I’m completing a biblical series to further understand the purpose of God in my life. I know it’s a strange thing to say. Almost sounds self-centered, really. God’s purpose in my life? Opposed to God’s purpose for my life.
But it isn’t really. Since we have no common definition of God, I have to assume that God is. And because God is, that presence pervades all throughout my being. So, my awareness of God’s presence makes way for a decrease in what the Bible refers to as the ‘flesh’. And at some point, I begin to disassociate with identifying from a flesh perspective and begin recognizing the presence of God in every aspect of my life. In that awareness, I begin to realize that my life is not my own. I have to accommodate the Will of God by sacrificing my own personal will.
That change in perspective allows me to see the world, in fact reality, much differently. And depending on the time and circumstances of my life, that change in perspective may alter my life in such a way that it completely opposes my prior reality. That is to say that I may have organized my life around values, principles, relationships and ideas that were centered by a flesh, or material, perspective of life. By accepting God’s Will, I have to, first, acknowledge my past decision making was a less desirable choice. And admit to myself that I have to change my material, or fleshly, orientation to life to a spiritual, or ethereal, orientated perspective.
That decision means undoing the ideas, relationships and actions that created the reality that I call life. This is a process that Romans 12:2 refers to as a renewing of the mind.
Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing and perfect will of God. — Romans 12:2
That renewed sense of being means that I no longer subscribe to previous definitions of who I am in life. My actions change. My responses change. My ideas and motives change. Not because I no longer see value in material possessions, but because I’m growing in understanding the value of acknowledging God.
