Mike and I have always tried to live of life of listening to and obeying God’s voice. The center of His will is exactly where we want to be. Where else would we go? Only He has the words of life. (John 6:68) 🙂
I learned a whole new dimension of hearing and obeying God from a verse sung on IHOP this week:
“My food is to do your will. I surrender.”
It’s taken from Jesus’ words in John 4:34
“My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His work.”
The disciples had left a tired and hungry Jesus near a well while they went into town to buy dinner only to return to find him too excited to sit and eat. They’d missed Jesus’ one-on-one encounter with the “Woman at the Well.” He had spoken life to a lost soul and she’d received it, causing Jesus to feel fed, refreshed, and exuberant. Jesus goes on to say that the harvest is plentiful, giving the word harvest a double meaning: hungry souls/food for us.
There is so much to feed on in this story:
• Jesus has no problem crossing any boundaries to meet you where you are.
• A new husband (or wife), a new car, a new house, a new job; nothing on this earth will ever satisfy us.
• Jesus is the only one who can quench our thirst. He is a fountain of life to us.
• Jesus reads between the lines, sees us as we really are and STILL loves us.
• He longs for true worshipers who worship in spirit and truth.
• Jesus takes pleasure and is fed by ministering life to us.
Then my new found food:
• I, too, am fed not only by the Word and His wonderful presence, but by doing His will and completing the work He has for me.
• The Harvest is not only plentiful, it’s also food.
I watched “This is Our Time” on NetFlix yesterday.
It echoed not only the lesson of “My food is to do your will,” but also the sad lessons of “I surrender,” that I am living out right now:
• Living for Jesus doesn’t always look the way we dreamed it would.
Sometimes it looks insignificant and sometimes it even looks like patience or longsuffering.
No mater what it looks like, it can become food for us when done in love and as worship to the One we love.
• Sometimes our hard work ends in what looks like failure.
Sometimes Christians are eaten by lions, crucified, beheaded.. etc. It doesn’t mean that they failed to do God’s will or to have enough faith or that God failed to keep His promises. It points us to an eternal perspective of the good things He’s prepared for us that we can’t comprehend except by the revelation of His Spirit (1 Corinthians 1:9).
We have to surrender our own ideas to God’s wisdom and open our hearts to His eternal perspective.
• We have a heavenly hope, so let us fix our eyes on Jesus.. who for the joy set before him endured (Hebrews 12).
Not even doing His will will satisfy us without this hope; this joy set before us… without
seeing how we excite and satisfy the longing of His heart.
“Like a Rushing River” by Misty Edwards expresses this ideal of surrendering with an eternal perspective.. “You make all things beautiful.. just in time… it’s just a matter of time. Calm down my soul. Be quiet within me and trust in God.”
1 Thessalonians 4:16-18 For the Lord himself will come down from Heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words.
Surrendered in Love,
Jenny
