OPEN: I once read the true story about a man who was a guest sailing aboard a submarine. Before they set sail, he asked the coxwain if there were any special regulations to be observed during exercises.
He said “I was puzzled when he replied by asking me how good my mental arithmetic was. He went on to explain the golden rule of submarine service: ‘One of the most important things to remember on board a Submarine is to count how many times we dive, add the number of times we surface and then divide by two. If there is one left over, don’t open the hatch.’”
APPLY: Seems simple doesn’t it? But for the crew of a submarine that simple rule can make all the difference.
I’ve noticed that there often comes a point in an eager Christian’s life when they want to know:
“What is God’s Will for my life?”
The idea that God had purpose for my life made a great impact on my life when I read Eph 2:10
“For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”
That passage (Eph 2:10) told me that God has something He wants me to do. And it tells me that there is something that God wants YOU to do as well.
Because we are Christians God has a purpose for us… a destiny for us to fulfill.
So how do I know what that purpose is?
How will I know what God wants me to do?
Well, just like the “Golden Rule” on board the submarine, knowing God’s will for our lives isn’t that hard. In fact, it’s really quite simple.
1st – God has said very basic things about His will for your life
Ø He wants you to be saved
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever would believe in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” John 3:16
Until we meet that purpose in our lives… nothing else matters. And if you don’t belong to Jesus Christ this morning you need to make that decision. (sooner rather than later)
Ø Once you belong to Him, He wants you to live a special kind of life.
“It is GOD’S WILL that you should be SANCTIFIED…” 1 Thessalonians 4:3
That passage goes on to say that you live that special kind of life by…
· being sexually pure
· and by treating others with honesty and kindness
When you and I belong to God, He expects our lives to reflect that special relationship we have with Him.
Ø In fact, He wants you live your lives as a model for the world to see.
1 Peter 2:15 tells us “For it is GOD’S WILL that BY DOING GOOD you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men”
We should live such decent lives that even those who hate Christ won’t have anything to accuse us of.
Ø And He wants to live grateful lives focused on God’s blessings. We shouldn’t be known as complainers.
1 Thessalonians 5:18 tells us “give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.
There’s a lot more that the Bible tells us about God’s will for our lives but those passages explicitly said: THIS IS GOD’S WILL for a Christian’s life.
Now that’s just generic “Will of God” stuff that will be true for every Christian. BUT what I want to know is what is God’s will for ME in MY LIFE!
· Who does He want me to marry?
· Where does He want me to live?
· What does He want me to do for a living?
· What kind of ministry can I do that would please Him?
ILLUS: When I was younger, I had some friends who would try to discover God’s Will for their lives by using (what I called) the “Magic 8 Ball” technique.
You remember those big black 8 balls they used to sell? They were about 6 inches in diameter – way too big to used on a pool table – and they were filled with a dark filmy liquid. You were supposed to hold the ball in your hands, ask a question, shake the ball vigorously, and then turn it over. On the bottom of the ball was a “window” where an answer would “magically” appear.
It would answer your question with such replies as “yes”, “no”, or “you’ve got to be kidding!”
Well, obviously that wasn’t a very spiritual way to determine what God wanted a Christian to do, so what these guys would do was lay their Bible in their laps… ask a question … and then plop their Bible open at random and seek their answer on that page.
Apparently that was such a common practice at one time, that someone made a joke of it. They told of a guy who wanted to know God’s will for his life and so he opened his Bible at random and came upon Matthew 27:5 “ Judas … went away and hung himself.”
(pause…)
That didn’t make him very happy, so he closed the Bible, opened it again and it plopped open to Luke 10:37 “…Jesus told him, ‘Go and do likewise.’”
(pause…)
Really frustrated now, he tried once more and the Bible fell open to John 13:27 “Then said Jesus unto him, ‘What thou doest, do quickly.’”
Let’s be perfectly clear on this: God does not endorse the “Magic 8 Ball” approach to learning His will. That type of practice is not much different from looking for God’s will in a horoscope or palm reading… and we all know God hates those things.
So why would I want to treat the Bible like a spiritual tea reading?
God is fairly explicit on how we can know His will for our lives. It’s right here in Romans 12:2
“Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. THEN you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is— his good, pleasing and perfect will.”
You see, the key to learning God’s will for your life is to make yourself ready for the time when God wants you to do something.
How do you make yourself ready?
You make yourself ready by learning to think like God thinks by:
· Reading your Bible
· Going to church
· Attending Sunday School
· Going to Bible Studies
In other words, you soak God’s thinking into your mind.
ILLUS: That’s exactly how some of the great men and women of the Bible prepared themselves for God’s purpose. An excellent example of this is the story of David.
