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Robert Wuthnow describes twenty-one to forty-five-year-olds as tinkerers.1
In 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men completed all the major transitions into adulthood by age thirty.
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.
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.
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.
God’s will of decree.
God’s will of desire.
If the will of decree is how things are, the will of desire is how things ought to be.
God’s will of direction.
Stop thinking of GOD’s will like a corn maze, or a tightrope, or a bull’s-eye.
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.
We’ll miss God’s best and have to settle for an alternate ending to our lives.
The Will of God as a Way of Life, by Gerald Sittser.
If we choose rightly, we will experience his blessing and achieve success and happiness. If we choose wrongly, we may lose our way, miss God’s will for our lives, and remain lost forever in an incomprehensible maze.2
who strangely feel more spiritual the less they actually do.
But such preoccupation with finding God’s will, as well-intentioned as the desire may be, is more folly than freedom.
we should really stop putting ourselves through the misery of overspiritualizing every decision.
I’ve seen more who are paralyzed by indecision and inactivity.
We have too many choices.
our preoccupation with the will of God is a Western, middle-class phenomenon of the last fifty years.
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.
But instead of reveling in this freedom, most find it agonizing.
“Decide” comes from the Latin word decidere, meaning “to cut off,”
“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 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.
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.
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.
First, the conventional approach to discovering God’s will focuses almost all of our attention on nonmoral decisions.
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 all the things God has already revealed to us in the Bible. In
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.
Second, the conventional approach implies that we have a sneaky God.
He not only hides His will from us, but He then expects us to find it.
Third, the conventional approach encourages a preoccupation with the future.
We don’t have to say “If the Lord wills” after every sentence, but it must be in our heads and hearts.
We must renounce our sinful desire to know the future and to be in control.
Fourth, the conventional approach undermines personal responsibility, accountability, and initiative.
I think it was a decision that pleased Him, just like He would have been pleased if we had stayed. But it was my decision.
we persist in searching for God’s will because decisions require thought and sap energy.
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.
Fifth, the conventional approach enslaves us in the chains of hopeless subjectivism.
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?
horse-riding accident and the regret he lived with after the fact because he asked the Lord if he should ride, but he never asked the Lord where he should ride.
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?
This highlights one of the great ironies about the will-of-God talk among Christians. If there really is a perfect will of God we are meant to discover, in which we will find tremendous freedom and fulfillment, why does it seem that everyone looking for God’s will is in such bondage and confusion?
Worry and anxiety are not merely bad habits or idiosyncrasies. They are sinful fruits that blossom from the root of unbelief.
The question God cares about most is not “Where should I live?” but “Do I love the Lord with all my heart?”
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.
First, God’s will is that we live holy, set-apart
lives:
