Far Too Easily Pleased

“The Spirit of God alters my dominating desires; He alters the thing that matters, and a universe of desires I had never known before, suddenly comes on the horizon.” Oswald Chambers

What better evidence of our being united with our Heavenly Father than when we allow Him to actually change our direction and our desires. To allow Him to alter our course is one of the most surrendered and vulnerable things we can do in our relationship with Him. “Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you; He rises to show you compassion…” (Isaiah 30:18).

We lay all kinds of plans based on our desires. We decide what looks like the best path and we try and get God’s stamp of approval after we’ve decided how it’s going to look. When things inevitably don’t work out how we planned, we are disappointed and upset at Him. We failed to line up our will with His.

It isn’t a bad thing at all to be corrected or detoured by God! If we really desire HIS will, it can be one of the most exciting and revealing times of our lives. Those ‘fork in the road’ moments can be a highlight on our journey if we are confident that He desires the best for us. Things only go wrong when we fight against Him and demand our own way. We tend to think that His way may not be the best. We are afraid that He’s somehow holding out on us.

In my life, God has moved me to places I never thought I would be. The first time He told me to move was in college – to another state and another school I had never seen. For months I fought with everything I had to stay put. It wasn’t in the plan. Things finally got so bad and I was so exhausted, I surrendered to what He was asking me to do. It didn’t have to be that way! Once I finally obeyed, the floodgates of blessing opened. What He had in store for me at that new place was more than I ever could have imagined. So later the next year, when He moved me AGAIN (this time to a different country) I was far less resistant. I didn’t understand it, but I certainly didn’t fight it. There was blessing on the other side of obedience. His plan for me was so much better than what I had in mind for myself! My little blueprint for life was NOTHING compared to His!

Our dreams are very small compared to what God has intended for us. C.S. Lewis nailed it when he said this:

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

Our desires aren’t too big for God, they are usually too SMALL! What if we believed this?! What if we stopped holding so tightly to all the little things we think we need to make us happy and grabbed on to what God Himself wants for us? Our feeble little hearts desires coming into total unity with what our creator intended for us. We can’t even imagine what His thoughts and plans for us look like.  It may not be what we think. It may not even be comfortable or pretty compared to the world’s standards. But it is the best. The people who can get out of the comfort zone of their own ideas and get centered in God’s will are the people He can use. It has nothing to do with talent or ability and everything to do with our surrender.

God has a whole new world of experiences out there for every one of us that we cannot even fathom. We can never exhaust His blessings or tap out the things He has for us. It’s true that our desires are actually too small and too weak. It’s the whole idea of getting out of the boat to walk on the water. We can stay where we are and sink or we can get up and let Jesus have His way with us. The great thing is that once we make that move and place ourselves in His care, He is in charge. If we step off the path, He shows us the way back on to it. If we are off the road by a mile, He directs us back. When we start to actively pursue HIS ways and take the limits off of what we think He can or will do… that’s when the new horizon appears. Things we never could have imagined start to happen because we set our heart on making His will and our will one in the same.