The will of God is not something you add to your life. It’s a course you choose. Either you line yourself up with the Son of God and say to the Father, “Thy will be done,” or you capitulate to the principle which governs the rest of the world and say, “My will be done”. . . .
We identify ourselves with Christ or we deny him. Jesus chose a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt. When we say as Christ did, “I have set my face like flint to do his will,” we are baptized into his death, and like the seed which falls into the ground and dies, we rise to new life. “We have shared his death,” Paul wrote to the Romans. “Let us rise and live our new lives with him. Put yourselves into God’s hands as weapons of good for his own purposes.”
That’s hard, clear language: put yourself. Obedience to God is action. I can’t find anything about feelings in the Scriptures that refer to obedience. It’s an act of the will. . . . Put yourself in his hands. Choose. Give yourself. Present your bodies a living sacrifice. Until you offer up your will you do not know Jesus as Lord.
This is the mystery of sacrifice. There is no calculating where it will end. This is what I mean by transformation. The bitter water, the wilderness, the storm, the cross are changed to sweetness, peace and life out of death. God wills to transform all loss into gain, all shadow into radiance. I know he wants to give you beauty for ashes. He’s given me the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. . . .
The glory of God’s will means trust, it means the will to do his will, and it means joy.
MAGNIFY CHRIST 