Lord, make Your will my desires.

Lord, make Your will my desires-change my heart so that I desire Your good and perfect will.

A daily prayer <3

Read Scripture: Ephesians 2:1-10, 4:22-24

“God, create a clean heart for me and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” Psalm 51:10

All those moments where you are really craving something, but you know your deeper desire is something better. I have many days where all I want to do is go and sit in my favorite coffee shop and buy myself a latte (honey lavender is my favorite), but I really know how much more I want to stick to my budget… so I settle for a drip coffee or stay home and make myself a pour over. I’m not alone in this one… am I?

Walking the Christian walk is walking in the will of the Father, and the reality is that our fleshly desires pull us away. Ephesians 2:1-3 shows us that before we knew Christ, we were dead, sinful, and our fleshly desires were at the root of it. My fleshly desires tell me to do a lot of things that pull me away from the abundant life that brings glory to God.

There is hope, as we read further in Ephesians and are reminded that in Christ, we are made alive and our sins are covered by the grace of God, through faith. (v. 4-9) Praise God! We were dead, and then there is a powerful “But God…” and we are rescued by faith in Christ.

Looking ahead in Ephesians to 4:22-24, there is a grand calling given to those who are alive in Christ, “...to take off your former way of life, the old self that is corrupted by deceitful desires, to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, the one created according to God’s likeness in righteousness and purity of the truth.”

Living alive in Christ looks a lot different than following the desires of our flesh, and it’s a battle every day. It’s a decision that we make when we wake up every morning. And when we stumble, we fall into the glorious grace of God that never runs dry.

It is a grand calling, but it can also feel overwhelming. We are called to strip off our old lives from the time when we were actually dead, and to put on a new self that walks in the ways of the Lord. Here again, we are reminded that our old selves were “corrupted by deceitful desires”. The desires of the flesh dragged us into sin and suffering. If our deceitful desires bring us to death, then the renewal and transformation of the deep desires of our hearts, by the power of the Holy Spirit, strengthens us to live alive.

There are times when following the will of the Father is hard, but we do not do it in our own strength. Jesus has already won and is victorious over sin, and we are now given the Holy Spirit to do heavy-lifting work of transforming us, teaching us, and filling us with righteous desires. We can invite the Lord to be with us in our daily struggle against the desires that we are to cast off, asking Him: make Your will my desires-change my heart so that I desire Your good and perfect will. He cares about what’s going on in our hearts and minds, and He doesn’t want to put a bandaid over the injuries. He wants to go in deep with us, and meet us right in the ugly of our broken roots.

The call to walk in the will of the Father can feel overwhelming at times, but may we always rely on the guidance and power of the Holy Spirit, and never ourselves. May we invite Him to transform and renew the very deepest desires of our hearts, so that we who are no longer dead can live alive in Christ. May we get on our knees before the Father and approach His throne of grace, asking Him to make His will the desire of our hearts.

xoxo

Andee Lee <3