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

by Kevin DeYoung

But tinkering also means indecision, contradiction, and instability. We are seeing a generation of young people grow up (sort of) who tinker with doctrines, tinker with churches, tinker with girlfriends and boyfriends, tinker with college majors, tinker living in and out of their parents’ basement, and tinker with spiritual practices no matter how irreconcilable or divergent.

Second, our search for the will of God has become an accomplice in the postponement of growing up, a convenient out for the young (or old) Christian floating through life without direction or purpose.

God’s will of decree. This refers to what God has ordained. Everything that comes to pass is according to God’s sovereign decree. And all that He decrees will ultimately come to pass.

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.

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.

fact, expecting God to reveal some hidden will of direction is an invitation to disappointment and indecision.

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.

But such preoccupation with finding God’s will, as well-intentioned as the desire may be, is more folly than freedom.

We’ve been stuffed full of praise for mediocrity and had our foibles diagnosed away with hyphenated jargon and pop psychology.

we need the firm reminder that many of us expect too much out of life. We’ve assumed that we’ll experience heaven on earth, and then we get disappointed when earth seems so unheavenly.

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

But if no one settled down and no one stayed put for awhile, let alone a lifetime, we could not minister to all the students in the way we do.

The church needs lifers and those who can be counted on for the long haul.

wonder if the abundance of opportunities to explore today is doing less to help make well-rounded disciples of Christ and more to help Christians avoid long-term responsibility and have less long-term impact.

Obsessing over the future is not how God wants us to live, because showing us the future is not God’s way.

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.

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

But if you are motivated by right and doing right, then your career choice is not a moral decision. The Bible simply does not address every decision we must make.

We must renounce our sinful desire to know the future and to be in control.

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.

The same is true of personal accountability. We need to be careful that we aren’t using God as the trump card in all our decisions. Just because you pray doesn’t mean your decisions are beyond objection.

We don’t want “God told me so” or “God laid it on my heart” or “It’s God’s will” or worse yet, “God told me that He wants you to do such and such” to be conversation stoppers that remove accountability in decision making.

The third person of the Trinity took a break from pointing people to Jesus to tell this girl not to date my roommate.

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.

Jesus doesn’t treat obsession with the future as a personal quirk, but as evidence of little faith (v. 30). Worry and anxiety reflect our hearts’ distrust in the goodness and sovereignty of God.

The decision to be in God’s will is not the choice between Memphis or Fargo or engineering or art; it’s the daily decision we face to seek God’s kingdom or ours, submit to His lordship or not, live according to His rules or our own.

Count on it: God’s will is always your sanctification.

It’s about who we are, not where we are.

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

We have no promise in Scripture that God will speak to us apart from the Spirit speaking through His Word.

The extraordinary means of guidance were not sought.

Many of our errors where spiritual gifts are concerned arise when we want to make the extraordinary and exceptional to be made frequent and habitual. Let all who develop excessive desire for “messages” through the gifts take warning from the wreckage of past generations as well as contemporaries. … The Holy Scriptures are a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path.

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.

Christians are sometimes guilty of using the absence of an open door as an excuse for laziness:

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.

The whole fleece approach to life is dangerously close to violating Jesus’ admonition, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test” (Matthew 4:7).

The Bible carries no greater weight just because verses are flipped to at random.

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.

without regarding the context, or duly comparing it with the general tenor of the word of God, and with their own circumstances,

Don’t confuse impressions, hunches, and subjective feelings with certain words from the Lord.

We cannot infallibly judge the rightness or wrongness of our plans based on the feelings we have about them after prayer.

The Word of God is not to be used as a lottery; nor is it designed to instruct us by shreds and scraps, which, detached from their proper places, have no determinative import; but it is to furnish us with just principles, right apprehensions to regulate our judgments and affections, and thereby to influence and direct our conduct.”

God doesn’t tell us the future for this simple, yet profound reason: We become what we behold.

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.

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?

Study the Scriptures, listen to others, and pray continually—that’s the best course of action, not just at the moment of crisis, but as a way of life.

The more you read the Bible, the more your thinking will be transformed, and the more these kinds of issues will matter to you.

But I didn’t ask God to tell me what to do. So what did I pray for? I prayed that God would make me honest in my interviews.

instead of finding purpose in every kind of work, we are madly looking for the one job that will fulfill our purpose in life.