What Do You Want?

"Don’t love the world’s ways. Don’t love the world’s goods. Love of the world squeezes out love for the Father. Practically everything that goes on in the world—wanting your own way, wanting everything for yourself, wanting to appear important—has nothing to do with the Father. It just isolates you from him. The world and all its wanting, wanting, wanting is on the way out—but whoever does what God wants is set for eternity." (1 John 2:15-17, The Message translation

The baying for wealth, power, recognition, and status is endemic to human nature. We all want our own ways. But all the things that we want will one day disappear, just like we will. 

There's nothing wrong with wanting a decent quality of life. 

And there's most emphatically nothing wrong with wanting to give better lives to neighbors who are subject to injustice, grief, or having no acquaintance with the God revealed in Jesus. 

These expressions of love for our neighbors are exactly what God desires us to pursue, as summarized in the Great Commandment and the Great Commission: Love God. Love neighbor. Make disciples, followers of Jesus.

John says that "whoever does what God wants is set for eternity." And what is it that God wants us to do? Jesus puts it succinctly in John 6:29: ""The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent." 

When we daily set aside our self-centered or self-aggrandizing agendas and our desires, trusting Christ, we're doing the will of God, the work of God. Not only do we have life from the One we trust, but as the love of God and love of neighbor that comes from Christ fills us, the lives of others are changed for the better too.