Introduction
Doug Batchelor, in his book: Determining the Will of God, tells the story about a Farmer who was trying desperately to know God’s Will. Everyday he would go out in his fields and as he was working the fields he would pray, “God, what is your will for my life? What do you want me to do with my life? Please, show me your will?” One day, while he was praying, he looked up and he saw an interesting cloud formation, moving over the horizon towards where he was. He looked up just as it drifted overhead, it began to morph into what looked like the letters “P” and “C”. And he said, “PC … Is that a sign from God? What does that mean? God, what is it you are trying to tell me?” And all of the sudden it struck him, “Preach Christ! It was like an energy went through him. “God wants me to leave farming and preach Christ!” So he sold his farm equipment and he gave up the land and he went out to preach Christ. He sent letters to all the surrounding churches telling them “If you need somebody to preach, I'm you man. Please, God has called me to preach Christ.” So he went out and started preaching, with no training whatsoever. He just knew that God had called him to preach Christ. He preached his very first sermon and it was horrible. It was so bad and he was so embarrassed. So he started to read about how to preach and he tried to learn from others. Then he went to the second church that called him and it was even worse than the first time. This continued to happen each week. He would go out and give it the best shot he had and each week it was dreadful. Until finally, after several months, people stopped calling him to preach. Finally, he realized that he couldn’t survive this way. So, he went back to farming. He bought all of his old equipment back and took over the ground again and began planting. That Spring, some of his old farming buddies came by and they asked him, “What happened? We thought you quit farming and were going out to preach Christ.” He said, “Well, I finally realized what PC stood for. It stood for “plant corn.”
Sometimes, it’s hard to figure out God’s will for our lives. You know, we look for the signs, try and read the signs, but even then we are not really sure how specific God's will is for our lives. So those are the kinds of questions that we are going to be wrestling with today. Over the last three weeks, we’ve been pondering some really important faith questions. We started with the question of God and suffering by asking if suffering is God's will. And I begged you to rethink what we naturally tend to say when we see something terrible happen, that it must be God's plan or God's will. I tried to teach you through Scripture that there are a whole lot of things that happen that are not God's will and that we have to be careful about what we attribute to God. Last week, we talked about unanswered prayer, about how we pray and pray for something and when it doesn't come through we get disappointed with God and how part of that is because maybe we don't have clear expectations of how God works in the world or how prayer works. Today, we want to really focus on how can we know the will of God, how specific is the will of God, and what does it mean to act upon the will of God?
How Specific is God's Will?
Let’s begin by recognizing that there are typically three answers given by Christians when it comes to how specific God’s will is. The first one, sometimes associated with hyper-Calvinism, is called Determinism. In this case the believers answer that God predetermined everything that is going to happen in your life before it came to be because God is in control and we only have the illusion of free choice. Now, on one hand, this seems to make sense, and there are Scriptures that seem to support this idea. But on the other hand, it’s a paradox. I mean, is this how life really is? Under this scenario, God has pre-written the script for your life, every detail scripted out, Daryl Allen's Life Story – Scripted by God. Now, you probably know that most United Methodists do not subscribe to this idea of God’s sovereignty and control over the world, but some people do.
Another view, would say that God does have a perfect plan for your life and that God does have a will for everyday and every action of your life, but God gives you free will. God still has a script for your life, but God allows you to enter in the manuscript and say, via God's permissive will, “you know what? I don't like that part. I don't like that paragraph either.” When this happens we are straying from the path that God wants us to take, but in God’s grace and mercy, God adjusts the rest of the script. If we change this page, then God has to change all the rest of the pages. The problem is that tomorrow we change something else and God has to re-write the rest of the script again. And the day after that, the same thing happens. So every day, God is adjusting the script due to our free will.
Now, this makes more sense to me than the first idea of God predetermining everything, but here’s another idea to consider. If we are using this metaphor of God writing a script or a plan for our lives, I wonder if would make more sense to look at it more like a journal, where all the pages are blank. I wonder if God hasn’t said to us, “I've given you life. I've given you a genetic make-up with certain gifts and abilities. I've given you a family of origin that has shaped your life and values. I am going to come along side you and My Holy Spirit is going to work with you. You have the Scriptures to teach you how I want you to live. And together we're going to write the novel that is your life story.” God gives us the freedom to write it by ourselves if we choose to, but God gives us no guarantees that it will be any good. On the other hand, if we allow God to be a part of writing of the story of our lives, it will be a story of faith and courage in the face of doubt and danger. It will be a story of grace and mercy. It will be a story of perseverance that ends with hope and triumph. God says, “That‟s the story I want to write with your life, if you will let me write it with you.” Together, we write a story of great faith, hope, courage, and love.
