God’s perfect will for us is better than our greatest idea of what that will is. This is important for believers to remember when it seems like the best thing we can imagine for ourselves is insufficient to equal the trials and tribulations we invariably experience in our earthly lives. It can be a great comfort to know that God’s plan for our lives, both here and past the veil of death, will ultimately be beyond our noblest hopes and dreams. The truth is that if we are open to God’s will for our lives He will make us into something so wonderful that our struggles here on earth will someday pale into insignificance by comparison. In fact on that day we will be thankful for Him allowing even the worst of those struggles, for without them His all-surpassing plan for our ultimate good might not have been fulfilled.

It is a common fault, among even the best Christians, to think we can imagine "what God has planned for those who love Him". We suffer from the conceit that we know what is good for us. This conceit is another facet of our flesh. No one more knows what is best for a creature than its Creator. This statement has the ring of common sense, but it is a great challenge to believe it in its full import. It is our tendency instead to stubbornly cling to the idea that what we want is what is best.

How many children of God have embarked on errant journeys to fulfill their own idea of what God’s will is rather than simply daily waiting for the Lord to show them the latest small steps they can take to fulfill His idea of what His will is? So many of us have had to learn the hard way that God’s ways are not our ways, at least not obviously. The author was once convinced that God wanted him to go to seminary and then enter into a particular kind of ministry. The result of assuming this was the divine will rather than my own (which I now believe it was) culminated in one of the worst "dark nights of the soul" that I have ever experienced. I hit the brick wall my false assumptions brought me to so hard that my seminary career ended with me dropping out in the midst of a deep depression that took not months, but years to climb out of. It was there I learned the hard way that my idea of what is best for me is often anything but. Since then I have been more circumspect about my knowledge of God’s will for my life and more open to Him taking me places I would not expect Him to. As a result my life is now experientially far better than it was during the time of my folly.

As we come to know God better we will realize that He is the Lover of our souls. Beyond that, and because of that, we will begin to deeply believe that our Lord not only knows the absolute best for us but also is absolutely capable of bringing about that best. He is both the Author and the Finisher of our faith and the Author and Finisher of our lives. Our job is to let Him have His way with us rather than put up roadblocks through trying to live out our wrong ideas about what we are destined to become. As with most, perhaps all, of the Christian journey the key to letting God have control of our lives on a day to day basis is faith. Someone once said that we cannot comprehend God, but we can apprehend Him. In other words while we cannot know the full plan God has for our lives we can trust Him about it and cling to Him for our forward progress in sanctification.

If we do one day we will wake to find ourselves to be what He always planned for us to be. On that blessed day of completion we will be exceedingly thankful to our God for making us more than we ever could have dreamed of in our own dim, human view of our potential.