Bible MBASample

Do You Share God's Passion? 

You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. James 4:3 ESV 

In the end, this is the crux of why we fail - God is not committed to our success when we are pursuing our own agenda. Whether it is the people who tried to make a name for themselves by building a tower at Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) or the rich man who got a windfall and decided to splurge (Luke 12:16-21), pursuing our own passions often leads to a dead end. 

While it might seem at first like a blank check, the promise that if you ask, “it shall be given you” is actually contingent on our asking for the right things and with the right motives. 

God actually wants to bless us beyond our wildest fantasies. He is “... able to [carry out His purpose and] do superabundantly, far over and above all that we [dare] ask or think [infinitely beyond our highest prayers, desires, thoughts, hopes, or dreams] -" (Ephesians 3:20 AMPC) The keyword is, however, Purpose. God will do all of these awesome things described only as it aligns with His purpose. 

Now, God's purpose will vary from one specific situation to the other, but His overall purpose for us is “... to be molded into the image of His Son [and share inwardly His likeness], ...” (Romans 8:29 AMPC) It is so, that in Adam, God made us after His image and likeness and He seeks to make us even now in the image of Christ - His manifest nature. 

In the pursuit of financial success in business, it is easy to lose sight of this ultimate purpose and to want it for different reasons. God, however, never loses sight of His own goal. It is His one single passion to make us like Himself and unless we align our own passions with His, God is unable to help us and will even thwart our efforts to protect us from ourselves.