Understanding God's Will

All of us desire to understand God's Will for our lives.  The following is an excerpt from my book, Faith Beyond Belief: Understanding True Faith from the Book of James (available on Nook and Kindle).

When we place our faith in our own plans and our own wisdom, we demonstrate truly how foolish and arrogant we are.  Psalm 33:10 says that God brings the council of nations to nothing and frustrates the plans of the people.  Proverbs 16:1-3 tells us that the answer to our plans lies with the Lord, not with ourselves.  When we commit ourselves to the Lord, and our plans align with his, then they will be accomplished.

Understanding God’s Will

James McDonald did a sermon series on God’s will in which he said that God’s will is not a “dot on the floor” such that we are either on it and in God’s will or not on it and not in God’s will.  Instead, much of God’s will is revealed to us through scripture.  For example, it is not necessarily true that it is God’s will for you to marry a specific person or to have a specific house or work at a specific job.  Sometimes God lays before us multiple choices that are equally good so that we may have the desires of our heart.  However, we must live with and make the best of those choices.  For example, once we marry, it is God’s will for us to remain married to that person for the rest of our lives.

Sometimes, God has a very specific task he wants us to accomplish.  When he does this, it is always a perfectly clear and unmistakable calling.  Most of the time, God’s will for our lives has nothing to do with the mundane choices over which we so often stress.  That is not to say God is not interested in those choices, but rather we stress over these mundane choices because we do not fully understand God’s will.  In many cases, God has already given us the direction we need to make these decisions, but we have not looked in the right places for the answers. 

At other times, we stress over things that perhaps may never be revealed.  It may surprise you to know that not only do we not know all of God’s will, but we may never know all of God’s will on this side of eternity.

 Deuteronomy 29:29 says: The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.

Those things that God has chosen to tell us about are his Revealed Will to us. Some of these have been revealed to us through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in God’s Word itself.  Among many other things, his word has revealed his expectations for us (Micah 6:8), his commands for relating to others (John 13:34), what attitudes we are to display (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18), his purposes for the works we do (1 Peter 2:15), and even his desires towards us (2 Peter 3:9).  If we take the time to read his word, pay attention to what he has revealed in his word, and then take those things into consideration when we are deliberating on important decisions, we will find that many decisions become clearer.