To me, this seems to make the most sense, especially when I think about some of the Biblical characters like Abraham. It doesn’t appear that Abraham was given a predetermined plan by God at the beginning of his life. The Bible doesn’t tell us anything about Abraham until he’s 75 years old. Presumably, he lived his life trying to walk with God. The ordinary stuff of life happened. He married. He had a career raising livestock. He moved to different places. It was just an ordinary life of walking with God and finally, at the age of 75, God says, “Now, here's the climatic ending.” God invites Abraham to join Him in an event that would change history forever. He said, “Abraham, I have blessed you all of your life, so that you might be a blessing to others. I'm going to ask you and Sara to leave your comfortable home in retirement and to travel to a land you've never been to before. I'm even going to give you a child in your old age. I'm going to bless you with descendants as numerous as the stars in the skies. And all the nations of the earth will be blessed through you.” Abraham had a choice. Abraham could have said, “Okay God, I'm on board. Let's go for the adventure!” Or he could have said, “I'm sorry, Lord, but I'm just too old for that. My knees ache and my back hurts. I'm just too tired for that.” But Abraham said yes and God started a new chapter in Abraham’s life. Part of what I love about this story, is that God didn’t begin his greatest work in Abraham until he was 75 years old. How cool is that! Moses was 80 years old when God called him to go to Pharaoh and set his people free! What this says to us, is that God is not finished with this book of the story of your life, until you breathe your last. C.S. Lewis says that everything that is written in your entire life is just the preface to the great adventure that God has for us after this life is over.
So, maybe God’s will is a process of God’s Holy Spirit working in our lives with each of us taking seriously what the Scriptures tell us about God's will, and we are writing the story with God each day. However it works, it is helpful for us to ponder about what God’s will typically looks like. No matter which answer you give to that question of “how specific God’s will is.” What we recognize is that most of the time, we’re not going to know the big, amazing plans that God has for us. We’re not going to know what’s going to happen in the future, so that we can prepare for it. What we have to do is to get up every day and try to live out God’s will for our lives in so far as we know it.
How Do We Know?
So the best way to know God's will is to read it in Scripture. Look for the basic principles outlined in it. Look for the truth this is applicable to our lives and through that allow God to speak to us. Now once we know the basic principles outlined in the Scriptures, when we come up against a situation where we want to know what God’s will is, we can say, “Well, the Scriptures say that I am to keep the Sabbath Day and keep it holy.” So, we take care of ourselves and don’t take a job that has us working 7 days a week. Or when we are being tempted to say things about another person that paints them in an unkind light, we remember the commandment: Do not bear false witness. You get the idea. But Jesus says that if you can’t remember all the commandments in the Bible … just remember two. These two will guide you in almost every situation and guide you to do God's will. They are: To love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and your neighbor as yourself.”
We look at the passage that we have before us today, from Paul’s letter to the Colossians, and we hear how we are to live in God’s will. Listen to these words again: “We have not ceased praying for you and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of God‟s will. What is God's will? He continues, so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God.”
Sometimes, we think that God has this big, dramatic plan for our lives that we need to figure out. But, it’s important that you realize that most of the time, God’s plan for your life is not something big and dramatic. Often, it’s simply showing up and paying attention. Doing those things that are according to Scripture, those things we are prompted to do by the Holy Spirit, those things that God reveals to us in Scripture. You live this way 365 days a year for 80 or more years, you will be accomplishing something great with your life for God.
Two years ago Debbie and I were in the Holy Land. One day we stopped to see an oasis. We were quickly met by a group of Bedouin children. These children were very poor and you could look at them and tell they did not eat often. We had just finished lunch and Debbie and I did not eat our dessert or our fruit. We were saving it for later. We went back on the bus, got that food, and gave it to the kids. One little girl, through her tears said shoo-kran, thank you. You know sometimes doing the will of God is giving somebody else your bananna or your twinkie. I think that is what the will of God looks like.
We Need to Discern
Now, sometimes we have important decisions to make and we want to know God’s will in those situations. We want to know which college to attend, who we should marry, what career to take. How do we know God’s will then? Well, we pray about those things and we should pray. But it may be that God doesn’t really have a clear choice for us in those matters. I mean God may not care if you go to the University of Florida...God might even let you go to Florida State and maybe that would be okay. But the thing to remember is that whatever college you go to remember that God says, you know what? I'm okay with whatever choice you make. As long as when you go to college, you remember who you are and you love other people. You pray about what career or job you should take and God says, I don‟t really care which job you choose as long as you seek to bless others and love me. Sometimes, this is what God’s will looks like. But when we pray, there are ways that we can begin to discern God’s will and some of these are very simple.
