God’s Will and Your Heart’s Desire

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My favorite time of the day is my early morning prayer time. I love to pull open the blinds, take in the morning light and snuggle up with my bible, my journal, and my Jesus blanket. An important part of this morning routine is my daily commitment to serve the Lord in whatever ways He wills for me, concluding with, “not my will, but Yours be done.”

As I think back over the years, I am not sure that I’ve always meant this prayer. I mean, I like when my will is done, don’t you? Besides, doing God’s will can be hard to figure out, or can seem like a set of complicated instructions to follow (probably instructions that I won’t even like).

As I look back, I see clearly that when I thought in this way, I really didn’t know the Lord. I projected onto Him the characteristics of the father-figures in my life without taking the time to build a relationship with Him.

Father Gregory Cleveland, writing about discerning and following God’s will says, “Once we are seeking God, secure in His love, we can receive His guidance through His loving providence.”

Notice the order of operation here:

1. We are seeking God

2. We are secure in God’s love for us

3. We receive His guidance through His loving providence

Receiving God’s guidance (i.e.: discerning His will) comes third. First, we seek Him and let Him love us. His will is that we would do His will within the context of a loving and secure relationship with Him! Not out of obligation or fear or for any other reason except an authentic desire to please Him and stay with Him always.

We begin the process of doing God’s will by seeking Him. We can seek Him in His chosen abode, which is our very own heart. How worth the effort it is to cut out noise and distractions so we can enter into the stillness and quiet of our own hearts.

If you find this difficult, perhaps this simple prayer might help:

Take two or three slow, deep breaths – breathing in and then exhaling out. Place your hands on your heart or open them to the Lord and say, “Here I am Lord, love me. Here I am Lord, bless me.”

Doing so, we present ourselves to Him and extend an invitation to Him to love, to bless. We come with no other agenda. And then we sit in the quiet, believing and expecting that He is loving and He is blessing.

“For surely, I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart.”

– Jer 29:11-13

Discerning and embracing God’s will is a love story! Seeking to do God’s will creates a trajectory for our lives that is meant to unfold in loving relationship with Him. Our seeking Him leads to finding Him, which leads to growing ever more secure in His love for us. In the security and power of His love, we find ourselves desiring to do only what He wants us to do. We find ourselves desiring to be only who He wants us to be.

And before we know it, we are doing His will consistently.

It is worth noting that God does the heavy lifting, so to speak, in bringing about the fulfillment of His will within each of our lives. For our part, the process is not a cerebral one, it is a process of the heart – seeking, opening, allowing, receiving – as God slowly awakens desires within us. The desires He awakens are the very desires that He wove into the fibers of our being when He created us.

I don’t imagine God is ever too worried about whether or not we are doing His will, but rather are we letting Him love us in the way that we were made to be loved by Him. Ultimately, we’ll arrive at the same place – God’s will – but the journey will be much sweeter.

“We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become.”

– St. Claire of Assisi