I want to share today a message called The Cross and the Kingdom, The Cross and The Kingdom. We've been doing a series, and the series has been about the area of desires, dreams and destiny. We looked at the area of destiny, and the common misunderstandings people have is that somehow, there's some force that forces everything to work according to a certain pattern, and you have no control over it. Sometimes people have this idea God is sovereign, God's in charge of everything, so whatever happens, God's to blame for it, and we can't really do much about that. Now these are very wrong concepts. In fact, although God has planned a life and things for us to accomplish, He gives within it, a great deal of creativity for us to partner with Him, rather than just be robots and slaves.
So last week we looked at the area of desires and destiny. In Psalm 37, Verse 4, we found, delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart, so clearly it's God's joy to give us things that are in our heart, the things we desire. We found that in discovering God's purpose for your life, one of the keys to it are, what are the desires that you have in your heart, what sorts of deep longings, deep desires, what gifts do you have? What passions do you have, what yearnings do you have? What is it that fires you up, and gets you really going? This is most likely connected to how God has wired you for what you're called to do with your life. Most people, if they begin to discover what they really desire and are passionate about, and begin to do it, their whole life comes alive.
We found also God not just leads us by the desires of our heart, but also He will speak and give revelation, so He speaks to us - for example, I love teaching, and so I got to teach in a high school, until one day I was mowing the lawns, and God spoke to me. God interrupted my plans, and my desires, and all the things I was thinking about, and He spoke about calling me into pastoral ministry. It was quite a clear voice from heaven. It was God speaking, saying I know you've set the course out where you're going, but I've got something higher for you, you wouldn't have thought about. So God, by revelation, can enlarge our thinking, so we think out of the box, and higher than we would normally think.
So one guide to direction in your life are the desires and dreams that you have in your heart, the dreams, the passions and gifts. Another is listening to God, and having God speak to you, but you have to operate out of both, because as many of you would realise, God doesn't talk to you all the time. It doesn't seem so anyway. Most of us, there's a bit of time between God saying one thing and saying the next. It's not like He tells you all the things you have to do. He gives room for you within that to do. Then the third part of finding direction in our life is applying the principles of wisdom. In other words, God doesn't want to tell you everything. He wants you to learn wisdom from the word of God, and apply yourself, so you run your life according to sound principles, so you're not always needing a miracle all the time - not good to run your business needing a miracle all the time. You need to run it on wisdom. See, you need to build your marriage on wisdom.
We need to build our life around wisdom, which is found in the principles of God, and God says if you lack wisdom, you don't know what to do, or how to handle the issues of life, come to Him. He gives freely wisdom for every situation in life, and He gives it freely, but in James it tells us that in Chapter 1, it says ask in faith, not doubting - if you doubt, you don't get anything. So we need to be confident that all that we need for life, God makes available, and if I'm not sure what to do, I need to ask Him sincerely, and as I ask, believe He will give me the insights I need. Many people pray and ask, but they don't persevere in believing God will give them the answer they need. We'll talk about that in another session, I'll talk about answered prayer. So that's how God guides us.