God's plan for your life?

Jeremiah 29:13 

You will seek Me and find Me when you seek Me with all of your heart.

Tonight Grant, the pastor, said people come into his office to talk. These people don't know what God's will is for their life. They don't know where God wants them; they can't figure out their purpose. He said he always asks these people what they do for their quiet time. He asks what scripture they are currently reading. He asks what their prayer life is like. He said their answer is all too often some excuse about how they are too busy for any of this. Their answer to these questions is that they don't have a quiet time, and they aren't reading any scripture. They don't have a prayer life. Then he quoted Martin Luther saying, "I have so much to do, I cannot afford to NOT spend  three hours a day in prayer."

Here is my total and complete, ice-cold-water-in-the-face conviction:

We go to class because if we don't, we will never learn anything. We have to show up, pay attention, study, listen, and practice the material. Without doing all of this, we never really learn anything, and we never really figure out what it is we should do with our lives.

It's no different with God's will for our life. If we want God to teach us, to reveal his plan and purpose and will for our lives, we have to show up. We have to meet with him daily. We have to study his word; pay attention to what it teaches us. We have to sit and listen to him; we have to talk to him. We have to practice living as he calls us to live. We can no more expect God to give us his good and perfect will without earnestly seeking it, as we can expect our Spanish teacher to give us a 100 on the test without genuinely earning it.

 I know when I fail at something, as much as it hurts me to fail, it hurts my father even more to watch me fail because he knows if I had just listened to him, I would have succeeded. God has a plan and a purpose for all of us, but as much as he wants us to seek him so he can give us the true desires of our hearts and fill us up, he allows us to choose for ourselves what voices we will listen to and what path we will learn from and follow.