Will alignment

  A considerable period of counselling, closely observing human life and my own personal experiences has led me to understand that most of our personal and spiritual conflicts in this life are directly or indirectly linked to our failure to surrender to God’s will.
This simply means we suffer because we exercise our will to do what we please instead of following God’s plan four our lives. We tend to forget that we do not own ourselves. God owns the whole earth including the people in it (Psalm 24:1) and He has a blue print of the life each one of one has to live.
However, we do as we like in many aspects of our lives instead of living according to His will. And this alone is the main door through which uncalled for sorrows come into our lives. In some cases we are like the prophet Jonah. We know what God’s will for us is in a given situation but we choose to do otherwise.  God instructs us to go to Nineveh but we rebel and head towards Tarshish instead.
But a storm of strange magnitude will visit us and out of the depth of sorrow we cry to God for help. Would it not be better to do it right the first time than to first have our way and then get back to God after getting hurt? After all, God’s will is good, acceptable and perfect for us (Romans 12:1-3). Let us get our minds renewed through God’s word so that we do not run away from that which we desperately desire.
 In other cases our rejection of God’s will is not a conscious one. We reject it unknowingly. Either we do not seek to know it at all fearing it will bring discomfort. This was the fate of the man who refused to accept God’s call into full-time ministry fearing that God would send him to areas where missionaries were being persecuted. Restlessness and lack of peace caused him to eventually accept God’s call and he agreed to go.
 Surprisingly God told him that He did not want him to be a missionary working in a foreign field. He told him that He just wanted him to be willing to do every part of His will. The crucial lesson is that either God is Lord of all your life or He is not Lord at all in your life.
Or we seek God’s will and find it but we set it aside presuming it is not the will of God. We think it is not His will because it comes from an angle we least expect.  A certain lady prayed earnestly for a husband and God graciously answered her prayer. He sent her a humble gardener for a husband. She declined his proposal. Then she later on eloped with a banker who impregnated her and refused responsibility for the child.
She had to come back and stay with her parents. Meanwhile the gardener won a fortune from the man he was working for. When his employer left for another country everything including the house was given to the gardener.  He began to live the very life that lady always wanted.
 She regretted profusely. However, because the man’s love for her was genuine, he agreed to marry her and take care of the child. They lived happily ever after but the sorrow she suffered in the hands of the irresponsible banker was unnecessary.   
What is the point in all this? Well the point is spelt out in the phrase “according to His will.” Surely these four words carry all the blessings you would want in this life and in the one to come. Living according to His will is the secret to a sorrow-free life. This does not mean sorrow will not come, but it will lose its sting if it comes because you are in the centre of God’s will and you are not moved away from the stance that God’s will is always good no matter what.
 But for anyone to attain this noble life of living according to God’s will, he or she has to place his or her will in alignment with the will of God. And this will alignment always and everywhere means the surrender of your will to God’s. Will you like David set the Lord always before you? (Psalms 16:8). Herein is our trouble: we place God behind us and not before us. We want God to give us what we want and not what He wants us to have.
We want Him to bless our plans and not to give us His plans first. We want Him as our servant and errand boy and not as our Lord and master.  Failure to submit our feeble will to His stronger will is being wicked on our part. And the indictment, ‘there is no peace to the wicked” becomes our lot.
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