You don't need God to tell you everything. He wants you to use wisdom, common sense. God doesn't want you to be a slave, so you've got to connect with your heart, and you do your homework. You've got to identify your desires, and make plans, seek counsel.
Today I want to just talk about your desires and the will of God, your desires and the will of God, how these things work together. Ephesians, Chapter 2, Verse 10 - we are His workmanship, created in Jesus Christ for good works, that God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. Every person longs for a sense of purpose. We all want to have meaning for our life, and being disconnected from God it's very, very difficult for people to find a purpose for their life that satisfies that deep need in the soul. That's because disconnected from God, we can never really discover and enter into the fullness of what we were designed and created for. There's an emptiness, which can only be met by relationship with God, but you notice in here it talks about things that God created beforehand.
It talks about destiny. Your destiny is not just a fate, something that happens, a power that moves and you can do nothing about it, that it's just going to happen anyway. A lot of people have that passive Eastern viewpoint that you know, destiny is just going to work out. There's a plan been worked out for you, and you have really nothing except to just find yourself in the middle of it, and try and understand it. That's definitely not a Christian position. Many Christians also are waiting for God to tell them everything to do, so we need to try and find the balance in this whole area. Notice in Ephesians 2, Verse 10, it says that we are created by God to do something, to do something that's got eternal value and benefit. We're created for things, and the Bible says, God prepared them before we were born, and it's a walk, it's a lifestyle of walking with God, we will begin to discover the things we're called to do, and some of those things are very natural.
So some are called to be a wife, a mother, a husband, a provider, a teacher. There's a whole range of very, very natural things, and all of that is part of our walk with God. We tend to think of the works of God being some great thing, but mostly the works of God are just worked out in our life quite easily, but here's something for you to see. If you look up in Verse 1, 2 and 3, it says - of Ephesians, Chapter 2 - it says God has made you alive, you were dead in trespasses and sins. So before we came to Christ we were cut off from God, dead in trespasses and sins, so the power of sin gripped us, and with that, self-centredness. Now watch this - it says, and once you walked - now notice we've just read how our destiny is walking with God and discovering what He wants for our life, but before we come to Christ, we walked a different way. What was the way we walked before we came to Christ? It says here we walked according to the course, or the track of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience.
So notice it's saying that, there is a course, a path that everyone in this world follows. It's got many different aspects of it, many different pictures, but it's still the same path; I do what I want, it's all about me. So it says that, that is the course the world follows. It's a self-centred, all about me and about my welfare, that's the way that we all walked, and notice it says that there is a spiritual power influences all people who live without Christ, to walk the same way, so no matter how good people look, you'll find nevertheless they are still walking, and there's a self-centred dimension around their lives. Then it says, and we also walked, and we once conducted ourselves among them in the lusts of our flesh, or desires of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and mind. So it says that the way we used to live was one, we just copied the way the world lived. We had the same value systems, pretty well sought after the same things everyone else did, we were just like all following like a herd down the same path. There was a spirit operating over that, and the way it worked was in the desires of our flesh and our minds.