George MacDonald once said that “If I devote the entirety of my day on what God would have me do, I would have no time second guessing it.” This is something that I have been meditating hard on as of late. There is a very fine line between what God would have me do, and what the ideology of the flesh would suggest I do. Here arises a problem; man does not have the capacity to devote our day to what God would have us do. This is a hard truth but a truth nonetheless. We may wake up every morning in meditation and declare to our God that I will do thy will always, and mean it from the bottom of our hearts, but we are sinners. We are a creation that has it in its heart to do well, but equipped with a mind to reason. Sometimes reason doesn’t collaborate well with the Kingdom. When collaboration fails, we turn to our own will. The minute we do this, even if for only the briefest moment, we turn away from the will of God. You see, we have a sort of protection while we are in the will of God. But the minute we turn away from that will, and execute our own self will, we are like a lone wolf in the midst of wolves.
Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am tempted by God”; for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He Himself tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, brings forth death.
We tend to hold a certain justification in regards to our temptations; that is that God is tempting us for a reason unknown to us according to his will. In our minds, our temptation in this world has nothing to do with what we have necessarily done; it is all part of a bigger plan. Well I am here writing to you today suggesting that maybe our temptations in this world are due entirely to what we have done. James wrote that God does not tempt. That temptation is a certain type of evil, and evil has no association with God. If that is true, then how is it that we have found ourselves in a position of hardship, despair, and temptation? Is it not because we have at some specific point turned away from the protection that is God’s will? Is it not possible that we have traveled into a region where God has no business being in? If our will brings about sin, and sin is evil, and evil is a vice that God has no association with; then I believe that it is safe to say that the walk that one travels in that situation is a road that God does not travel. At that point, it is up to man to walk back to Christ. And believe me, He will be waiting.
I believe I would be flawed if I did not point out the difference between hardships in God’s will, and temptations of our own making. There are hardships in God’s will. Do not walk away from this passage thinking that anytime an occurrence comes to pass that you feel is unjust, it is because you have entered your own will; this is untrue. God’s will is a path that we do not understand. We tend to fear, and dislike what we do not understand. But the difference is that the hardships in God’s will do bring about a purpose that is for a greater good. We may not realize or understand it at that moment but it will. A hardship that has arose from your own self will, on the other hand, will do nothing but take you further from the Kingdom of God and the will that He has bestowed upon you.
This writing is truly from a holy place for me right now. It is something that I have been battling with hard. For the past couple of months I have been under the impression that I am where I am right now because God wants me here right now. Day-by-day though I began to realize that this was something more; it was something of my own making. What I was going through had nothing to do with God. It had everything to do with myself. It wasn’t till I stopped expecting God to deliver me out of this place, and instead delivered myself back to God did I begin to feel consciousness. Take these words to heart, and apply them to your walk. These are hard truths, but they are essential.
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