We usually think of David as just appearing out of nowhere to confront a giant on the field of battle. But in reality, David had been preparing for that confrontation long before that fateful day. As a boy, David had spent his days out in the fields watching his father’s sheep. But he had not been idly spending his time gazing on the flocks in the field and the clouds in the sky. No. He had been spending his time meditating on the law of God "day and night” (Psalm 1:2). In fact, David was so involved in this activity that he began to write songs that spoke of the glory of God that he found in Scripture… and David was honored to be brought into the court of King Saul to ease that King’s tortured mind with the Psalms he had written while he was out in the fields.
Thus, when David went out into the field of battle against Goliath, he had long been prepared by his constant exposure to God’s mindset… so much so that he became offended by Goliath’s taunts and went out on the field of battle to declare:
"You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the LORD Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied.” 1 Samuel 17:45
David had allowed God’s thinking to TRANFORM his own.
But there is a kind of thinking that competes with God’s. It’s called the “Pattern of this world”.
The world constantly tries to conform me to it’s way of thinking. It does this by the books it turns out, the movies and TV shows that many of us could watch, and the video games that we could play.
Now I don’t mean to say that every TV show we watch or book we read has to be “Christian.”
But we’ve got to be careful what we allow into our homes and our minds.
ILLUS: Diana and I have just made the decision to let our subscription to "TV Guide" lapse. Does anybody have an idea why we’d have done that? Well, it’s not the magazine it once was. It’s become a grocery story gossip magazine that now focuses on sexual innuendo, crude humor and outright cursing. We don’t need that in our home, and we began to realize that if we allowed this magazine to be in our home long enough, it would begin to conform our thinking to the thinking of this world. Diana and I decided we can’t afford to let that happen. So that magazine will no longer be in our home.
The key to learning God’s will for our PERSONAL lives is soak “God’s kind of thinking” into our minds so that we’ll be READY when He wants to make use of us.
Now is it possible that I might MISS OUT on God’s will???
Well, yeah….
Romans tells that the ways I can miss out on God’s will is by
1. “conforming my mind to the pattern of this world (Romans 12:2)
2. and by putting myself 1st – by thinking more highly of myself than I ought to (Romans 12:3)
By contrast, Paul talks about the kind of thinking that will ALWAYS allow me to be in God’s will. In 2 Corinthians 8:5, he praises the actions of the churches in Macedonia, and he tells us:
“…they did not do as we expected, but they gave themselves FIRST TO THE LORD and then to us in keeping with God’s will.” 2 Corinthians 8:5
In other words… the churches in Macedonia were doing the will of God BECAUSE they put God first in the choices they made.
Let’s go back to the original set of questions I asked earlier
· Who does He want me to marry? (do they please God?)
· Where does He want me to live? (can I serve God there?)
· What does He want me to do for a living? (can I use that job to witness/ serve others)
· What kind of ministry can I do that would please Him? (what can I do right now?)
The churches in Macedonia were doing God’s Will BECAUSE they put God’s priorities 1st
And, because of that, God made use of them.
If you put God 1st in your decision making, God will Always find a way to use you. God will always find a way to reveal His will to you – so you can do it.
There are a lot of people who are afraid they might miss out on God’s will by being in the wrong place. They tend to look on God’s will as it were akin to a bus station. They essentially believe that if they’re not at the right bus station at the right time, God won’t be able to find them. And since He can’t find them He won’t be able to make His will complete in their lives.
Let’s get something straight here…
If God wants you or I to do something special…
Or wants to do something special in our lives…
There is NO CHANCE that we’ll ever miss the bus
Do you need proof of that?
ILLUS: Well, let me tell you the story of a man named Jonah. Do you remember what God told Jonah to do? God commanded him to preach to the city of Nineveh, to convict it of its guilt and bring it to repentance.
So, what does Jonah do? He gets on a boat headed for Tarshish which just happened to be on the other side of the known world.
Jonah didn’t want to preach to Nineveh. It was a wicked city and Jonah just knew that if he went and preached at Nineveh, the people there would probably repent and then God would spare their city. But Jonah didn’t want Nineveh to repent… he didn’t want them spared… he wanted them annihilated.
Jonah defied the WILL OF GOD.
He didn’t just miss God’s will… he actively refused to do it.
But, did he succeed?
No. In fact, God took him fishing and explained His will to him a little more succinctly.
My point is this: if God really wants you to do something… He can find you anywhere. There isn’t any place you can go to that you could even hide from God if wants you to do something.
YOU WILL NOT MISS THE BUS!
The key thing is: always be available for God to use you.
THEN you’ll always be ready for God to do His will in your life.
God has a purpose for our lives… a destiny for us to fulfill.
And you know the really neat thing about this is that when God wants you or I to something, He will always prepare us for that deed.
Romans 12:6 tells us: “We have different gifts, according to the grace given us.”
In short, God prepares us for our tasks with abilities that may not be things we come by naturally. He equips and prepares us because He knows what we can do if He empowers us to the task.
