God’s Will

Many people approach the issue of God’s will as a kind of guessing game. How can I know what God wants? How can I get direct guidance concerning something or other — like, “Who should I marry?” or “What job should I take?” or “What church should I go to?”

Many times we ask questions like that and become frustrated because we don’t seem to get any direct guidance. I believe this is because we have the wrong notion of God’s guidance. We expect him to answer direct questions in a direct way, as if he were a kind of oracle or divining rod.

I am convinced that we can receive guidance from God. Sometimes that guidance can be extremely direct. However, in general God does not want us to seek that kind of guidance because he is trying to lead us to maturity so that we will internalize his will and act in accord with it in a natural, organic way. Hebrews 5:14 talks about how a mature person will have his “powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.”

Rather than constantly guiding us directly, God wants us to walk with him, walk in the Spirit, and then our acts and desires will be pleasing to him, naturally in accord with his will. (Galatians 5:16 tells us that if we walk in the Spirit we will not fulfill the desires of the flesh.)

God does not want robotic conformity; he wants fellowship, relationship, give-and-take.

For this reason I am not a big fan of step-by-step guides for the Christian life. In general these guides tend to downplay relationality. If I follow the steps, God will do what I want. Yes, nobody puts it that way, but the impulse is there.

For example, there is a relatively well known essay that gives a list of six steps to find God’s will — conveniently alliterated for easy remembrance:

1. Saved
2. Spirit-filled
3. Sanctified
4. Submissive
5. Suffering
6. Saying thanks to the Lord

There are Bible proof-texts associated with each of the above.

Quote: “If ALL those 6 THINGS are TRUE in your Life, you may do WHATEVER you want (so to speak).”

The article then quotes Psalm 37:4 and says that it means that if you are conforming to God’s will in the above ways he will put desires in your heart that conform to his will.

I believe the above is wrong-headed. For one thing, it gives the picture that God is sitting in heaven with a check-list for each of us. If we manage to check all the boxes then he will (apparently somewhat grudgingly) place correct desires in our hearts that will allow us to follow his will.

In other words, in this view God is waiting for us to change before he will let us know what he wants. But this is anti-grace. God is not waiting for us to change. He is simply saying, “Come. Hear me. Let me speak into your life. Let us reason together (Isaiah 1:18).”

In fact, God is already there offering us his guidance. This is what James 1:5-8 tells us:

If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.

But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind.

For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.

Now many people read that passage and think it is just another list — with one rather difficult item on it. We have to have faith “with no doubting.” So isn’t this just as bad?

This is where the confusion over the meaning of “doubt” rears its ugly head.

I wrote a long post called Faith and Doubt that discussed this issue. The main point to understand is that most people confuse doubt with uncertainty. In fact, both faith and doubt only operate in the presence of uncertainty. If you are certain about something you can neither doubt it nor have faith in it—it is simply a fact.

On the other hand, when we are uncertain about something we must decide on our course of action with regard to that thing. In the context of wisdom from God, the way this dichotomy gets posed is as follows. If you get guidance from God, will you follow it?

As someone called upon from time to time to give pastoral advice, I sometimes have people ask my advice only to ignore it. For some strange reason (spiritual?) I have been mostly right when I’ve given such advice, and it has been rather painful to watch people ignore good advice and experience quite negative consequences as a result.

The point is that they didn’t believe me. This is the same thing with God. If you ask God for wisdom, do you really want it? Are you willing to follow it if you get it? Because the very fact that you are getting wisdom and guidance from God means that it will usually have a considerable element of uncertainty associated with it. I have gotten such clear guidance from God as to have everything short of a voice in my head, and yet I’ve still wondered if I was simply imagining it.

My own experience has been that getting guidance from God involves the following:

First, walk with God. That is, have an on-going interactive relationship with him, one of “constant” prayer, one where you lay yourself before him as honestly as you know how, and seek, as honestly as you know how, to know him as he is and not as you want him to be.

Second, pray about everything in your life. Tell him what you really think and really want. Be as transparent as possible, laying yourself before him as a “living sacrifice”. Ask, seek, knock, trusting that God wants what is good for you, even more than you do.

Third, step out in faith. Expect God to open doors and be ready to walk through them when they open. Understand that even our mistakes are used by God for his glory—in fact, our mistakes can even glorify God more than our successes because our mistakes reveal his redeeming power. And so don’t be paralyzed by fear of failure—don’t be like the man who buried the talent his Lord had given him because he feared he was “a hard man”. Play the game; push the envelope with God.

Finally, understand that all this is a relationship. God is not a cosmic slot machine or bookkeeper. He does not sit in heaven checking boxes. Instead, he meets us at every point in our lives, interacting with us as we work out our salvation. We are co-creators with him. But this means we cannot use God as a means to our ends. We ask like we ask any person, not demanding or manipulating, but in a gracious and loving give-and-take. And—since after all he is God—we trust that he will work all things for our good; that if we ask for a fish he will not give us a stone; that even his answer of “no” to our prayer is really his way of saying “yes” in a much better and more glorious way.