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In 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men completed all the major transitions into adulthood by age thirty. These transitions include leaving home, finishing school, becoming financially independent, getting married, and having a child. By 2000, only 46 percent of woman completed these transitions by age thirty, and only 31 percent of men.2
There are lots of reasons for delayed adulthood. I understand that. Just because you’ve been on the planet for one-fourth to one-third of your life and still haven’t completed “the transition” to adulthood doesn’t mean you’re automatically a moocher, a lazy bum, or a self-indulgent vagabond.
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. 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.
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.
If we examine the Bible, we see that God’s will has two sides to it. On the first side is God’s will of decree. This refers to what God has ordained. Everything that comes to pass is according to God’s sovereign decree.
Shocking as it sounds, the most heinous act of evil and injustice ever perpetrated on the earth—the murder of the Son of God—took place according to God’s gracious and predetermined will.
The other side of the coin is God’s will of desire. This refers to what God has commanded—what He desires from His creatures.
I am simply noting that God is sovereign, but He is not the author of sin.
Deuteronomy 29:29: “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.”
Most of the time what we really are looking for is God’s will of direction.
So here’s the real heart of the matter: Does God have a secret will of direction that He expects us to figure out before we do anything? And the answer is no. Yes, God has a specific plan for our lives. And yes, we can be assured that He works things for our good in Christ Jesus. And yes, looking back we will often be able to trace God’s hand in bringing us to where we are. 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.
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.
Conventional understanding of God’s will defines it as a specific pathway we should follow into the future. God knows what this pathway is, and he has laid it out for us to follow. Our responsibility is to discover this pathway—God’s plan for our lives. We must discover which of the many pathways we could follow is the one we should follow, the one God has planned for us. If and when we make the right choice, we will receive his favor, fulfill our divine destiny and succeed in life…. If we choose rightly, we will experience his blessing and achieve success and happiness. If we choose wrongly,
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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.
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.
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. In the conventional view of God’s will, however, we get the impression that He not only hides His will from us, but He then expects us to find it. So we obsess over God’s will of direction, eventually getting frustrated with God for not showing us what He wants. We end up disappointed with ourselves or angry with God because we can’t seem to figure out how to find God’s
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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)
But it would have been wrong for me to use God’s will as a way to remove my personal responsibility in the decision.
Poor guy—he got rejected, not only by this sweet girl, but by the Holy Spirit.
If we ask, “How can I know the will of God?” we may be asking the wrong question. The Scriptures do not command us to find God’s will for most of life’s choices nor do we have any passage instructing on how it can be determined.
But a subjective divining of God’s will should not be your decision-making process. It’s a dead-end street. How do you know when an open door is the Lord’s open door or the Devil tempting you?
Besides, I don’t recall in the book ever hearing how this divining of God’s will actually works, except that we “try on” answers and second-guess ourselves a lot. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the author when he wrote about his 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. He recalled praying over the horses and feeling “like it wasn’t working,” but he went out anyway because he just wanted to go for a ride like a normal person. Surely, this is misplaced shame.
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?
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. Worry is a spiritual issue and must be fought with faith.1
First, God’s will is that we live holy, set-apart lives: “For this is the will of God, your sanctification” (1 Thessalonians 4:3).
Second, we are to always rejoice, pray, and give thanks. Paul the apostle gives three straightforward commands: “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (1 Thessa-lonians 5:16–18).
“And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding” (Colossians 1:9).
Fourth, the will of God is to be filled with the Holy Spirit. “Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is” (Ephesians 5:17).
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).
Statement 1: God guides us by His invisible providence at all times. This is another way of stating Ephesians 1:11: “[God] works all things according to the counsel of his will.”
Statement 2: God can speak to His people in many different ways, guiding them with their conscious cooperation.
Statement 3: In these last days, God has spoken to us by His Son.
Statement 4: God continues to speak to us by His Son through His Spirit in the Scriptures.
God not only has spoken in the Scriptures, but he continues to speak through the Scriptures. That’s the assumption behind Hebrews 3:7.
Statement 5: Apart from the Spirit working through Scripture, God does not promise to use any other means to guide us, nor should we expect him to.
Was an available ship sailing to Tarshish the Lord’s open door for Jonah? Was this a “favorable providence” confirming that Jonah’s decision to turn away from Nineveh was the right one? Of course not. The next ship to Tarshish had nothing to do with the Lord’s leading and everything to do with Jonah’s disobedience.2
If God opens the door for you to do something you know is good or necessary, be thankful for the opportunity. But other than that, 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.
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).
But impressions of the Lord’s leading after prayer are still impressions. We cannot infallibly judge the rightness or wrongness of our plans based on the feelings we have about them after prayer.
Wisdom is what we need to live a godly life. God does not tell us the future, nor does He expect us to figure it out. When we don’t know which way to turn and are faced with tough decisions in life, God doesn’t expect us to grope in the dark for some hidden will of direction. He expects us to trust Him and to be wise.
“What is wisdom?” Wisdom is understanding the fear of the Lord and finding the knowledge of God.
In other words, God says, “Don’t ask to see all the plans I’ve made for you. Ask Me for wisdom so you’ll know how to live according to My Book.”
The first way to get wisdom is to store up God’s commands (1). The second way is turn your ear to wisdom (2). And the third way is to call out for insight (3).
Too many of us want God to be the world-class scholar who will write our papers and live our lives for us, when God wants us to sit at His feet and read His Word so that we can live a life in the image of His Son. God doesn’t tell us the future for this simple, yet profound reason: We become what we behold. God wants us to behold Him in His glory so that we can be transformed into His likeness (2 Corinthians 3:18).
But what do we pray for if we aren’t asking God to tell us exactly what to do? 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.
I prayed that I would make a decision based on faith, hope, and love—and not the praise of man and greed and selfish ambition.
And it’s a problem I put squarely at the feet of young men whose immaturity, passivity, and indecision are pushing their hormones to the limits of self-control, delaying the growing-up process, and forcing countless numbers of young women to spend lots of time and money pursuing a career (which is not necessarily wrong) when they would rather be getting married and having children. Men, if you want to be married, find a godly gal, treat her right, talk to her parents, pop the question, tie the knot, and start making babies.
The problem with the myth of “the one” is that it assumes that affection is the glue that holds the marriage together, when really it is your commitment to marriage that safeguards the affection. So ditch the myth and get hitched.
