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

by Kevin DeYoung

God does not send us out on a fool’s errand, expecting us to discern His will like an old man listening to his aching knees to discern the weather.

Those who tinker know how to improvise, specialize, pull things apart, and pull people together from a thousand different places. But tinkering also means indecision, contradiction, and instability.

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

My goal is not as much to tell you how to hear God’s voice in making decisions as it is to help you hear God telling you to get off the long road to nowhere and finally make a decision, get a job, and, perhaps, get married.

floating through life without direction or purpose. Too many of us have passed off our instability, inconsistency, and endless self-exploration as “looking for God’s will,” as if not making up our minds and meandering through life were marks of spiritual sensitivity. As a result, we are full of passivity and empty on follow-through. We’re tinkering around with everyone and everything. Instead, when it comes to our future, we should take some responsibility, make a decision, and just do something.

With so many questions to face in the next years—or sometimes in the next several weeks—it’s no surprise so many of us are desperate to know the will of God for our lives. Which brings me back to a rephrasing of the question that began this chapter: If God has a wonderful plan for my life, how can I discover what it is?

I’d like us to consider that maybe we have difficulty discovering God’s wonderful plan for our lives because, if the truth be told, He doesn’t really intend to tell us what it is. And maybe we’re wrong to expect Him to.

“The will of God” is one of the most confusing phrases in the Christian vocabulary.

God is sovereign over all things—nature and nations, animals and angels, spirits and Satan, wonderful people and wicked people, even disease and death. To steal a line from Augustine, “The will of God is the necessity of all things.” In other words, what God wills, will happen, and what happens is according to God’s will. That’s what I mean by God’s will of decree.

“Providence is the almighty and ever present power of God by which he upholds, as with his hand, heaven and earth and all creatures, and so rules them that leaf and blade, rain and drought, fruitful and lean years, food and drink, health and sickness, prosperity and poverty–all things, in fact, come to us not by chance, but from his fatherly hand.”

God knows all things and sovereignly superintends all things. God’s will of decree is absolute. It is from before the creation of the world. It is the ultimate determination over all things, and it cannot be overturned.

God’s will of decree —what He has predetermined from eternity past—cannot be thwarted. God’s will of desire—the way He wants us to live—can be disregarded.

Doing the will of God means we say no to the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, and our pride in possessions.

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. I’m not saying God won’t help you make decisions (it’s called wisdom, and we’ll talk about it in chapter 8). I’m not saying God doesn’t care about your future. I’m not saying God isn’t directing your path and in control amidst the chaos of your life. I believe in providence with all my heart. What I am saying is that we should stop thinking of God’s will like a corn maze, or a tightrope, or a bull’s-eye, or a choose-your-own-adventure novel.

Many of us fear we’ll take the wrong job, or buy the wrong house, or declare the wrong major, or marry the wrong person, and suddenly our lives will blow up. We’ll be out of God’s will, doomed to spiritual, relational, and physical failure. Or, to put it in Christianese, we’ll find ourselves out of “the center of God’s will.” We’ll miss God’s best and have to settle for an alternate ending to our lives. Several years ago I read The Will of God as a Way of Life, by Gerald Sittser. His book helped me crystallize my understanding of what I felt was wrong with the traditional understanding of God’s

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.

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.

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. Our misdirected piety makes following God more mysterious than it was meant to be.

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

“admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all” (1 Thessalonians 5:14).1

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

It’s all a matter of perspective. If you think that God has promised this world will be a five-star hotel, you will be miserable as you live though the normal struggles of life. But if you remember that God promised we would be pilgrims and this world may feel more like a desert or even a prison, you might find your life surprisingly happy.

Faith in Jesus does not guarantee that everything will go our way.

Abel had faith and he died; Enoch had faith and he did not die; Noah had faith and everyone else died!2 So just having faith doesn’t guarantee your life—or the lives of those around you—will be all candy canes and lollipops. Life isn’t always fun, and we shouldn’t expect it to be.

The more my grandpa and I talked, the more I realized the will of God beyond trying to obey His moral will was an unfamiliar concept to him. “You just … do things” seemed to be my grandpa’s sentiment, and as you’re doing them and walking with the Lord, you don’t spend oodles of time trying to figure out if you like what you are doing. I guess if you keep busy and work your whole life, you don’t have time to worry about being fulfilled.

I’m not against people leaving their unhappy jobs to take a shot at what they really love. But as a counterweight to the “make your dreams come true” stuff of graduation speeches, 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.

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.

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 some countries, people suffer from too few choices. In America, we have too many. I remember a missionary from Turkey telling me, tongue in cheek, that one of the hardest parts of being back in the United States was all the salad dressing. “Just get some dressing,” he said while we were eating out for lunch. “Don’t make me choose among seven different kinds of ranch.”

most of our obsession with knowing the will of God is due to the fact that we are overburdened with choice. We think choice makes us happy, but there comes a point (and most of us are well past it) where we would actually be better off with fewer choices.

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.

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.

My fear is that of all the choices people face today, the one they rarely consider is, “How can I serve most effectively and fruitfully in the local church?”

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 re...

With so many choices, it’s no surprise that we are always thinking about the greener grass on the other side of the fence. We are always pondering what could be better or what might be nicer about something or someone new. “Decide” comes from the Latin word decidere, me...

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.

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. But that’s not how God spoke to Esther. As a Jewish woman who won an unusual beauty contest to become Xerxes’ queen (see Esther 2:2–17), Esther would learn that God’s plans can include risk—and an opportunity to show courage.

All she knew was that saving her people was a good thing. God did not tell her what would happen if she obeyed or exactly what she could do to ensure success. She had to take a risk for God. “If I perish, I perish” was her courageous cry.

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. If the king extended to her the golden scepter, praise the Lord. If he did not, she died.

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 sa...

“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. His way is not a crystal ball. His way is wisdom. We should stop looking for God to reveal the future to us and remove all risk from our lives. We should start looking to God—His character and His promises—and thereby have confidence to take risks for His name’s sake.

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—...

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).

God promises to be your sun and your shield and to carry you and protect with His strong right arm. 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 conventional approach to the will of God—where God’s will is like a corn maze with only one way out and lots of dead ends, or like a bull’s-eye with the center of God’s will in the middle and second best everywhere else, or like a Magic 8-Ball that we are supposed to shake around until some generic answer floats to the top—is not helpful. It is not good for our decision making. It is not good for our sanctification. And sometimes it is frankly dishonoring to Christ.