ILLUS: I once spoke to a friend of mine named Gary who didn’t believe he could ever speak in public. He didn’t even like to pray publicly. I told him not to worry… if God wanted him to speak/ teach/ even preach… God would give him the necessary ability and desire to do it.
One day, Gary encountered a personal crisis and asked me to pray for him. I refused. I said I wouldn’t pray “for” him, but I WOULD pray “with” him. It was still a prayer offered in the “privacy” of just the two of us, but it was the beginning of his growth. After a time, he went on to be a leader in his congregation and led the youth group for a while.
All he needed to was be willing to let God make use of him.
One person observed: If God wants 7, you can give him 3 and He’ll add 4.
If you give Him 4, He’ll add 3.
No matter what you give Him, He is capable of adding or subtracting whatever He needs to, to get whatever He desires.
The key here is to make sure we GIVE HIM the best we have, and let HIM make use of it.
ILLUS: One of the things that I have marveled at is how God has used our church quartet (the Sonshine Boys). Initially, we just thought we’d be singing here at church, and occasionally at other congregations. And frankly, I couldn’t hardly stand to listen to our singing. But as time went by, we got better and people liked coming to our concerts… and even “paid us” for the privilege.
God has worked it so that we’ve been honored to sing on the same stage as groups like the “The Down East Boys”, “The Imperials” and “Hoosier Harmony”. We didn’t deserve to be up there with them… but God arranged it so that we could.
Just recently we sang at a local County Fair. Things went well, the audience was receptive, and afterward the woman in charge approached us and asked us what they’d agreed to pay us. Apparently, that question had never really come up and so I asked her what other groups asked for. Without batting an eye she said “$500.” We’ve never been paid $500 in the 3 years we’ve sung so far… and from the way she talked, she felt we deserved more than that amount.
I pulled Larry (our lead singer and booking manager) aside, and asked him about a concert we had sponsored a few weeks before, where we’d lost money because we had brought in a big name group… and the audience hadn’t been large enough to support the expense.
“How much did we lose?” I asked.
“$1200” he replied.
“Well, this lady seems to be telling us she’d pay us whatever we’d ask.”
“Oh,” he replied, “$1200 seems like way more than we deserve”
“Well, would you settle for $800?” I responded.
“Yeah”
And so, at a concert we hadn’t even been expecting to be paid for, God supplied a major portion of the money we needed for our past expenses. It was great.
My point is this: If God wants to use you, He’ll supply you with the opportunities and the resources to accomplish His goals.
Lastly, one of the problems with trying to be in God’s will is that God isn’t always on the same timetable as we are.
ILLUS: There was once a preacher named Phillips Brooks who was noted for his poise and quiet manner. At times, however, even he suffered moments of frustration and irritability. One day a friend saw him pacing the floor like a caged lion. "What’s the trouble, Dr. Brooks?" asked the friend. "The trouble is that I am in a hurry." said Brooks. "but God isn’t."
I’ve noticed in Scripture, God often took a great deal of time working His will in the lives of people He used.
· Moses was in the wilderness for 40 years being prepared by God to lead the Israelites
· The apostles spent 3 years with Jesus being prepared for their ministries
· Paul spent 3 years in the desert with Christ before he was ready to go to work for God
CLOSE: Again and again throughout the Bible, God often took a great deal of time preparing His servants for their jobs. Because Of That: Christians have been known to get impatient with God. They may want Him to do something powerful and dramatic in their lives RIGHT NOW!
ILLUS: When I was just out of Bible College, I couldn’t find a church that would hire me just then… and I was impatient to get started. For three years, the best I seemed to be able to do was work in fiberglass factory and sell real estate. I remember setting in the church choir listening to a particularly boring sermon by the preacher (I really liked the man, but I simply couldn’t get into what he was preaching that day).
As my mind wandered, I began to consider going to some other church. Any church that was more exciting that then one I was in. But one of my problems was, I knew that if I went to some of the other churches in town, they would teach things that I didn’t believe.
So I just sat there despairing and wondering when God would ever make use of me.
And then the most amazing thing occurred. Seemingly out of nowhere, a butterfly flitted down from the balcony and landed on my knee. He peacefully sat there for few moments and then flew of into the auditorium, disappearing in the back somewhere. At the moment, it seemed as if God had reached down, patted my knee and said “It’s ok. Just be patient, I’ll work everything out.”
Was it a coincidence. I personally doubt it. Because, at that moment I felt at peace and was satisfied to just “wait” on God and His timing.
OTHER SERMONS IN THIS SERIES (Got Questions?)
* Do I Qualify For Heaven? Matthew 22:1-22:14
* Freedom From Guilt. John 8:31-8:36
* How Can I Know God’s Will For My Life? Romans 12:1-12:8
* What are you like, God? Isaiah 6:1-6:7
* God, why do you allow suffering? 2 Corinthians 12:1-12:10
