Just Do Something: A Liberating Approach to Finding God's Will

by Kevin DeYoung

“God is not a magic 8-ball we shake up and peer into whenever we have a decision to make. He is a good God who gives us brains, shows us the way of obedience, and invites us to take risks for him.”

Consider this one statistic: In 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men completed all the major transitions into adulthood by age thirty. These transitions include leaving home, finishing school, becoming financially independent, getting married, and having a child. By 2000, only 46 percent of woman completed these transitions by age thirty, and only 31 percent of men.

Young adults statistics

Perhaps your free spirit needs less freedom and more faithfulness. Maybe your emerging adulthood should … I don’t know, emerge.

Decisions

Providence

The other side of the coin is God’s will of desire. This refers to what God has commanded—what He desires from His creatures. If the will of decree is how things are, the will of desire is how things ought to be. I realize that I am not dealing with the massive question of how God can decree all that comes to pass while also holding us responsible for our actions. That’s the old divine sovereignty and human responsibility question. The Bible clearly affirms both.

There’s a third way in which we sometimes speak of God’s will. Most of the time what we really are looking for is God’s will of direction. We hear it in those questions we asked at the beginning of this chapter: What does God want me to do with my life? What job should I take? Where should I live? Those are the questions we ask when we seek God’s will of direction.

So here’s the real heart of the matter: Does God have a secret will of direction that He expects us to figure out before we do anything? And the answer is no. Yes, God has a specific plan for our lives. And yes, we can be assured that He works things for our good in Christ Jesus. And yes, looking back we will often be able to trace God’s hand in bringing us to where we are. But while we are free to ask God for wisdom, He does not burden us with the task of divining His will of direction for our lives ahead of time.

God does have a specific plan for our lives, but it is not one that He expects us to figure out before we make a decision.

Here’s Sittser’s explanation of the usual, and misguided, way of looking at God’s will. Conventional understanding of God’s will defines it as a specific pathway we should follow into the future. God knows what this pathway is, and he has laid it out for us to follow. Our responsibility is to discover this pathway—God’s plan for our lives. We must discover which of the many pathways we could follow is the one we should follow, the one God has planned for us. If and when we make the right choice, we will receive his favor, fulfill our divine destiny and succeed in life. … If we choose rightly, we will experience his blessing and achieve success and happiness. If we choose wrongly, we may lose our way, miss God’s will for our lives, and remain lost forever in an incomprehensible maze.2

In fact, expecting God to reveal some hidden will of direction is an invitation to disappointment and indecision. Trusting in God’s will of decree is good. Following His will of desire is obedient. Waiting for God’s will of direction is a mess. It is bad for your life, harmful to your sanctification, and allows too many Christians to be passive tinkerers who strangely feel more spiritual the less they actually do.

God is not a Magic 8-Ball we shake up and peer into whenever we have a decision to make. He is a good God who gives us brains, shows us the way of obedience, and invites us to take risks for Him.

accion. obedience

We know God has a plan for our lives. That’s wonderful. The problem is we think He’s going to tell us the wonderful plan before it unfolds. We feel like we can know—and need to know—what God wants every step of the way. But such preoccupation with finding God’s will, as well-intentioned as the desire may be, is more folly than freedom.

This is the first reason we seek to know God’s specific will of direction for us: We want to please Him.

We may have the best of intentions in trying to discern God’s will, but we should really stop putting ourselves through the misery of overspiritualizing every decision.

The second reason some of us seek God’s will of direction is because we are, by nature, quite timid.

Some Christians need encouragement to think before they act. Others need encouragement to act after they think.

Some Christians have the best intentions in seeking out God’s will. They are just too cautious and a little fainthearted. Such Christians need admonition, but they also deserve our patience and help.

The third reason we seek God’s will for direction is we are searching for perfect fulfillment in life.

By and large, my grandparents’ generation expected much less out of family life, a career, recreation, and marriage. Granted, this sometimes made them unreflective and allowed for quietly dismal marriages. But my generation is on the opposite end of the spectrum. When we marry, we expect great sex, an amazing family life, recreational adventure, cultural experiences, and personal fulfillment at work. It would be a good exercise to ask your grandparents sometimes if they felt fulfilled in their careers. They’ll probably look at you as if you’re speaking a different language, because you are. Fulfillment was not their goal. Food was, and faithfulness too. Most older folks would probably say something like, “I never thought about fulfillment. I had a job. I ate. I lived. I raised my family. I went to church. I was thankful.”

Recently, I was talking with Grandpa DeYoung, a lifelong Christian now in his eighties. I asked him if he ever thought about what God’s will was for his life. “I don’t think so,” was his short response. “God’s will was never a question presented to me or I ever thought about. I always felt that my salvation … depended on my accepting by faith the things that we believe. After that, I don’t think I ever had a problem thinking: ‘Is this the right thing for me?’”

Consejo

I guess if you keep busy and work your whole life, you don’t have time to worry about being fulfilled.

I’m pretty sure most of us would be more fulfilled if we didn’t fixate on fulfillment quite so much.

Of the five reasons for our obsession with finding God’s will, this may be the most crucial: We have too many choices. I’m convinced that previous generations did not struggle like we do trying to discover God’s will because they didn’t have as many choices.

In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz tells of a trip to his local moderately sized grocery store. He found 285 varieties of cookies, 13 sports drinks, 65 box drinks, 85 kids’ juices, 75 iced teas, 95 types of chips and pretzels, 15 kinds of bottled water, 80 different pain relievers, 40 options for toothpaste, 150 lipsticks, 360 types of shampoo, 90 different cold remedies, 230 soups, 75 instant gravies, 275 varieties of cereal, 64 types of barbeque sauce, and 22 types of frozen waffles.

