Daily Devotional

Word of the Day

Are My Decisions Submitted to Fathers Will?

Our heart's true desire needs to be for the will of God to be done in us on earth as it is in heaven. As we pray for the will of God, we submit ourselves to His will and not ours, to His way and not ours, and to His wisdom and not the world's. Have we truly been emptied of self? The emptying of self will is what the cross is all about. We don't want to think is that the cross has anything to do with our works, although works are the byproduct of the choice to subordinate our will to the will of God. The cross is not about our works or performance, but the motive behind them. The cross is not something that we bear as persecution or affliction. The cross is the daily pursuit of the heart and will of God. It is our purposing to destroy everything within us that would oppose the will of God.

We sometimes think we are in the will of God but the fact is that many are still calling the shots in our lives. We believe we've embraced the cross of Jesus Christ but we are still living lives not submitted to His will. Not saying first, "If the Lord wills, as James says, I will do ‘thus and so.'" We've already made up our minds and seek Scriptures to justify the course we've chosen. We have not truly sought the mind of God first. "I'm going to go do this for the Lord. I'm going to go here and preach. I'm going to go preach in this manner. I'm going to minister in this way. I'm going to deny this." We do good works motivated by self will. But we have not said, "Lord, what's Your will in this situation?" God is not looking for works. He's looking for obedience.

The key to the cross is knowing what God want to do in your life right now and to be able to say, "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me." (Galatians 2:20) It is no longer I that live. The "I" is the ego. The "I" is the self that has the greatest of all of God's gifts: free will, volition, and choice. We can't control anything that's happening in our lives except our next choice. You control the next choice you make whether it is the choice to resign yourself to the will of God, the choice to boast and to praise in the midst of adversities, or the choice to serve others instead of yourselves. The cross is the choice of yielding our will to the wisdom and will of God. It is death to self, death to ambition, and death to independence.

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