Wanting God Uncages Us {Guestpost by Lisa Whittle}

Oct 17, 2014Find joy today

I’m so happy/joyful/excited to share with you my dear friend Lisa Whittle. Oh how I love her. Here we are, being friends:

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She has a new book out, I Want God, that is a beauty. It’s challenging, amazing, and life altering.

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I love how Lisa equates our wanting more of God to FREEDOM. And this blog and little spot on the interwebs is exactly about this. So, here, meet Lisa and her words:

It happens to me sometimes when I am driving.

I see an open field, grass thick and soft, and my instinct is to ease the car over to the road’s side, step onto the mouth of the open field and run my heart out.

I’ve never done it. But I always want to.

Because to me, running in an open field with no restriction or boundaries says, I am free.

I want to be free. Even as a young girl, it is something I feel deep inside. I think a lot, too much really, and sometimes I long to be free from that.

I have friends who want and need to be freed from something else. A guy I know spends too much money. A girlfriend I do lunch with watches too much tv.

A woman I know from church, one of those good, Godly ones, confides to me that she’s tired of being on the spiritual roller coaster. I know what she means: the one minute on fire for God, the next in the busy pace of life, nearly forgetting all about Him. I want to be freed from it, she whispers so other good church people can’t hear, and I know how she feels.

I believe in the message of Galatians 5:1, “Christ has set us free to live a free life.” (Msg) So I wonder: if we are free to live a free life, why are so many of us still living, bound?

It has to do with our desire for God.

We have a bad past. We live in less than perfect circumstances. We know we need God to help us get through.

But we don’t really want God. We want the idea of Him, the rescuing one. We want the tangible blessings. We want the favor and the God smiling down on us and the perfect life without problems.

And all the while, other things have our attention. We grasp at the self-help books, the pep talks, the worldly things to fill us so we don’t have to sit with a growling of the God hunger inside.

But we need to feel that hunger so we will desire God in an equal way.

The truth is, wanting God sets us free.

We worry about people liking us, accepting us. Our heart is bound to this unstable, fleeting fix.

We want God more than being known and popular, and it sets us free.

We spend our life trying to make life make sense. It robs us of the ability to trust and believe and hope.

We want God more than our logic, reason and control, and it sets us free.

We are a slave to what we know and makes us feel comfortable. It’s cost us vibrancy with God, never living our dreams, spiritual immobility.

We want God more than those temporary comforts, and it sets us free.

The life with God, the one where we desire Him above all else, is the one of no restriction and boundaries. It’s the one where we run in wide open spaces, free from shame, man’s opinion, pride, distrust, limits.

Only when we want Him the most will we know this place.

And then, we will know free.

“Wanting more really just means that what we have now will no longer do,
and we believe He has better.” ~I Want God

Find Lisa Whittle here. And here on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

Click the link below to get the book:

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

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