In some countries, people suffer from too few choices. In America, we have too many.

Professor Schwartz’s observations about college students are telling, and from my experience, spot-on. He observes that the students he teaches have multiple interests and capabilities. They have gobs of talent and opportunities. The world is wide open to them. But instead of reveling in this freedom, most find it agonizing. They are forced to navigate between competing interests: making money and making a difference, challenging their minds and channeling their creativity, focusing on a career and leaving time for a family, settling down now and traveling abroad for a while, starting a career and trying another internship, living in a bustling city and resting in a pastoral location, going to work right away and going on for more schooling.

“Decide” comes from the Latin word decidere, meaning “to cut off,” which explains why decisions are so hard these days. We can’t stand the thought of cutting off any of our options. If we choose A, we feel the sting of not having B and C and D. As a result, every choice feels worse than no choice at all. And when we do make an important choice, we end up with buyers’ remorse, wondering if we are settling for second best. Or, worse yet, we end up living in our parents’ basement indefinitely as we try to find ourselves and hear God’s voice. Our freedom to do anything and go anywhere ends up feeling like bondage more than liberty, because decision making feels like pain, not pleasure.

Decision. Accion.

But I am advocating floundering less, making a difference for God sooner, and—above all—not spiritualizing, year after year, our inability to make decisions in the elusive quest to discover God’s will. I’m arguing that our eagerness to know God’s will is probably less indicative of a heart desperately wanting to obey God and more about our heads spinning with all the choices to be made.

The final reason we want to know the will of God is because we are cowardly. It’s true. Sometimes when we pray to know the will of God, we are praying a coward’s prayer: “Lord, tell me what to do so nothing bad will happen to me and I won’t have to face danger or the unknown.” We want to know everything is going to be fine for us or for those we love.

Esther was more man than most men I know, myself included. Many of us—men and women—are extremely passive and cowardly. We don’t take risks for God because we are obsessed with safety, security, and most of all, with the future. That’s why most of our prayers fall into one of two categories. Either we ask that everything would be fine or we ask to know that everything will be fine.

That’s often what we are asking for when we pray to know the will of God. We aren’t asking for holiness, or righteousness, or an awareness of sin. We want God to tell us what to do so everything will turn out pleasant for us. “Tell me who to marry, where to live, what school to go to, what job to take. Show me the future so I won’t have to take any risks.” This doesn’t sound much like Esther.

Because we have confidence in God’s will of decree, we can radically commit ourselves to His will of desire, without fretting over a hidden will of direction. In other words, God doesn’t take risks, so we can.

riesgo

So we can stop pleading with God to show us the future, and start living and obeying like we are confident that He holds the future.

The most important issues for God are moral purity, theological fidelity, compassion, joy, our witness, faithfulness, hospitality, love, worship, and faith.

because anxiety, after all, is simply living out the future before it gets here.

We are not gods. We walk by faith, not by sight. We risk because God does not risk.

Worry about the future is not simply a character tic, it is the sin of unbelief, an indication that our hearts are not resting in the promises of God.

Passivity is a plague among Christians. It’s not just that we don’t do anything; it’s that we feel spiritual for not doing anything. We imagine that our inactivity is patience and sensitivity to God’s leading. At times it may be; but it’s also quite possible we are just lazy. When we hyper-spiritualize our decisions, we can veer off into impulsive and foolish decisions.

No doubt, selfish ambition is a danger for Christians, but so is complacency, listless wandering, and passivity that pawns itself off as spirituality.

But why did the Lord give us brains and say so much about gaining wisdom if all we are really supposed to do is call on the Lord to tell us what to do in a thousand different nonmoral decisions?

If there really is a perfect will of God we are meant to discover, in which we will find tremendous freedom and fulfillment, why does it seem that everyone looking for God’s will is in such bondage and confusion? Christ died to give us freedom from the law (Galatians 5:1), so why turn the will of God into another law leading to slavery?5

Worrying and fretting and obsessing about the future, even if it is a pseudo-holy worry that attempts to discern the will of God, will not add one single hour to your life, and it will certainly not add any happiness or holiness either.

Worry and anxiety are not merely bad habits or idiosyncrasies. They are sinful fruits that blossom from the root of unbelief.

Worry and anxiety reflect our hearts’ distrust in the goodness and sovereignty of God. Worry is a spiritual issue and must be fought with faith.

God’s way is not to show us what tomorrow looks like or even to tell us what decisions we should make tomorrow. That’s not His way because that’s not the way of faith. God’s way is to tell us that He knows tomorrow, He cares for us, and therefore, we should not worry.

The apostle Paul echoes Jesus’ message about what the center of God’s will is. In fact, in four key passages he uses the phrase “the will of God,” “his will” and “the will of the Lord” to describe God’s call upon our lives. Walking in God’s will means seeking first God’s kingdom and His righteousness.

God's wilk

First, God’s will is that we live holy, set-apart lives: “For this is the will of God, your sanctification” (1 Thessalonians 4:3).

He wants you to buy a house that will make you holy. If you marry, He wants you to get married so you can be holy. He wants you to have a job that will help you grow in holiness. Count on it: God’s will is always your sanctification. He has set you and me apart that we would grow to be more like Christ.

Second, we are to always rejoice, pray, and give thanks. Paul the apostle gives three straightforward commands: “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (1 Thessalonians 5:16–18).