God inspires us to want to want Him | The Word of the LORD | Jeremiah 32:38-41

by Angela Jones

The Word of the LORD for today:

Jeremiah 32:38-41

38 They will be My people, and I will be their God.

39 I will give them singleness of heart and action, so that they will always fear Me and that all will go well for them and for their children after them.

40 I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never stop doing good to them, and I will inspire them to fear Me, so that they will never turn away from Me.

41 I will rejoice in doing them good and will assuredly plant them in this land with all My heart and soul.

Praise be to God.

These verses changed my entire "apprenticeship," my perception of walking with Jesus.

What stuck out to me, and continues to stick out, is how GOD can and is willing and promises to give us "singleness of heart and action... inspiring us to fear Him."

This is Good News.

God can and is willing to inspire your heart, your desires, your thoughts, your motivations, and your entire being to want to want Him.

Are there times you don't want Him? Don't want to pray, converse with God (Yes converse, conversation is a two-way street, praise God)? Don't want to talk to Him as a friend through Scripture (Yes, you can have a discussion with the Creator God and your Father through the Bible, that's awesome and incredible news)?

There's a solution to that: God can and is willing to change your heart to want to want Him more.

Naturally, we didn't want to want God. We were born corrupted with a perverted inner-being, longing for anything and everything but God.

But God made a Way for our inner-being, our nature to be redeemed; the Bible calls this: being "born-again."

Though our inner-being, if you are in Christ and have been baptized in the Holy Spirit, your nature has already been freed from the stain of sin. Sin is like cancer. Once you received Jesus and were baptized in the Spirit, your cancer disappeared in your spirit self.

However, our bodies are still subject to decay, to sin. Because of that, all humans will die.

Therefore, there's a reality in the spirit, the freedom from sin in Christ, that is trying to take more and more prevalence in our bodies. The Bible calls this: sanctification - the lifelong process of receiving the love of God in Jesus, learning from Him, and slowly implementing what we see and hear Jesus do into our lives so that we do what see Him do and say what we hear Him say, becoming more and more like Him overtime: into people of love, compassion, grace, joy, and peace.

This is the process we are inviting God into, or more accurately put, making ourselves available to God.

We want to want to do these things.

We want to become like Him.

The Good News is we can make ourselves available to the transformative power of God through prayer by asking God to inspire us to fear Him (wanting to want Him and be like Him, to honor Him and revere Him, be in awe of Him and adore Him, to like Him and love Him).

We can ask God to increase our desire to want to want Him, to inspire us to "fear Him," to like Him more, to want to know Him more, to want to see Him in our lives more, to want to hear from Him more, to want to read Scripture more, to want to talk to Him more, to want to listen to Him more, to want to become more like Him, and so on.

In summary:

We naturally do not want God because our entire being (spirit and body) were alienated from God because of sin. But God made a Way through Jesus to be recreated RIGHT NOW through the baptism of the Holy Spirit into a "New Creation" in the spirit part of ourselves. And the more we make ourselves available to God through some of the practices stated above, our bodies start to live in the "New Creation" reality (living like Jesus), experiencing the healing made available to us NOW in Christ Jesus. We may not always want to make ourselves available to God to receive His love and be transformed, but the Good News is we don't have to stay uninspired, God is willing to change our desires and inspire us "to want, to want" that more and more overtime.

Prayer

May the God who is love, draw you and keep you in His love for you in Christ Jesus, giving you knowledge, insight, and understanding to how much He loves you. As a result, causing you to want to want Him more, to want to know Him more, to want God to be your Best Friend, through He who lived, died, and rose again by the power of His Spirit, amen.