Align Yourself to God's Purpose

For Christmas of 2019, two of our adult children–Sumerr and Caleb–surprised my wife and me with the gift of a puppy we did not know we wanted, we named him Dietrich. An unintended consequence of the COVID quarantine of 2020 was that we were not able to send him to a professional trainer as we had planned. Dietrich missed a couple of steps in his development. One of the steps is understanding the word come. His two favorite things in the world are to play Frisbee and go on walks, but he will not bring me the Frisbee so I can throw it and he will not come so that I can put him in a harness to leash and walk him. I spend an inordinate amount of time chasing him so that I can do for him what he desperately wants to do and what I enjoy doing with him. If he would just respond to my call from him to come, he would align himself with my good intentions, and I would find great pleasure giving him what he desires.

One day, while more than a little frustrated from trying to catch Dietrich, it occurred to me that this might be how God often feels about me. He passionately wants to do good to me and in me and through me, but sometimes I make it terribly difficult for Him to do what He wants to do.

We must cooperate with God in order for Him to be able to bless us. We must align ourselves with His good intentions. God wants to bless us, but we also have to help Him help us.

We must align ourselves with His good intentions, He desires to bless us, but we must get ourselves in a position where we can be blessed.

There are three fundamentally important things we must do to take hold of the blessings God has for us and bring them into our lives:

First: We must believe. It’s impossible to convey how impossible it is for God to truly bless someone who does not believe in Him and His good intentions for them.

Second: We must pray according to what we believe. Prayer takes the blessings that are ours in the unseen realm of spiritual reality and makes them our reality in the here and now. When we pray, we are able to see things we want that are in agreement with what He wants.

Third: We must act in ways that convey an expectation that good things will happen in our lives. We must act in ways that line up with what we believe and have asked for. Expect to be blessed, and act like it!

So, how do we appropriate these blessings that God has for us? How do we bring them into the realm of our own experience and the practicalities of the life we live now?

There is an exercise that I propose for that. Name the blessing that you need or want—that God already has for you—and imagine reaching up into the heavenly realm and bringing it down into your soul. Then pause to see that blessing has an impact on you in some area of need and desire in your life. Reach up, grab it, bring it down. God wants you to have it. It already exists for you in the heavenly realm. You just have to appropriate it into your life. It is not that you earn it, of course, but that you align yourself with His desire and act to receive something that He has already willed.

Andrea CallesJanuary 10, 2023