Question to be asked: I hear a lot of people say that God told them to do something. I also have a friend who says that she and God have an understanding when it comes to some of her choices. I’m wondering – how can I tell when God is directing me to do something?
Intro: “How can I know God’s will?”
I want to make a note up front that this is a GREAT question. If you’re asking it, you’re in effect saying, “I’m interested in doing what God wants. How can I make sure of that?” So, for anyone who’s honestly asking that question, good for you! Just like other issues, the fact that you’re here today may be some indicator that you care about this, and probably have given it some thought - maybe a lot of thought.
I want to help us approach this question, and to leave with some very doable, biblical answers to it. But, this isn’t Jenny Craig - “You just eat the food and lose the weight.” There’s not a secret formula where you just do it, and boom-chucka-lucka, you’ve got it!
In fact, one of the sources I ran across on this subject was an article by Philip Yancey called “Finding the Will of God: No Magic Formulas.” But, instead, what I find is something much more wonderful and engaging.
How can I know God’s will?
First, we need to look at how God’s word describes what is even meant by that phrase “God’s will.” After all, if God is all-powerful, isn’t there a sense in which everything that happens is permitted by God? Doesn’t that mean everything that happens is God’s will?
But we’ll still need to narrow this down because when I ask the question, “What is God’s will?” I’m especially asking what I should do, aren’t I?
Where should I live? What should I do for a vocation? Whom should I marry? What Church should I be a part of? What skills should I develop? Where should I invest my money, my time?
I need to credit Jack Cottrell, and others, with a way of looking at God’s will that I hope will help us. That is, when the Bible speaks of “God’s will,” it’s generally speaking of one of 3 things: God’s Purposes, God’s Desires, or God’s Permission. Sam Stone calls it what God Performs, Prefers, and Permits. Get a handle on these things, and we can begin to answer this big question. I’m going to focus us on the first 2 this morning.
1. God’s Purposes (Sovereign will; Purposive will; Decretive will; Predetermined will)
Begin at the beginning where God purposed to create a perfect world. No one told Him to do it. No one advised Him to do it. No one loaned him the power or resources to do it. In His absolute power, God determined He would do something. Listen to how He describes it in…
Psalm 33:8-9 Let all the earth fear the LORD; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him! For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.
That was God’s will, and the will of God only, at work.
God is perfect. He can’t lie. He can’t fail. He can’t deny Himself. That’s what the word says! The perfect God makes a perfect creation. For God to do otherwise would contradict His being.
So, He looks at His creation and declares it good. That doesn’t surprise me. God doesn’t make junk.
And to that perfect arrangement, again by His own choosing, God added other creatures, with a free will - angels, some of whom He knew would turn against Him and His creation; a man and woman, whose fall would shape the course of time/space history. From our very human perspective, it seems like those created beings messed up what God wanted. Some people think of God somehow making a mistake. Everything would have been OK if He hadn’t put humans here. But all along, there has been this overriding power of God that can’t be sidetracked - God’s purposive will, God’s eternal plan for His creation that He has openly explained to us. Paul describes the way God…
Ephesians 1:11b
…works all things according to the counsel of his will,
He says through Isaiah…
Isaiah 46:9a-10
…I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, “My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose,”
That purpose, He tells us, includes a path of redemption - a complicated path that will fix the brokenness of creation. It involves the forming of a nation called Israel. All along, they are a group of people who have a tendency to wander off from what God tells them. He even lets them be completely overrun and exiled, but God has a purpose at work, despite their tendency to disobey. That, by the way, is the context of Jeremiah 29:11, where God is talking about His purposes for Israel
Jeremiah 29:10-11
For thus says the LORD: When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.
That future and hope is that Israel would still exist, and that through them would come the Messiah - Jesus! Just like God had determined from the beginning, Israel would accomplish what God wanted to accomplish through them. So Jesus came, and He was…
Acts 2:23
…delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God…crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.
Isaiah said “it was the will of the Lord to crush him.” (Isaiah 53:10a Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him; he has put him to grief…)
It was no mistake! It was God’s plan. Jesus Himself spoke about God’s purposes:
John 4:34 Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.
