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March 9 - March 21, 2021
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.
The better way is the biblical way: Seek first the kingdom of God, and then trust that He will take care of our needs, even before we know what they are and where we’re going.
We have little longing left for our reward in the next life because we’ve come to expect such rewarding experiences in this life. And when every experience and situation must be rewarding and put us on the road to complete fulfillment, then suddenly the decisions about where we live, what house we buy, what dorm we’re in, and whether we go with tile or laminate take on weighty significance. There is just too much riding on every decision. I’m pretty sure most of us would be more fulfilled if we didn’t fixate on fulfillment quite so much.
One quickly learns that “What are you going to do when you graduate?” is not a question many students are eager to hear, let alone answer. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that my students might be better off with a little less talent or with a little more of a sense that they owed it to their families to settle down back home, or even a dose of Depression-era necessity—take the secure job and get on with it! With fewer options and more constraints, many trade-offs would be eliminated, and there would be less self-doubt, less of an effort to justify decisions, more satisfaction, and less
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Our freedom to do anything and go anywhere ends up feeling like bondage more than liberty, because decision making feels like pain, not pleasure.
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.
Esther didn’t wait for weeks or months trying to discern God’s will for her life before she acted. She simply did what was right and forged ahead without any special word from God.
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.
Obsessing over the future is not how God wants us to live, because showing us the future is not God’s way. His way is to speak to us in the Scriptures and transform us by the renewing of our minds.
God is all-knowing and all-powerful. He has planned out and works out every detail of our lives—the joyous days and the difficult—all for our good (Ecclesiastes 7:14). 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.
For all of us it means putting aside our insatiable desire to have every aspect of our lives, or even the most important aspects of our lives, nailed down before our eyes before we get there.
God has a wonderful plan for your life—a plan that will take you through trial and triumph as you are transformed into the image of His Son (Romans 8:28–29). Of this we can be absolutely confident. But God’s normal way of operation is not to show this plan to us ahead of time—in retrospect, maybe; in advance, rarely.
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.
We obsess over the things God has not mentioned and may never mention, while, by contrast, we spend little time on all the things God has already revealed to us in the Bible.
My point is that we should spend more time trying to figure out how to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God (as instructed in Micah 6:8) as a doctor or lawyer and less time worrying about whether God wants us to be a doctor or lawyer.
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.
Perhaps our inactivity is not so much waiting on God as it is an expression of the fear of man, the love of the praise of man, and disbelief in God’s providence.
If something goes bad in our lives, do we really need the added burden of feeling like it all could have been prevented if we had just better discerned God’s will?
Expecting God, through our subjective sense of things, to point the way for every decision we face, no matter how trivial, is not only impractical and unrealistic, it is a recipe for disappointment and false guilt. And that’s hardly what intimacy with Jesus should be all about.
Rather it consists of a sober life, living in the power of the Holy Spirit, and offering praise and gratitude to God for his goodness. Paul’s main concern is about how believers conduct themselves in ordinary life.2
Simply put, God’s will is your growth in Christlikeness. God promises to work all things together for our good that we might be conformed to the image of His Son (Romans 8:28–29). And the degree to which this sounds like a lame promise is the degree to which we prefer the stones and scorpions of this world to the true bread from heaven (Matthew 7:9–11). God never assures us of health, success, or ease. But He promises us something even better: He promises to make us loving, pure, and humble like Christ. In short, God’s will is that you and I get happy and holy in Jesus.
We should put aside the passivity and the perfectionism and the quest for perfect fulfillment and get on with our lives. God does not have a specific plan for our lives that He means for us to decipher ahead of time.
What is a bad idea is treating nonethical decisions as weightier than they really are because you think that there is One Right Answer that you must discover.
God can speak to people in many ways, the writer explains, but His full and complete revelation is now spoken by His Son, Jesus Christ. As we’ll see from the opening chapters of Hebrews, God speaking by His Son includes not only divine revelation in the person of Christ—that is, Jesus shows us what God is like—but also divine revelation through the Spirit of Christ speaking in the Scriptures.
God has you where you are for a reason. He has given you success this week for a reason. He has sent hardship into your life this week for a reason. In everything, the invisible hand of providence is lovingly directing your life—behind the scenes—down to the smallest detail. We often assume that guidance means God whispers secret plans in our ears. But we would be less anxious to get special revelatory guidance if we thought more about God’s providential guidance by which He sovereignly directs our affairs at all times.
Scripture is not a dead letter. God not only has spoken in the Scriptures, but he continues to speak through the Scriptures.
When we read the Bible, we know we are hearing from God. We are not only reading what God has inspired by the Spirit, but what He continues to say by the same Spirit.
