May 14

“As God’s servant you should have no other agenda than to be obedient to whatever He tells you.  God does not need you to dream great dreams for your life, your family, your business, or your church.”  H. Blackaby, Experiencing God Day-by-Day, 5/14

I use to think that God often gave us the “great dreams” for our lives in order for us to have something to aim at.  But I’m beginning to see that He doesn’t work this way.  Any “dream” that we might start out with in our youth can’t be of God.   A dream is not the same thing as the “desires of our heart” that scripture says that God gives us.  To dream, according to the dictionary, is to invent, devise, or concoct.  The desires of our heart are the natural outcome of giving our hearts to God.  Hannah W. Smith says that our hearts, as referred to in the Bible, are our wills.  So when God says He will give us the desires of our hearts, He is saying that if we’ve surrendered our wills to Him, He will fulfill His desires through us.  Everything belongs to Him--even those things we think are our desires.  Even when we go against God’s will and do our own thing, even those things belong to Him in the sense that He controls their eventual results.  They will be labeled as refuse in His Kingdom, and we enter Heaven with nothing to show for our time here on earth.

“Now if any one builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw--each man’s work will become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done....If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.”  1 Corinthians 3:12-13, 15