Enjoy this article from Noah J. Matthews, a second-year apprentice at The Company. Learn more about Noah and read some of his work at NoahJMatthews.com.
You have a dream. There’s something inside of you that you just have to accomplish, have to become, have to pursue. Even if you’ve banished it to the back of your mind for decades, there’s a dream inside of you.
Being a mom, writing a novel, becoming a filmmaker—these are all heart-level dreams that sometimes take some uncovering to find within us.
As Christians we want to do what God wants, not what we want. But we also have dreams—aspirations that don’t always feel very “Christian.”
What do I mean? Some people have dreams of becoming missionaries. Obviously, that’s something God would want for them—it’s clearly advancing the Kingdom.
But some of us have dreams of becoming actors, businessmen, novelists, programmers. Those dreams, if anything, seem more related to money than to God.
Now, if you’ve been following The Company for any amount of time, you probably understand that any profession can be used for the Kingdom, to minister truth to people, to cause them to seek God, etc.
And obviously, as Christians we do want to make a difference and influence people for Jesus.
But we also just like writing, or acting, or coding, or whatever it is. It gives us joy. We love the craft.
Does God care about that? Does God care about your dream?
In Psalm 37:4 it says “Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”
In context, the surrounding verses are talking about trusting God and committing your way to him. That’s pretty straightforward. We all need to trust God more with everything that concerns us.
But then this verse sneaks in that word “delight.” It’s a beautiful word, isn’t it? It’s soft, light, almost bounces off the tongue.
In Hebrew, the word used for “delight” is ‘anag. When I was looking through its definitions, this one stood out to me: “to be happy about, take exquisite delight in.”
The verse is speaking to a heart condition. When we position our heart so that we delight exquisitely in God and His plan, the things He put in us will come out.
God cares about our dreams if we have joy in Him. Not if we give Him a certain amount of our lives out of obligation or “do the right thing.”
It’s delight. It’s love. It’s a relationship.
And God wants you to succeed in your dream! 3 John 2: “Beloved, I pray that all may go well with you and that you may be in good health, as it goes well with your soul.”
In the King James, it says “prosper” instead of “goes well,” and the Greek word backs it up: euodoo, which means “to help on the road, to prosper, to be successful; figuratively, to succeed in business affairs.”
“Business affairs.” Right there in the Bible one of the apostles is wishing for the believers to succeed even in business!
Not only does God care about your dream and want to grant it to you, He wants you to succeed in it.
That doesn’t mean it won’t take work. That doesn’t mean we won’t have to trust Him for every single step. But it does mean that our dreams are something I think God is pretty happy about. He gave them to us after all (remember the parable of the talents in Matthew 25?).
So next time you’re getting discouraged about your dream, remember, God DOES care about your dream. If you’re delighting yourself in Him and pursuing that relationship, your dream will become a beautiful outflow of that. It’ll happen, not as a reward, but as another piece in the beautiful mosaic that God is creating through your delight in Him.
Originally from Grayling, Michigan, Noah J. Matthews is a second-year writing apprentice at The Company. Noah is passionate about helping artists and young professionals seek the Lord with their whole hearts and pursue their creative dreams.
As an apprentice at The Company, Noah also serves as the Managing Editor of our in-house literary magazine, The Pearl.
Learn more about Noah and download a free short story at NoahJMatthews.com.
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