You don’t get the sense that the apostle got angelic visits every other day and waited for his dreams to tell him what to do. With few exceptions, Paul planned, strategized, and made his own decisions about the nonmoral matters of his life.
We have no record in the New Testament of anyone anxious to hear God tell him what to do. Paul never sought out special words of knowledge concerning his future. He seems very concerned to know and obey God’s moral will.
Hearing from God directly can be important and legitimate, but I certainly wouldn’t treat a special impression from the Lord as more special than the sure word of the Lord found in the Bible.
If we had done something—almost anything, really—faithfully and humbly and for God’s glory for all that time, we could have made quite an impact. But if we do nothing, because we are always trying to figure out the perfect something, when it comes time to show what we did for the Lord, we will not have anything.
Here’s the bottom line: If God opens the door for you to do something you know is good or necessary, be thankful for the opportunity. But other than that, don’t assume that the relative ease or difficulty of a new situation is God’s way of telling you to do one thing or the other. Remember, God’s will for your life is your sanctification, and God tends to use discomfort and trials more than comfort and ease to make us holy.
Even if the answers seem thrilling in their relevance, we must not put any stock in anachronistic, out-of-context answers we read into the Bible after asking questions the Bible never intended to address.
This book is not designed to make us all into hyper-rationalistic decision-makers who need to consult an Excel spreadsheet before deciding on an appetizer from Applebees.
Why is this me...
Don’t confuse impressions, hunches, and subjective feelings with certain words from the Lord. If a thought or impulse pops into your head, even if it happens while reading Scripture, don’t assume it is a voice from heaven.
We all get intuitions and hunches and gut feelings all the time. Some are from the Lord. Some aren’t. Most often, it probably doesn’t matter. Listen to your gut or not, but don’t make it an extra-special factor in your decision making, and don’t think you need that peaceful, easy feeling before you can make up your mind.
But impressions of the Lord’s leading after prayer are still impressions. We cannot infallibly judge the rightness or wrongness of our plans based on the feelings we have about them after prayer.
Wisdom is understanding the fear of the Lord and finding the knowledge of God. Wisdom, in Proverbs, is always moral. The fool, the opposite of the wise person, is not a moron or an oaf. The fool is the person who does not live life God’s way.
Isn’t it interesting that we are never told in Scripture to ask God to reveal the future or to show us His plan for our lives? But we are told—in no uncertain terms—to call out for insight and to cry aloud for understanding. In other words, God says, “Don’t ask to see all the plans I’ve made for you. Ask Me for wisdom so you’ll know how to live according to My Book.”
To put these ways into familiar language, we could say we get wisdom by reading our Bibles (storing up God’s commands), listening to sound advice (turning our ears to wisdom), and praying to God (calling out for insight). The second and third are nearly interchangeable because when God gives us wisdom, He most often gives it through other people.
God doesn’t want us to merely give external obedience to His commands. He wants us to know Him so intimately that His thoughts become our thoughts, His ways our ways, His affections our affections. God wants us to drink so deeply of the Scriptures that our heads and hearts are transformed so that we love what He loves and hate what He hates.
Too many of us want God to be the world-class scholar who will write our papers and live our lives for us, when God wants us to sit at His feet and read His Word so that we can live a life in the image of His Son.
God doesn’t tell us the future for this simple, yet profound reason: We become what we behold. God wants us to behold Him in His glory so that we can be transformed into His likeness (2 Corinthians 3:18). If God figured everything out for us, we wouldn’t need to focus on Him and learn to delight in His glory.
God says, “I’m not giving you a crystal ball. I’m giving you My Word. Meditate on it; see Me ...
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But for most of our decisions we would do well to simply ask someone else, “What do you think?” We spend all this time asking God, “What’s Your will?” when He’s probably thinking, “Make a friend, would you? Go talk to someone.
But what do we pray for if we aren’t asking God to tell us exactly what to do? Well, first of all we pray for illumination. We ask God to open our minds so we can understand the Scriptures and apply them to our lives. Don’t forget about this prayer. God can show you amazingly relevant things in His Word if you ask Him to.
And then after you’ve prayed and studied and sought advice, make a decision and don’t hyper-spiritualize it. Do what seems best.
That’s why the way of wisdom is about more than getting a decisive word about one or two big decisions in life. The way of wisdom is a way of life. And when it’s a way of life, you are freer than you realize. If you are drinking deeply of godliness in the Word and from others and in your prayer life, then you’ll probably make God-honoring decisions.
For most Christians, agonizing over decisions is the only sure thing we know to do, the only thing that feels safe and truly spiritual. But sometimes, oftentimes actually, it’s okay to just decide.
But isn’t it possible that if we are walking with God in daily prayer, and we have some sanctified common sense, that we should be able to make decisions on the spot once in a while?
