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“He shapes his will in us far more than he speaks his will to us.”

A thought by Erwin Raphael McManus from his book, The Last Arrow: Save Nothing for the Next Life (p. 178). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. (Click on the title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.)

I’ve just been out walking by and looking at the Pacific Ocean and I’ve just had two things came to me: One, God sure does know how to create and two, he sure knows how to create big.  His Ocean is way bigger than the largest city in the world that we have created and way more beautiful.  And he also is the one who created you and me and he still is interested in us even though we possibly have messed up. 

Erwin says, “I wonder how many times God has asked us, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ and in false humility, we stammered and said, ‘Whatever you want to do, Lord, is fine.’”

He goes on, “The psalmist David tells us that we are to delight ourselves in the Lord and he will give us the desires of our heart (Ps. 37:4). This means we need to know our hearts, we need to know our desires, and we must allow those desires to first be informed and then formed by our love and worship of God. He shapes his will in us far more than he speaks his will to us. If we want to know what God wants, we need to give him our hearts and let him build desires in us that we want more than anything else in the world. That is why the asking is so important.”

He then says, “If you don’t know what you want, then God’s trying to give you what he wants for you is a wasted effort. You have to want what God wants in order to receive what he wants to give you… I’m convinced there are many of us who are walking blind because we ask God for a cane rather than for sight. It is clear that there are times in life when it is not within the scope of God’s intention for our life to give us certain things we ask for. But wouldn’t you rather err by asking for too much than too little?”


By the way, if he can create the Ocean He can do so much more than we can ask.  So, what do you want him to do for you?
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