You ask God, “What is Your will for my life?”

Sometimes God responds, “What is in your heart?”

Does the Lord care about your heart?

Does He care about the things your heart desires?

Yes!

As my children grow, I often ask them, “What do you want to do when you’re older?” I look to see how God has uniquely shaped them – their gifts, the things they’re passionate about – and the things that concern them about the world they hope to change.

Fathers watch for the dreams of their child’s heart, and encourage them to go for it.

As your heart is set on loving Jesus, He shapes the desires of your heart. As you keep Jesus first in your life, pursuing these desires of your heart is an act of faith in the God who designed you in His image.

This is a season to dream with God. The world is shaped by those with the courage to risk failure and reputation to pursue the God-shaped design of their heart.

In the beginning, God told the first people (paraphrased), “Be fruitful and multiply. Tend the garden. Fill the earth…just don’t eat fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

God had some general instructions, but He left a tremendous amount of freedom up to Adam and Eve to decide how to tend the garden and where to go as they pursued God’s challenge for them to fill the earth. He left a lot up to them for how to dream and imagine and shape the garden and the earth according to the design God put inside them – their initiative and creativity would reflect His very nature. They abused this freedom and disobeyed the one thing He told them not to do. But God wasn’t done yet. He started a process of redemption in history to restore in us what was lost in the garden.

So, what did God want to restore that was lost in the garden? It’s a theological question humans have wrestled with for millennia. Early on God saw fit to give His people a complex system of laws in order to stay in covenant relationship with Him. Why did He do this? Paul says the Law was our tutor to bring us to Christ. I believe part of the reason for the Law was to show us that living by a system of rules and laws can never bring us to freedom and restore God’s dream for the planet.  Waiting for explicit commands sometimes can inhibit us from pursuing things God’s already planted in our heart to pursue.

When Christ died and rose again, what did He accomplish? Did He set us free to dream with God again out of a transformed heart?  Or did He just start a new system of Laws?

Today, God is restoring this aspect of dreaming with Him to see the world filled with people who dare to accomplish great things for God out of the passions of their heart.

The last year, my wife and I have been on an interesting adventure. We’ve experienced divine leading, supernatural open doors, specific direction, and times of waiting on the Lord. We’ve laid our lives before the Lord and said, “We’ll go anywhere you want to send us.”

The funny thing is, often we don’t sense God saying anything about where to go next. As we’ve prayed and sought God, we started to experience a part of God’s nature we had never experienced before.

We felt the Lord saying,

“What do you want to do? Where do you want to go? What do you dream about? You can do anything. You can go anywhere.”

“Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.”

(Psalm 37:4)

Here’s the conclusion we’ve come to:

“When your heart is set to obey the Lord, and He gives no specific direction, it’s time to press toward the desires of your heart.”

What is in your heart?

There are seasons when we must wait on the Lord for specific instructions. We should always be tuned to alter our plans according to His specific leading. But here’s the side of God I believe He is calling many of us to know in this season: When you delight yourself in the Lord, pressing into the desires of your heart is an act of faith.

Do we actually believe God is big enough to give us the desires of our heart, protect us wherever we go, and that pursuing the desires of our heart is actually a journey into encountering Him in deeper ways?

For the world, we have good news to offer. If you delight yourself in the Lord, you’ll discover the dreams of your heart are already in His will for you.

This is an hour for dreaming and going. This is an hour for you to respond in faith and honor God by praying and responding out of the dreams of your heart.

If your heart is set on loving God and obeying Him, then I want to ask you,

“What do you dream of?

Where do you want to go?

What do you want to do?

Dream with God and trust Him to shepherd you as your pursue the dreams of your heart!

— Erik

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