God Says: Yes!

It seems like every time I ask God for direction I get a question in return.

"What do you want me to do?" I ask him.

"What do you want?" He responds.

In the midst of stressful situations, especially in times in which a major decision is looming, I become so focused on an answer that it can be difficult to hear from God at all. And when I do hear, I naturally believe that the response I get is directly related to the question I've been asking. Speaking from experience, I really think that desperate people, when looking for direction, are able to easily misinterpret what God is saying. Not because we want the answer we want and won't look at any other response, but simply because we don't always know that God is saying "Yes!!" to something larger than the questions we are asking.

Years and years ago, I found myself attracted to a certain guy. There were a handful of times when I recognized something in a guy that caused me to ask the inevitable question: "What about him, God?" I was determined to not make a move without the approval of God, and I was equally determined to wait for something solid from Him – to not take every little thing I noticed and twist it to fit the answer I wanted to the question I was asking.

My heart was actually in the right place; I was ready to drop all thoughts of the guy with the slightest discouragement from the Lord because I really did want to follow Him more than I wanted anything else in my life. I was impetuous and stubborn, but also very sincere. So I began asking, "God, can I have him?" (maybe not in those words, but it's effective for the story) and all I heard, in a thousand different ways, was a resounding "Yes!!" I had dreams and visions and unusual circumstances surround me. I had quiet times with God in which he reinforced what he had said as he spoke quietly to my heart. So I was ready with what I thought was approval from the Lord to be in a relationship with, and ultimately marry, this guy. Unfortunately (at least I thought so at the time), he saw me as a kid sister, and I refused to make something happen, so it all kind of fizzled away.

When it became apparent that nothing was going to happen with the guy, I spent quality time with God trying to reconcile what I saw as an unfulfilled promise with my knowledge that God is faithful and will always do what he said. I didn't understand how I could hear so much so clearly and not actually see it play out in life. I knew I had heard from God; they were all situations that I couldn't have made up or manipulated. I wondered if something I had done or not done had messed things up. Maybe I ought to have prayed more. Pretty soon, however, after watching the guy's life, I realized that I was glad that nothing had happened. His life was turning into one that I didn't want to be around on a regular basis, let alone be married to. I was relieved, but I still didn't understand until I heard the Lord ask me again, "What do you want?" And then I began to see.

The entire time that I had been caught up in seeing one aspect of my life clearly, in this case my hopeful relationship with a guy, God had been asking in the background, "What do you want? What do you want? What do you want?" but I considered it such a general question that I, quite frankly, tuned it out. And when I decided that I wanted to spend my life with "that guy" and started asking God for permission, his response was a resounding "Yes!!" What I didn't realize at the time was that my question was actually: "God, this is what I want. Can I? Is that okay? Is this right for the rest of my life?" It wouldn't have mattered who I had asked him about. In fact, God said "Yes!!" to me with three different guys before I really got the picture. My question was "God, can I do this?" and his response was, "Of course!" So my question has had to change to: "God, this is what I want right now. Am I seeing what's true? Is this really what's going on here, or have I not seen clearly?"

The guy example was an easy one to use because it was a clear yes or no question, but I found out after that particular experience that I was doing the same thing with every major decision that was placed in front of me. I was asking God permission.

Proverbs 25:2 says, "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings," and Proverbs 20:5 says, "The purposes of a man's heart are deep waters, but a man of understanding draws them out." God has placed our dreams and desires within us for us to discover. He trusts us to find ourselves out as we increase in our understanding of him and grow toward becoming kings in our own right. He encourages us in every step we take toward discovering what he has hidden within us, but his "Yes!!" answer to our "can I?" question is not a command or a directive, it is an enthusiastic cheer.

It's up to us to get so close to God that we begin to discover ourselves and the way He views things and put those pieces together to find out what we really want. My question, rather than "God, can I?" has to become, "God, this is what I want. Is it really what I want?" and I have to allow him to search my heart and show me where my thinking is off or my perception skewed.

It's the same with vision. Vision changes. Dreams shift and focus and realign, and it's not an issue of having heard correctly or incorrectly from the Lord; it's an issue of discovering what is in our hearts. God has a resounding "Yes!!" to give us in response to any dream, any desire we want to pursue. Even in relationships with people. There isn't a right or wrong dream, as long as we're moving toward him. God will gladly show us when our thinking is wrong or our perception skewed, but that's not usually the question we ask. We usually ask "God, can I?"

When I was young I wanted to be many different things. I wanted to be a veterinarian while reading James Harriet books; a racehorse-trainer while reading Black Stallion books; a detective while reading Nancy Drew books; a physicist while reading Madeleine L'Engle books; an archaeologist or explorer while reading Scott O'Dell books and other historical fiction; and a poet while watching and listening to stars, wind and fire. My parents smiled at some, raised their eyebrows at others, and never knew about the poet one (they DID know about my poetical tendencies, but I never said it out loud – some things are just too close to risk being laughed at). They never told me I couldn't or shouldn't do any of them. They realized that as I grew and learned to know myself better and really know what I wanted, that they wouldn't have to discourage me from doing something that didn't agree with who I am. They told me "yes" every time. They definitely weren't commanding me. They were trusting me to work out what I really wanted inside myself and go with that.

God's "Yes!!" response to our questions is his response to our dreams and desires, not a clue-in to the destiny over our lives. He responds to our heart-cry. He wants to see us succeed. He placed dreams within us. He hid them inside of us for us, so we have to grow as people, as individuals, as kings to find them. It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, it is the glory of kings to search it out.

So I ask you: What do you want? Too often, we take our "permission" from the Lord to follow our desires as a command to follow the desire we have specifically asked him about. Or we take it as a revelation that the specific desire is our only option. We think that because God knows our future and our past, He's giving us secret commands to accomplish our destiny when he tells us "Yes!!" in response to a question we're asking. In actuality, God is telling us "Yes!!" because we can have whatever we want. He is happy to give us understanding of ourselves and of Him in the midst of our search, but he is friend, not master. He is trusting us to find out what we really want and pursue it. And just like children, we sometimes pursue things that we find out later we don't really want to do, and we change our minds. And that's okay. We're growing toward understanding him. That's why it's incredibly important that we understand what God is talking about when he says "Yes!!" and that we understand that God's "Yes!!" says more about who He is and the way he relates to us than about anything we think we are supposed to do.