Text: John 6:27-40 (see below)
What is God’s will for your life?
In this passage from John’s Gospel, Jesus states that “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me.” Verse 39 announces that God’s purpose for redemption is to bring people to Jesus and to be transformed by all that he has to offer. As one commentary suggests: “Jesus has come down from heaven to make God’s will visible and accessible to humankind. Faith in Jesus is impossible without God’s initiating will for the world, but human beings retain responsibility for the decisions they make in response to God’s initiative” (New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume IX).
Jesus’ unique ministry was to make God known and accessible. But, what about you? What about me? What does God have in store for your life and mine?
In order to understand or hear God’s will for my life, I have to do three things daily. The first is to read a portion of God’s Word each and every day. I currently use the Daily Lectionary which you can find here http://satucket.com/lectionary/. The Word of God is as relevant today as never before. God is still speaking through the words found in the Bible. By using the Daily Lectionary, over the course of two years, a person will read just about every word of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. What a blessing that would be!
Second, I must make time each and every to be still and to listen for God. This is difficult for silence can produce peacefulness and it can also be threatening. Our world is so full of sound and noise that it is very difficult to be still and to listen for God. However, as we begin to shed the “worldly clatter” of our lives and enter into the chamber of our inner self a marvelous transformation begins to occur.
Henri Nouwen in his book With Open Hands writes beautifully about this moment and the confidence it brings: “Along with the new knowledge of our ‘inner space’ where feelings of love and hatred, tenderness and pain, forgiveness and greed are separated, strengthened, or reformed, there emerges the mastery of the gentle hand. This is the hand of the gardener who carefully makes space for a new plant to grow and who doesn’t pull weeds too rashly, but uproots only those which threaten to choke the young life” (With Open Hands, page 40).
The opportunity to be still and to enter into silence is one of the supreme gifts given to us by the Creator. The more we practice this spiritual discipline, the greater intimacy we will find with God where heart can speak to heart.
The third component to understanding God’s will for my life is the courage to simply live it daily! I greatly appreciate what Matthew Fox has to say about living found in his work A Spirituality Named Compassion (see below). God’s will for your life and for mine is not about being happy or content. That philosophy was created by the Madison Avenue crowd and more importantly the false self.
Following God’s will, more times than not, brings me into conflict with the powers and principalities of this world, conflict with loved ones, and even conflict with the institutional structures such as the Church. But that is okay for nowhere in the Scriptures does it say that following God’s will in our life will keep us from suffering and pain. On the contrary, if you and I are going to live fully into this day, we are bound to run into moments of grief and woundedness. I believe that God calls us not to avoidance but to enter into that pain and discover the great truths found in such anguish and sorrow.
Trust in these three disciplines and with practice you can discover what God’s will is for your life.
Love One Another - Brian
The Goal of Life is Living
Matthew Fox
Our society tends to define happiness as absence of suffering and therefore we strive to invest our creative powers in building temples to security, whether they be the immortal marriage, the immortal job, the immortal corporation or the immortal skyscraper to house that corporation, or the immortal Nation with its invincible army and weaponry. One has to ask how much of this compulsion to wipe out suffering--or to buy it out in the form of insurance of all kinds--is not a symptom of a flight from suffering.
I prefer Pierre Boulez's definition of what life is about. Says he, "The goal of life is not happiness [aka security]; it is living." And living implies suffering. In fact, the creative person--and that hopefully is all of us--takes on additional burdens of suffering by entering fully into living.
Source: A Spirituality Named Compassion
John 6:27-40
Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.’ Then they said to him, ‘What must we do to perform the works of God?’ Jesus answered them, ‘This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.’ So they said to him, ‘What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, “He gave them bread from heaven to eat.” ’ Then Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.’ They said to him, ‘Sir, give us this bread always.’
Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away; for I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.’
No comments:
Post a Comment