When Your Life Says You Want Something More Than God

I’m so excited to have my dear girlfriend, Lisa Whittle, as a guest today. She has written a book entitled, I Want God. And let me tell you. It has impacted my life and relationship with God. It’s a must read and I don’t say that often. It will start a fire in your soul!

Guess what? I’m giving away a copy! Write, I Want God, in the comment section and enter to win!

Now, here’s Lisa…

Let’s be honest. We, the good church people, have this thing down.

We worship on Sundays. We speak Christianese. We take cupcakes to the neighbors and jump into the latest Bible Study group over coffee.

If our spiritual practices told the whole story, we’d be a Christian best seller.

But they don’t.

And God knows.

He knows when our heart is fully into Him. He knows when we mean those songs we sing about taking us into His great unknown and give me more faith and other beautiful words that are both awesome and scary.

The truth is, most of us do want God. We just want other things, too.

“When we say words like anything for You, God, but we mean anything but this, God, His heart is grieved. He denies this conditional allegiance of holding on to both when He designed us to be capable of going all in.” ~Lisa Whittle, I Want God

Your life says you want something more than God:

…when He tells you He wants to use you, but you choose to stay comfortable, instead.

…when you are only willing to do things that make sense to you or are in your control.

…when you chase the approval of other people, constantly investing time and energy into fighting for them to love you.

…when you are most interested in what God can do for you, rather than simply cultivating a relationship with Him.

But here’s the good news. If you want God, you can have Him. You just have to want Him more than anything else.

And then, your life will speak for itself. 

*Excerpt from I Want God, Chapter 6: Most

Before I start writing this book, I start shopping.

It’s summer, that glorious time when my kids’ legs are tanned from outside play, grill smells live in my nostrils, and I dive deep into Mommy waters while the writer sleeps by the pool. I like to shop, and

when the writer is asleep I seem to shop more.

But really, it’s about something else: Sometimes I don’t want to hear from God, and shopping helps with that.

I think, and I know, that this moment is not about the shopping (because it rarely is). I recognize it as the human impulse of storing up, controlling my world before He starts requiring something of me.

When you know God in that intimate way, there is an understanding that when He calls, it will be loud. And it will be specific. And it may require other things to go away. And it’s terrifying. So I shop.

But even as I sit in the parking lot of this antique mall with all my precious finds perched around me, I know it is a myth, the storing up. For a brief moment, the shopper subsides and the writer awakens. I take out my phone and go to my notes and the fingers start running and running fast.

It’s all a myth. Chasing this kind of more only brings the foggy high and runs up the bills, and in the end it is the same choice as it was yesterday: out of life, what do I want the most? (That is the question. That is always the question.)

But in the meantime, the shopping has gotten almost weird and manic—like I am ravenous for change. I feel the change coming, the unraveling that happens when I start writing a new book and mostly, I want Him to change me but the house is screaming so loud for me to pay it attention instead that I am nearly going deaf. In its every square foot I see imperfection and I want to make it beautiful, and it already is.

I shop because it helps me forget I may never do the everything for God both of us want. And the reality of that feels painful.

But no matter how much I shop, I will never be able to muffle Him.

Because He haunts me. Yes, haunts. Not in the creepy, scary movie way where it’s about some broken-down clapboard house with squeaky floors and curtains of cobwebs and that guy who died who now lives under the house and occasionally emerges wearing a mask. He haunts me in the unrequited love kind of way whereby you love someone so much it aches and their scent doesn’t go away no matter how much you try to scrub it off yourself.

So in the end, after the shopping, I will come back to the same. I’ll just have less money.

What I’m really wanting is not to tear my house apart and put it back together more beautifully, but what I want God to do to me: deconstruct me, clean me up, make me better, streamlined, more beautiful. And at the same time I’m scared He will.

This is the rub of my life.

The words are now done and the writer goes back to sleep. I have dialogued with no one in particular, but I have somehow worked it all out.

1. God is what I want most.
2. Other things will scream for my attention.

3. I will have to choose between them.

It is the same for you.

To order the book: click here!

To read more about I Want God: www.IWantGod.me

Connect with Lisa!

Link to Blog: www.lisawhittle.com

Link to Instagram: http://instagram.com/lisawhittle

Link to Twitter: https://twitter.com/LisaRWhittle

Link to Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Lisa-Whittle/189067321123012?fref=ts

Link to Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/lisarwhittle/