Understand, this is what Paul is talking about especially when he tells the Ephesians,
Ephesians 1:11
In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will
6 years ago we went through a long series called “The Story.” One of the perspectives we used every week was to talk about how the Bible has an “upper story” and a “lower story.” This first part of God’s will - this is the “Upper story” of the Bible. This is the story of what God is doing, already determined, unchanging. God decided it. God is making it come to pass.
We need, as we’re reading God’s word and we run across reminders of this, to say, “Ahh, there’s that upper story again again! God’s plan that won’t be changed.” He takes the actions of wicked leaders like Pharaoh, evil nations like Assyria, betrayers like Judas Iscariot, liars like Jacob, cowards like Barak, runaways like Jonah, courageous nobodies like Esther, unselfish outcasts like Ruth, men of faith like Abraham, and He uses them to write HIS STORY.
That’s great news, isn’t it? Because, at the end of the day, God’s plan is this:
John 6:40 For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”
That’s what God performs. He has already decided it. It’s what God wants, and it’s what God makes happen. Period. You can bank on it. It’s not going to change.
The 2nd part of God’s will is His Preceptive Will - What God prefers.
2. God’s Desires (God’s Preceptive Will; God’s Commands; What God Prefers)
This is more about the big question staring at us today. Because, when we ask that question, “How can I know God’s will?” we’re recognizing that there is a lower story - that God has given us a choice in all of this. There’s something that He wants from us, but we decide if we’re going to do it.
Jesus was weeping over the city of Jerusalem when He said,
Matthew 23:37 O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!
God’s will, God’s desire is that everyone would repent, be saved, and come to the knowledge of the truth and not perish. But that’s not what’s going to happen. Some are going to choose to refuse Him.
Matthew 18:14
So it is not the will of my Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.
2 Peter 3:9
The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.
1 Timothy 2:4
who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.
I wonder, what have you chosen today? It’s not up to your parents, your grandparents, your friends, or even your church. Just you. God has handed to you the most important choice of your life. So, what’s your choice? Would you choose Him today and quit saying NO? Would you be willing to become loyal to Jesus today, to swim against the cultural current? Would you stand up right now and say, “I’m done with running from God and I want to turn my life over to Him?” I’ll ask you again in a while…if we’re still here.
This all brings us to this big question - How can I know God’s will?
If you’re reading through the Bible this year, you’re going to find that there are several ways people looked for and found what God wanted them to do.
In the OT, the Jewish priests used a way of figuring out God’s will called Urim and Thummim. We really don’t know much about it.
There were other ways God communicated what He wanted - through prophets, by dreams, by visions, by natural disasters and object lessons, even by having a donkey talk to a guy named Balaam. The writer of Hebrews says that God spoke “in many portions and in many ways.”
What about now? I wouldn’t spend much time searching for a donkey that will talk to you.
Let’s start here:
We have something now that none of those people had. God’s precepts, God’s commands, God’s desires, what God prefers, are spelled out for us in His word. First, and above all, the place where we learn God’s will the most is through His written word.
Let me give you an example of how you can know God’s will:
1 Thessalonians 5:18
give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
Now, you know, and I know, that God wants us to give thanks in all circumstances. How did we know that? We just read it in God’s word. It tells us that’s what He wants.
Asking God to point us where He wants us to go can’t be used as a substitute for knowing what God has already told us in His word!
Ill - I’m going to share a true story about my wife, which she OK’d. She has told it on herself several times. Before the days of Siri and cell phone navigation, Carrie was making a drive up to Maranatha Bible Camp, about an hour away from our home in Joplin, MO. Like most church camps, Maranatha is out in the middle of nowhere, and getting there involved several county roads with names like “MM” and “W.” It’s not the easiest to find if you’ve never driven to it. Somehow, Carrie was on her own this trip, and feeling very uneasy about finding the camp. After driving along in the sticks, she was sure she had missed it, so she began praying: “Lord, please, give me some sign, some indicator of where I’m supposed to go.” Just then, she saw a sign, literally - a sign at a bridge that said, “Turnback Creek.” So, she very dutifully stopped and turned around! Actually, the camp was just a couple miles past that creek, and Carrie ended up more lost than before.
Sometimes you don’t need to get a sign from Heaven. Sometimes you need a map! God has given us a map! You can’t substitute some “sign from God” for knowing God’s word and knowing the mind of God!
