What God Wants For You
Monday, June 15
What do you wish for? Maybe you wish you had more money, maybe you wish for better health, maybe you wished you were married or maybe you wished you were single. We all wish for something, maybe your wishes are for someone else, maybe you wish that your parents did not have to work anymore, maybe you wish that your kids would clean up after themselves or maybe you wish for the happiness of someone you love. As believers the way we express our wishes to God is through prayer. But did you know that God also wishes something for you and me? Today I would like you see through the prayer of the apostle Paul what our Heavenly Father wishes for us.
Philippians 1:9 NIV
And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight…
God’s prayer is that your love for him and for everyone else would grow more and more in knowledge. You can’t truly love someone you do not know. The deepest form of love is to know a person’s good and bad qualities and still choose to love them. Isn’t that the way you want to be loved? You can’t be completely loved until you’re completely known. The reason I know that God truly loves me is because He knows exactly who I am, all the good, bad and the ugly but in spite of it all He still chooses to love me. This is the way God wants us to love everyone who He has placed around us.
God also wishes that your love for Him and for others would be accompanied by “depth of insight”. Not only does God want you to know and love others in spite of their defects, He also wants you to appropriately discern which is the proper way to display that love. Sometimes love is kind and other times love is tough. Sometimes love gives; sometimes love takes. How do we know when love should give and when love should take? How do we know when love needs to be kind and when love needs to be tough? The more you get to know a person the more you will be able to discern which is the proper way to express that love. The good news is that love isn’t blind, if it’s blind then it’s not really love.
Do you know why God has placed some nice and some not-so-nice people around you? The reason is so that you would get to know them, the good and the bad. Do you know why God wants you to get to know them? Because He wants you to choose to love them just the way they are. But he also wants you to discern how each one of them should be loved because love always does the right thing.
First and foremost your Heavenly Father wants you to get to know Him more and more everyday and the more you get to know Him the more you will fall in love with Him. But He also wants us to get to know the people around us and He wants us to show the proper love to each one of them.
It’s simple, you can’t completely love someone if you don’t fully know them.
Heavenly Father, I can’t explain the fact that you know me just as I am and yet you still love me. Who in the world loves like that? Only you Lord. Help me to get close enough to those around me that I might be able to extend your unconditional love to others.
Throughout the entire month of June and July
Special Father’s Day Service
This Sunday June 21
“POWER”
Starts June 28th
