Day 2252 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.


Isaiah 55:9 NIV

As I was saying my prayers last night I had something hit me out of nowhere. I've spent a massive portion of my life living for me. Focusing on what I want. Chasing after what I think is important. Worrying about what I'm afraid of. Doing what I think suits me best. That's a whole lot of me. And all of us can say the same thing. We've learned to "look out for #1" as the world likes to put it. But there's a huge danger in living for ourselves.

The danger of always putting ourselves first and prioritizing only what we want is that we just may get it. We just might be able to find everything our hearts desire. We just may have very selfish dream fulfilled. But what if we get everything we want only to realize that none of it is what we need, and worst of all, that it's nowhere close to what we could have had if we had followed a different path with different priorities.

That's the painful realization that awaits all of us, we just get to it at different times. Every single one of us will eventually come to understand that getting everything we want means nothing if costs us what God had planned instead. While what we want, while our plans and our dreams and our goals may seem amazing to us, they can't hold a candle to God's plans. They can't compare with what He wants for us.

In a world where selfishness is king we've all learned to believe that our ideals are as good as it gets. But friends, what we want is only based on the limited information we have. What we think is best is only based on things like what makes us comfortable, what brings us a little bit of pleasure, or what satisfies a craving. As limitless as a life spent serving ourselves may seem, in reality it couldn't be more limited.

Thankfully, through God's amazing grace, we have the chance to learn to see beyond ourselves and what we think is as good as it gets. We get to learn to follow a path of trust and faith in something higher than ourselves. We get to experience things that we simply couldn't imagine had we stayed in the driver's seat and kept doing things our way. But it's not an easy change because it requires that always difficult thing called humility.

We should be thankful that God's ways are not our ways. We should be thankful that He has better ideas than we do. We should grasp every opportunity we have to lay ourselves down and get out of His way because the things that He has in mind simply can't fit into ours. It may feel strange at first to stop chasing all the selfish things that we've spent so long focusing on. But in the end, doing so will open so many more doors for us to step through to things that are well beyond our wildest dreams.

It’s just not worth missing out on what God has in store because we think we know better. Don’t risk getting everything you want because it just might cost you everything you couldn’t begin to dream of!

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