Have you ever asked this question before?
“What is God’s will concerning me?”
God’s will involves three actions.
Not everyone is going to like hearing these three actions, because two of them require a good helping of faith.

Also, I believe that we get better and better at these three things the longer and closer that we walk with God. So, take hope if you are a new follower of Jesus—this will get easier!

Here you go….

God’s Will:
1. Rejoice always
2. Pray without ceasing
3. In everything give thanks

See? I told you two of these would be hard.

Rejoice always. Besides the obvious hardships we encounter in life, do you want to know where I have the hardest time rejoicing? In traffic. Yep, sitting parked in traffic. It drives me batty. Thank goodness I live in a rural area, so traffic is not a part of my daily life, but when I have been sitting in traffic, it is so very hard to rejoice.

The “pray without ceasing” part comes easy for me, because I need prayer to get through every moment of my day! It’s like a constant stream of communication that never ends.

In everything give thanks. I attended a prayer conference a few months ago, where I was challenged to take the worst thing that has happened in my life and thank God for it.

Wait, what?

I did not understand at the time, but I trusted and did it. I thanked God for my dad’s stroke when he was just 48 years old. My dad’s stroke was massive and it radically changed his life. And I thanked God for it??? This seemed so very wrong on every level.

But what it did in my heart was amazing.

Thanking God for this event was another way of putting my faith into action. This gesture shows God that I trust Him, even though I don’t understand why some things happen. And thanking Him made a piece of bitterness that I was harboring in my heart fall away.

If you choose to follow God’s will for your life, some of you will thank God for losing a loved one. For being laid off from a job. For cancer. For watching someone suffer with illness. For losing a child.

How do we muster the energy, the ability, to do this? Where would that come from?
Not from us, for sure!
It would be the Holy Spirit at work in us.

I know how crazy this sounds. Believe me. When I sat in that prayer conference, I thought the speaker had lost his mind.
But….
It really is amazing when you have the faith to thank God for the valley you are currently in, or for a valley that you have already been through. I couldn’t put into words to describe what it does, so you’re just going to have to trust me on this one.

Correction, don’t trust my words…..trust God’s Word…..

“Rejoice always; pray without ceasing; in everything give thanks;
for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”
1 Thessalonians 5:28

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Source: Christian Canvases by Kasey