Begging the Question

What does God want – not from you, but for you?

I’ve been thinking about this question for weeks now, asking myself what it is that God wants for me. The question has real power, I think, to disrupt me from religious thinking, from the slow, subtly creeping notion that God’s just someone else that’s asking just one more thing from me. It has power to dislodge from my heart the view that I must do something for God and all that flows from that and replace it with the view that God wants me to simply be (Which is so much deeper… instead of the typical, “What am I supposed to do for God” response, now the question begs, “Lord God, what am I to be – who have You created me to be and for whom have You created me?” It is a much more personal way to relate.)

I’m dwelling on this question, beginning to ask God what it is He wants for me instead of from me. In response, I’ve only heard so far something to the effect of, “I’ve shown you my heart. What do you think I want for you?” Maybe he’s asking me to go deeper into the question, like he did with the man at the pool of Bethesda.

What’s really striking, though, about the question is my first reaction to it. At the very first, I thought to myself, “That’s not a very good question. Is that really what the Gospel is about – God giving us something? No way, it’s about what God expects of us.” How revealing of my own hesitation to accept “the handout of amazing Grace,” that God in Christ really has come to give me what I lost and could never get back on my own: Life.

Somehow, to really trust that all God’s thoughts toward me are bent on bringing me into that, that all his actions and ways towards me and all his plans for me are aimed with that purpose: to give me life… I think it would change everything. What a perspective. What a way of seeing.

And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.
-Romans 5:5