Possibilities are Hints from God
Possibilities are Hints from God
I have long been fascinated with the tension between God’s predetermined purposes and a human being’s free will.
God clearly designed a destiny for each of us.
But it seems just as clear to me that He offers us choices within His predestination that are, to a large degree, determinative.
What we believe makes a difference.
How we pray makes a difference.
What we decide makes a difference.
What we do makes a difference.
“Our choices regulate whether we can experience all the potentialities that God has destined for us.”
Think about the way God related to the very first human beings. He created a world of possibility for Adam and Eve but gave them the ability to choose whether to live the lives that He had purposed for them. They had to exercise their will in order to bring to pass what God had dreamed for both of them and, interestingly enough Himself.
Lives imbued with God’s presence and promise, experienced in an earthly paradise, would have been theirs had they agreed to God’s way instead of rebelliously choosing their own.
Philip Yancey wrote,
Genesis tells of God’s final set of choices . . . . Man and woman came into being. . . . Alone of all God’s creatures, they had a moral capacity to rebel against their creator. The sculptures could spit at the sculptor; the characters in the play could rewrite the lines. They were, in a word, free.
“Man is God’s risk,” said one theologian. . . . Nearly everything theologians say about human freedom sounds somehow right and somehow wrong. How can a sovereign God take risks or imprison himself? Yet God’s creation of man and woman approached that kind of astonishing self-limitation.1
Adam and Eve’s first and greatest choice was whether to accept God’s plan to live and rule in the garden from which they could have expanded God’s beauty to the entire earth. Within that context, there are examples of how God relates to every member of the human family in ways great and small.
One of my favorites is this: “Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name” (Gen 2:19).
God, in His infinite wisdom, created the world in intricate measure and form. He was exact in every minute detail—from the specific rotation of the earth on its axis to the precise measure of sunlight necessary to make a daisy grow. But into this perfection, He introduced a variable: people—to whom He gave the capacity to make decisions, even about the perfect things He had made.
“Adam, look at what I created. Whatever you decide to call it, that’s what its name will be.”
Don’t you see God operating that way in our lives?
He creates something or has an idea. He brings it to a person, and says, “Look what I have for you. What do you want to do with it? What do you want to name this? Whatever you name it, that’s what its name will be. It’s up to you.”
It seems that God is constantly alternating between being a spectator and being a participant in human affairs.
“This much I know: God insists that we participate in bringing what He says is possible to pass. ”
At very distinct times in my life, God seems to have brought His dreams for me, and His dreams for the areas over which I have influence, and said, “Terry, this is what I have made for you. I call this possible. Now what do you want to call it?”
Possibilities are hints from God.
They enter our consciousness through the portal of spirit and become a vision, a thought, an idea. We must pray, make decisions, activate faith, and take action in order for these things to leave the spiritual and become physically real. God wants us to join with Him in crafting our preferred futures.
One of the most important roles of the hospitable leader is to help followers identify and operate in their Area of Destiny. We partner with God in destiny fulfillment.
Joining this dance between what God does and we do is essential.
God speaks; we pray.
God leads; we follow.
God inspires; we believe.
God acts; we respond.
We act; God responds.
What “hints from God” have you gotten lately? Drop a comment and let us know.
1. Philip Yancey, Disappointment with God: Three Questions No One Asks Aloud (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992), 64.
Adapted from Live Ten (Thomas Nelson) and The Hospitable Leader (Baker Publishing Group) by Terry A. Smith. All rights reserved.
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