I’ve heard it said time and time again that if you follow God he will fulfill all your dreams. Though the underlying meaning is true that God plans fulfill your dreams, we can easily interpret this incorrectly on several different accounts. Often times God calls us down a path that just doesn’t make sense or fulfill our dreams. In the end, you simply need to trust God with your dreams as you follow him.
1) God Knows Your Dreams Better than You Do
The first problem with this statement is that we often assume we know what our dreams are. Sure, you have dreams, but aren’t our dreams often misguided? What if we have a much deeper and more fulfilling dream we don’t even know of yet?
There’s so much more to you that you don’t even know about yet. Fortunately, God knows. While you are pursuing what you think you desire, God could easily be nudging you away from that path toward what you actually enjoy.
I thought journalism would be a good degree path for me because I liked writing. So, without consulting God, I got a job working at my community college’s newspaper and signed up for a journalism class. I hated both. Yes, I liked writing, but I hated journalism. Now I know. In the same way, the dreams you have right now might not actually be what you truly desire.
2) You Can Trust God Even When the Path Doesn’t Make Sense
Of course we can’t just stand in one spot doing nothing until we know exactly what we want to do. We need to journey down some path, but how do we know which one? This is where we trust God.
Sometimes God will call you to do something you don’t think you’ll enjoy. This was my case when God called me to the Middle East. At the time I was a little mad at God, but now I understand and I thank God for leading me where I didn’t initially want to go. If I had never gone to the Middle East, I would’ve never found my reason to write: to challenge believers to adventurous and Christ-filled lives through wild steps of faith so the unreached will be reached with the Gospel.
When God leads you to a place that seems totally against everything you enjoy, trust him. There’s a reason. It may take you thirty years to discover why, but God never makes mistakes. If you find yourself in such a place, don’t complain. If God called you there, then you are in that hard place for a reason.
3) God knows the Best Timing
Did you know Moses was eighty years old when he returned to Egypt to free his people? Hopefully you don’t have to wait that long, but God’s timing is perfect. One of my biggest fears is that I’d rush ahead of God and get published and then let any potential success get to my head. I’d rather never land a book contract and remain faithful to God than be a New York Time best seller and let the fame tear me from him.
God knows the best timing. And, even better yet, God cares more for your heart than for the ministry he desires to do through you. He won’t push you into something that you aren’t ready to do, though this doesn’t mean you will feel ready.
4) God Knows How to Satisfy Your Dreams Best
Another thing we can get wrong with the idea that “God will fulfill all your dreams” is that we assume there’s some future promise land where we will be totally satisfied. Ideally, this is heaven, but we picture this being our lives on Earth too. As God leads you, you’ll find that he fulfills different dreams all along the path. There’s not one place in the future where all your dreams will be fulfilled.
Dreams will come and go. So enjoy the current dreams God is fulfilling in your life, rather than always longing for that next future dream to be fulfilled. This breeds dissatisfaction. In the end, Paul tells us that we can be satisfied in all things simply because God is our satisfaction.
5) You Can Trust God With Unfulfilled Dreams
The journey God leads you down will satisfy a lot of our dreams, but not all of them. Some dreams we will just have to set down as a pleasing offering to God. And this is a beautiful thing.
That being said, God will fulfill a good chunk of your dreams. But you can’t expect him too. It is not your right to have your dreams fulfilled. Each time God fulfills one of your dreams, we need to consider it a gift.
We are God’s servants and his children, though we deserve to be neither. We were his enemies. How amazing is it that he still chooses to use us? Why would we not trust him? And how could we feel so entitled to assume that God is here to please us? Yes, God loves us, but his job is not to make us happy. So, let’s go forward and fight the battles God has laid before us with absolute trust and gratitude.
How have you seen God fulfill your dreams?
If you are having a hard time trusting God with your dreams, please check out my blog 5 Reasons Why You Can Trust God
If you don’t know how to live a Godly life, check out my last blog Four Principles of the Christian Life
