Can I Know God's Will? (Crucial Questions)

by R.C. Sproul

If prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, surely fortune-telling is the second oldest.

God delights to hear the prayers of His people when they individually ask, “Lord, what do you want me to do?”

the will of God is a holy quest—a pursuit that is to be undertaken with vigor by the godly person.

Theologians describe as the “decretive will of God” that will by which God decrees things to come to pass according to His supreme sovereignty.

When God sovereignly decrees something in this sense, nothing can prevent it from coming to pass.

there is a God who is sovereign, whose will is greater than ours. His will restricts my will. My will cannot restrict His will. When He decrees something sovereignly, it will come to pass—whether I like it or not, whether I choose it or not. He is sovereign. I am subordinate. The Preceptive

One of the great tragedies of contemporary

Christendom is the preoccupation of so many Christians with the secret decretive will of God to the exclusion and neglect of the preceptive will.

the goal of our redemption is not piety or spirituality but righteousness.

from beginning to end—from the nature of God to the destiny of man—our human duty remains the same—a call to righteousness.

No earnest Christian can ever have a cavalier attitude toward the law of God.

We know certain things about God’s decretive will that He has been pleased to set forth for our information in Holy Scripture. But because we are finite creatures, we do not comprehend the total dimension of divine knowledge or the divine plan.

understanding of the will of God is desperately important for every Christian seeking to live a life that is pleasing to his

or her Creator.

God’s inability to sin is based not on an inner powerlessness to do what He wants, but rather on the fact that God has no inner desire to sin.

man still has the ability to choose what he wants, but lacks the desire for true righteousness.

To understand freedom as purely spontaneous choice with no prior disposition controlling it is to rob freedom of any moral significance.