I Want It All, and I Want It Now

I am so often amazed at the way God uses the many and varied elements of the life I was going to have anyway to inform and change the life I’m going to have soon. At least, He is offering me these opportunities for improvement; it’s my responsibility to decide that they are for me, apprehend them as completely as I can, and make them part of my current fabric as best as I’m able. Why I’m amazed at this I don’t know, because He’s just being God—the God I find in Scripture, and the God Who has revealed Himself to me so far.

This past weekend COA hosted a conference which featured a guest worship team, some teaching via DVD’s, and extended times of prayer ministry in which everyone had the opportunity to ask God for anything they thought they needed. As often happens, God seemed to be weaving a consistent thread through all the ministry times, in the midst of such a great range and depth of needs. The constant message seemed to be: “Ask and you shall receive, but sometimes you have to ask with a depth of passion, a desperate hunger and thirst that might at first seem unnatural.”

The Collect for this past Sunday (Lent V), a prayer near the beginning of the service which everyone says together and I suspect most people do as a duty to be disposed of, invites God to bring our desires into His order so that our hearts may be fixed—stuck fast to, permanently attached—where true joys are to be found.

One of our young people gave a testimony of unusual power at both the weekend services. The core of it was that he had decided that the Saturday night ministry time was not going to pass by without God’s very definitive, sovereign, and supernatural touch. He was sure that this was in line with what God wanted, based on the teaching that day, so he asked with increasing urgency and desperation, but great amounts of time went by with no apparent answer. Finally, when everyone else was long done and he was the only one left in the room, God spoke the words he longed to hear through the voice of one of our most persevering and caring adult leaders. In paraphrase, His word was “Your longing and deep heart’s-cry are pleasing to Me; I have a plan, I’m filling you even now, and never will I leave you.”

There is a song being used as background music for a commercial about buying a new TV set. The entirety of the lyrics being used are “I want it all (repeat 3x), and I want it now.” We are—I am—SO this way, and this demanding, give-it-to-me-because-I want-it-and-I-deserve-it is SO not what God is about. Everything in our culture points to that song as a good thing; “customer service” is measured not in quality but in time—how fast did you respond? “How quickly” is WAY more important than “how fully?”. God is not like that—longing and desire PLEASE Him (although grabby self-absorption does not), and time is just not an issue for Him in the way it is for us. That’s hard to get, but that’s how He is, and I think it better that I change for Him than that He change for me.

Father God, You’re the only one that can change me enough to want what You want me to want. If You offer this grace and I receive it willingly, then obeying You will be an act of love, and receiving anything You give me will be my greatest desire. I know the time will come when my heart is turned permanently to You; make it soon, please. I know that’s what You want for me, so Father, that’s what I want, too. Change me, move in me, fill me with You, so that this is all I will ever want. Thank you in advance. Amen.

(a paraphrase of the Collect for the Fifth Sunday of Lent, from the Book of Common Prayer, 1979)