and failures with areas that we were not meant to succeed because they fall outside of His desire for our lives. While the lexicon which we can apply to our varied perceptions of failure and success amount to a great many, their seems to be a continual model for the appropriate response to life’s mysterious pattern which transcends all of them.
If we awaken each morning with a genuinely repentant and yielded heart and mind, one which seeks to assert God’s supremacy in our lives, we no longer equate the results of our pursuits as having a correlation to our own success as an individual. Being each day as a bondservant to our Lord, we strive to follow His declaration for our every action and gauge our days upon an entirely different scale. We reflect humbly upon our hearts, seeking to discern the level of yielded contrition we have maintained. Thus, deriving success and failure from our sensitivity and responsiveness to Christ’s imposing voice on our souls.
Applying this truth to our dreams and pursuits then becomes a dangerous proposition. If we are truly seeking to yield every aspect of our person to the Lord, what then remains which is truly our own? Our dreams, our goals, our passions, abilities, strengths, pleasures, interests, desires and plans all becoming a forum of sacrifice and surrender to our Lord.
How then are we to surrender our dreams to the Lord and adopt His own in their place? We must be critical of our own heart and minds in a manor which becomes hostile to our original nature. We must be zealously vigilant to seek out and eradicate all forms of idolatry which manifest themselves in the form of personal interest. After all, if love is our motivation for living as believers, it is no longer our own interests which prevail, rather we live as selfless sacrificial beings. Seeking for the glory of God, by attending to the interests of others.
Ask yourself these questions:
Am I seeking to assert my dreams or God’s?
What goals have I made lord in my life?
If the area in which I commit my time produces no discernable fruit, can I derive hope from my yielding to God?
If I derive success from my life’s labor do I attribute it to God alone?
I do not propose this contrite reflection by fear, but from the joy and grace which a life lived in subjection to God provides. God is our great provider and the manor in which He can provide and sustain you is determined by the ways in which you allow Him to do so. It is certainly a trepidatious and for some foreign realm.
So if you are seeking to commit yourself to the exploration of the life of servitude to God’s authority, diligently seek the company of His fellow servants and share in the stories of His great provision. Worship of God is the very evidence of this work in His servants lives and something undeniably present in those who genuinely call God their Father, Ruler, Most High, Provider.
Are the dreams you have your own?