George Meuller, whose prayer-directed work helped thousands of orphans in England, said this about knowing God’s desires:
“I never remember a period that I ever sincerely and patiently sought to know the will of God by the teaching of the Holy Ghost, through the instrumentality of the word of God, but I have always been directed rightly. But if honesty of heart and uprightness before God were lacking, or if I did not patiently wait upon God for instruction, or if I prefer the council of my fellow men to the declarations of the word of the living God, I made great mistakes. - George Meuller
What about the things that aren’t directly addressed in Scripture? What about God’s will for those things? Where should I work? Who should I marry? Should I become a missionary? Which church should I become a part of? Should I move to TN? Should I adopt a child?
Most of life’s choices are neither commanded nor restricted by God’s will as it’s spelled out in the Bible. Like Jack Cottrell says,
“The only difficulty is that He has not spelled out His [specific, individual] will on these matters in the pages of Scripture; He has left it up to us to figure it out in the best possible way. He has even left it up to us to figure out what is the best possible way to figure it out.” - Cottrell
That’s what we’re working on this morning! We’re not without help, though.
Remember that God gives us a pretty big set of guidelines to begin with. Knofel Staton refers to those as the “umbrella” of God’s universal will. In other words, if your choices fit under that umbrella of what God has clearly communicated for everyone, you can be confident that they’re good choices.
Still, what if there are choices that are not just good, but better? How do you tune into those?
Ill - Kenny and Cindy White were at a crossroads in their schooling and in life. They wanted to do what God had in store for them to do. Kenny could either finish his degree and enter youth ministry work, or finish his degree to become a school teacher. They were wrestling around with what to do, talking it back and forth as they were driving down the highway at night. Finally, Kenny said, “Let’s ask God for a sign. If we see a deer on the right sight of the road, we’ll go into the youth ministry. If there’s a deer on the left side of the road, I’ll become a school teacher. They continued driving, and as they came around a curve, there in the middle of the road…was a skunk. Kenny said they concluded that God thought their attitudes stunk!
Colossians 1:9-10
…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, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God.
“…filled with the knowledge…all spiritual wisdom and understanding…walk in a manner worthy…fully pleasing…bearing fruit…increasing in the knowledge of God.” Do you hear how this isn’t just about memorizing all the right answers? I like Philip Yancey’s point that “The Bible contains very little specific advice on the techniques of guidance, but very much on the proper way to maintain a love relationship with God.”
Sometimes we can get so caught up in trying to find and do God’s will that we neglect this most basic and important part of understanding it. You have to be close to God to know well what He desires.
Other helps
Over the years, I’ve heard several people point to some helps to discern God’s more specific desires for your life. Let me share a few of those:
It starts with God’s direct word - always. God will never direct you to do anything that conflicts with His word.
Then what about the opportunities that God may be opening up in front of you? Paul watched for these and wrote about them.
From there, what about godly counsel from spiritually mature people? The Proverbs speak of the value of that kind of advice.
What experiences has God taken you through that may have prepared you to do something? Henry Blackaby refers to these as “spiritual markers.” James wrote that our difficult experiences make us more complete.
What abilities or Spiritual gifts do you have? It may be that the Lord is going to use something that just really stands out about you. He took Peter, who had a brash and forward character, and used Peter to be outspoken for Him.
Do you have a passion for something God can use? It might be that God has prepared you for it by stirring it inside you. Jeremiah, for all his hardships, said that he couldn’t help but speak God’s message because if he refused to speak it became like fire in his bones. I watched people who have a burden placed on their heart to do something for the Lord. It’s obvious when it’s there.
Use all these helps from God. Listen to the variety of ways He’s directing you.
Conclusion:
Nothing is more clear from Scripture than the fact that God wants you in a relationship with Him that will save you and give you life.
John 6:40
For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”
God has set this into motion. His desires are clear. He wants your life given over to Him now, and He wants you to be with Him forever.
We’re still here, for now. I’ll ask you again:
What’s your choice? Would you choose Him today and quit saying NO? Would you be willing to become loyal to Jesus today, to swim against the cultural current? Would you stand up right now and say, “I’m done with running from God and I want to turn my life over to Him?”
