And God has set up prayer in such a way that, if you want to explain it away, you can. That's the human mind. God set it up like that for a reason, which is this: God ordained that people should be governed in the end by what they want.

Generally speaking we are in God's will whenever we are leading the kind of life he wants for us. And that leaves a lot of room for initiative on our part, which is essential: our individual initiatives are central to his will for us.

Specifically, in our attempts to understand how God speaks to us and guides us we must, above all, hold on to the fact that learning how to hear God is to be sought only as a part of a certain kind of life, a life of loving fellowship with the King and his other subjects within the kingdom of the heavens.

A day shared with Jesus is a day of continuous conversation. We will learn to hear his voice.

"Do I really want this?" This question needs answering for the simple reason that if God is going to be with us, we should expect that our lives will be extremely different from ordinary human life.

Desire—wanting something that appears to be good for some purpose or pleasure.

And where people do not want to know God, he usually allows them to be without him—at least for a while. When desire conflicts with reality, sooner or later reality wins.

It may seem strange but doing the will of God is a different matter than just doing what God wants us to do. The two are so far removed, in fact, that we can be solidly in the will of God, and know that we are, without knowing God's preference with regard to various details of our lives.

That is the function of the will or heart: to organize our life as a whole, and, indeed, to organize it around God.

God does not delight in having to always explain what his will is; he enjoys it when we understand

We can receive the things we do not want—or give up the things we do want—if we have decided, by the grace of God, that we can trust God to take care of us.

Our desires are the roots of the self-life in all of us. And until we, in conjunction with the grace of God, have made an intentional decision not to allow our desires to be the center of our lives, we can never have the kind of faith that will lead us to the life of abundant sufficiency in God.