How do we do that?
One way is to read and pray through the Scriptures. Sometimes, we discern God’s will through our conscience. God’s Holy Spirit nudges us through our conscience and we have to learn to listen for that. Sometimes, it’s being with other Christians in small groups or friendships and God speaks through them as we pray and share together. Coming to church is an important part of discerning God’s will for our lives. Every week, we pray that God will speak to you through some part of the worship service. So, God makes His will known to us in these ways and others. But the problem for most of us, is not that we don’t know God’s will. We just don’t want to do it. We pray and read the Scriptures, and we’re hearing the same thing over and over again, but we’re hoping that the next time we pray, God’s going to change His mind.
We need to recognize that part of where we come from when we’re trying to discern God’s will. We need to see that cultural value is often in conflict with God’s will. In our culture, what we’re supposed to strive for in life is ease, comfort, convenience, and safety. These have become our primary values in life. But when you read the Bible, you find that this is really not what God is after in His will for your life. Many times, God’s will is going to lead you to sacrifice; to discomfort; it’s going to stretch you and to challenge you and will make you risk certain things.
Jesus said it this way in the Sermon on the Mount. He said, “There are two roads in life. There is one that is broad and wide and it's downhill, easy, comfortable, and convenient. But it leads to destruction.” And then, “there‟s a narrow road that is hard and difficult, and it‟s uphill, but it leads to life.”
In the script that you are writing with God about your life’s story, there are things that God is inviting you to do. You hear this idea at church or from somewhere else and you feel that nudge from God to do this. But the moment you hear it, you say, oh, I don‟t want to do that. I mean imagine Abraham when God said, “I want you to go to the Promised Land.” Can you imagine all the excuses Abraham could have come up with? He’s 75 years old and being asked to uproot everything and go somewhere he’s never been to before. Or Joseph, Abraham's great-grandson, who ended up as a slave in Egypt and then in prison … do you think he wanted that? And yet, God was at work in the middle of all that. Or you think about Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, “Father, take this cup from me. Yet, not my will, but Thy will be done.” And, as he’s praying for God’s will to be done, he knows he’s praying to be nailed to a Cross.
When you go back and read the story of your life and you look at those places where you actually said yes instead of no even though you felt like saying no, you find that the best moments of your life were in those moments when you said yes to God, even though you didn’t want to do it at first. If you never say yes to those things that stretch you, that are hard, and challenging, and uncomfortable, you’re going to find that when you get to the end of the book you really missed out. God’s will is sometimes going to be the difficult, hard, challenging, and narrow way in life.
So, what we have to do is to learn to surrender our plans to God’s plans. It’s not that God has every detail of your life planned out, but God’s plan for your life looks something like this. Jesus said it at the end of Matthew 6: Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things that you worry about will be taken care of. Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God. So, we invite God to lay out the narrative for every day. Here I am again, God. Let's write today's page. God has a way of nudging, guiding, and leading us when we put ourselves in the center of God’s will. Then when you find yourself at the end of the novel, it was a great adventure after all.
Now we are all going to have chapters of pain, grief, uncertainty, and desolation. But the one thing we have learned in this series is that God doesn’t cause the bad things to happen to us. But when we entrust our lives to Him, God can redeem those moments and do great things through us. And today, what I hope you’ve heard is God saying to you that, if you trust me and don't let go, your darkest moments are an opportunity. They are an opportunity for My light to shine though you. An opportunity for things to happen in you you can't see. If you will trust me this chapter may have a few more pages before we are done with it. But it is not the end of the story for you. That is the promise of God, your story is not finished yet! Trust me and I will see you through.
Conclusion – The Preferred Ending
Now, I do believe that God has a preferred ending to the story of your life. Over the course of your life, there will be interesting twists and turns that God will work through with us, but I think that when we get to the end of the story, God has already written the last paragraph. And He’s hoping that you will allow this to stand.
It goes like this: She sought to live life worthy of the Lord and pleasing to Him. He bore fruit in every good work and throughout his life, he was growing deeper in his knowledge of God. And when she breathed her last, she heard God say, Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into your rest.
And that I think is God's will for your life.
Prayer:
Lord I offer my life to you
Lead me and guide me
Help me to do your will
To love you with all my heart
To love my neighbor
When I am scared Lord, help me to trust you
I invite you to write the story of my life with me
And when I come to the end,
I hope to meet You face to face
and hear You say...Well done. Amen.
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