"I Know the Plans"

"I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." Jeremiah 29:11 What an inspiring promise! And yet so often we get it all wrong. Our picture of God is so warped, that we see Him as destining us to a miserable life, or at least deferring the realization of our hopes and dreams, to develop our characters. Yet this sounds like a very plausible explanation to us with our distorted views. Oh, how finite is our conception of the Infinite! In our foolishness we want to make Him like ourselves. But He is not. 

Thankfully, our misconstrued images are not nearly reality. No, my Heavenly Father loves me more than I could ever love myself! In fact, He sent His only Son to die that I might live instead. Do we understand what this means?! Clearly we haven't the faintest idea. And, for what it's worth, we can't even right our own thinking. But He has promised to do that for us. "A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh."  Ezekiel 36:26  

We can have certainty, (no matter how difficult it is for our minds to grasp this great truth): The God who created the very desires of our hearts, longs to fulfil them them much more than even we do! 

Will I give Him my hopes, plans and dreams, my heart?

Will I trust Him?

According to His Mercy

We try. We make resolutions. We know we need to change, but can't seem to. 

Why?

But we forget. It's not because of us. It's Him. Nothing I can do. 

We can't even come to Him of ourselves. Without His Spirit working in our lives, wooing us gently (even when we are resisting Him most), our hearts would just grow stonier. Without Him, we wouldn't even realize that we need Him.  

"Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost;" 

Titus 3:5 

The only question, then, is this: Will we let Him?