Just Do Something: A Liberating Approach to Finding God's Will
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Read between September 1 - September 28, 2020
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“God doesn’t care where you go to school or where you live or what job you take.”
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God certainly cares about these decisions insofar as He cares for us and every detail of our lives. But in another sense, and this was the point I was trying to make, these are not the most important issues in God’s book. The most important issues for God are moral purity, theological fidelity, compassion, joy, our witness, faithfulness, hospitality, love, worship, and faith. These are His big concerns. The problem is that we tend to focus most of our attention on everything else. We obsess over the things God has not mentioned and may never mention, while, by contrast, we spend little time on ...more
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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.
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The traditional approach to God’s will makes God into a tricky little deity who plays hide and seek with us.
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God does not hide things from His people. There are lots of scenarios we don’t know, lots of mysteries we can’t figure out. There is a will of decree that is not usually known to the people of God (Deuteronomy 29:29). But He is not trying to confuse us or hide truth.
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The way many Christians treat God’s will is no different than you might treat a horoscope. We come to God and we want to know, “Is the job market good for Kevin today? Will I find my true love? Should I live in states that start with the letter A?” Our fascination with the will of God often betrays our lack of trust in God’s promises and provision. We don’t just want His word that He will be with us; we want Him to show us the end from the beginning and prove to us that He can be trusted. We want to know what tomorrow will bring instead of being content with simple obedience on the journey.
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Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” (James 4:13–15)
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we should be humble in looking to the future because we don’t control it; God does. And we should be hopeful in looking to the future because God controls it, not us.
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We walk by faith, not by sight. We risk because God does not risk. We walk into the future in God-glorifying confidence, not because the future is known to us but because it is known to God. And that’s all we need to know. 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.
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Just because you pray doesn’t mean your decisions are beyond objection.
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Poor guy—he got rejected, not only by this sweet girl, but by the Holy Spirit. The third person of the Trinity took a break from pointing people to Jesus to tell this girl not to date my roommate. I didn’t know that was in the Spirit’s job description. But I bet at any Christian school there are scores of men and women blaming God for their breakups.
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God’s will is frequently employed as an excuse for difficult relationship decisions. This is the sort of accountability-dodging jargon we want to avoid. If you aren’t interested in dating or courtship or marriage or whatever, just say “No thanks” or “Not now,” but please don’t make God the bad guy in your relational messes.
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We seek relief from the responsibility of decision-making and we feel less threatened by being passive rather than active when making important choices.
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Passivity is a plague among Christians.
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When we hyper-spiritualize our decisions, we can veer off into impulsive and foolish decisions. But more likely as Christians we fall into endless patterns of vacillation, indecision, and regret. No doubt, selfish ambition is a danger for Christians, but so is complacency, listless wandering, and passivity that pawns itself off as spirituality. 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.
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I’m not saying subjective decisions are wrong. We make decisions based on a “feeling” all the time. But a subjective divining of God’s will should not be your decision-making process. It’s a dead-end street.
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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?
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Would God really spare us from all accidents if we simply asked Him enough particulars and prayed hard enough at the start of the day? 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?
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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 And, to make matters worse, this law is personalized, invisible, and indecipherable; whereas the Mosaic law (which was hard enough already), was at least objective, public, and understandable. What a burden. 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 ...more
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you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” (Matthew 6:25–34)
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The big idea of this passage could not be any clearer: Jesus does not want us to worry about the future. God knows what we need to live. When He wants us to die, we will die. And as long as He wants us to live, we will live. He will provide us with the food, drink, jobs, housing, with everything that we need to live and glorify Him in this life until He wants us to glorify Him by dying. 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 ...more
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Worry and anxiety are not merely bad habits or idiosyncrasies. They are sinful fruits that blossom from the root of unbelief.
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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.
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We must fight to believe that God has mercy for today’s troubles and, no matter what may come tomorrow, that God will have new mercies for tomorrow’s troubles
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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 tomor...
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“Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.” He doesn’t call on us to seek a divine word before scheduling another semester of classes or deciding between bowling and putt-putt golf. He calls us to run hard after Him, His commands, and His glory. 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. The question God cares about most is not “Where should I live?” but “Do I love the Lord with all my heart, ...more
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Walking in God’s will means seeking first God’s kingdom and His righteousness.
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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.
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Don’t spend all your time wondering to your friends about whom to marry, where to live, how many kids to have, where to go on vacation, and what job to take. Instead, make sure you are practicing 1 Thessalonians 5:16–18. Are you joyful always? Are you praying continually? Are you giving thanks in all circumstances? You ought to be. For this is God’s will for us in Christ Jesus.
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Being filled with the knowledge of God’s will doesn’t mean getting divine messages about our summer plans and financial investments. It means we bear fruit, grow in our understanding of God, are strengthened with power unto patience, and joyfully give thanks to the Father.
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It’s about who we are, not where we are. Fourth, the will of God is to be filled with the Holy Spirit.
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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).
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put aside the passivity and the quest for complete fulfillment and the perfectionism and the preoccupation with the future, and for God’s sake start making some decisions in your life. Don’t wait for the liver-shiver. If you are seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, you will be in God’s will, so just go out and do something.
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The only chains God wants us to wear are the chains of righteousness—not the chains of hopeless subjectivism, not the shackles of risk-free living, not the fetters of horoscope decision making—just the chains befitting a bond servant of Christ Jesus. Die to self. Live for Christ. And then do what you want, and go where you want, for God’s glory.
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the will of God for your life is pretty straightforward: Be holy like Jesus, by the power of the Spirit, for the glory of God.
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