Ideas That Have Guided My Life

from Pat Morley

Volume 210
December 11, 2006

Most of us will do some reflecting over the Christmas holidays. I started a bit early this year, and ran across a file named “Ideas That Have Guided My Life.” I thought I would share some of those thoughts with you to possibly help you get in the reflective mood. They are reflections on my walk with Christ, not my work for Christ.

1. I will do anything God wants me to do.

2. I must each day come humbly to the foot of the Cross and there negotiate the terms of a full surrender of my life to the Lordship of Jesus.

3. Lord, whatever it takes for me to be in right relationship with You, do it.

4. “Letting it happen” versus “making it happen.” Zechariah 4:6, 10

5. All disappointment is the result of unmet expectations.

6. Sometimes I must substitute discipline for a lack of natural interest.

7. Because God is good, my life has not turned out like I planned.

8. “Your system is perfectly designed to produce the result you are getting.”

9. I didn’t get what I wanted. I spent the first 18 years of my adult life working and praying to achieve something that would have destroyed me, then was disappointed when I was spared. The Bible calls this grace.

10. I have made many idols. Calvin called men “idol factories.” An idol is anything I think I must have to be happy. An idol is anything of which I say, “Jesus Christ alone is not enough to make me happy. I need something else.”

11. Three ways God works on me: First, He withholds things I think I can’t live without. Second, He removes things I think I can’t live without. Third, He gives me so much of what I want that I gag on it. He has taken away, and continues to take away, my desire for idols.

12. God did not force me to revere Him, but He made it impossible for me to be happy until I did. Ecclesiastes 3:1

13. Futility is the chief tool by which God has sovereignly drawn me to Himself of my own free will. Romans 8:20-21

14. God has sovereignly orchestrated all the seemingly random circumstances of my life, and it has been good.

15. Where is the cloud leading me?

16. I do not know where God is taking me. I no longer need to know. It is enough that He is the one I follow. I suspect that is precisely what Jesus meant when he said, “Follow me.”

17. I am a passenger. I have always been a passenger. I have no idea what happened. I have no idea what is going to happen. I am a passenger. Passenger is the word that best describes my experience with God in this life.

18. What is the most positive possible way of looking at this?

Pat Morley, Ph.D.