The Will of God

I was reading Larry Osbourne’s Ten Dumb Things Smart Christians Believe and came across his discussion on the will of God. I kind of liked it and it got me thinking about the topic. He says we think that God has a set blueprint for our lives, especially as regards to major decisions. As though God has this plan for me that I could mess up really easily, like it is made out of glass flowers and if I do not follow it exactly it will shatter and my whole life will be messed up. I confess to thinking the same way without realizing it.

Yet looking through the examples of Scripture we see that God does not seem as worried about specific life decisions in people’s lives as much as their faithfulness to His revealed will in the Bible.

1 John 2:15-17 (NASB95)
15 Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.16 For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world.17 The world is passing away, and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God lives forever.
            

In this passage we are safe to say that this will of God that we are to do is not so much referring to specific life decisions like what to have for breakfast, or even a big decision like my career. However, if in doing my career I found myself drawn into materialism or sexual sin, then I would need to make a change in order to stay within the will of God.

            

The will of God is to follow all the passages that we all know to do. To know Him as friend, to love others, to be holy, to tell people about Jesus as we get the chance, etc. There could have been long passages about how to choose the right spouse but there aren’t.

            

The OT history books give many examples of people living out their lives in the will of God. One common refrain is when a king goes out to war and before he goes into a battle he seeks out a prophet of the Lord to ask about God’s will. Every time a king humbles himself and seeks God in this manner, the battle turns into a victory. Sometimes God intervenes directly through confusing the enemy troops, or He gives the king a special strategy that leads to victory, or He simply says ‘go up’ and the victory is won.

            

Even in the times where God gives a special strategy for winning a battle, I don’t feel as though the lesson is that we all need to plan really well if we want a victory, as if there was a special strategy that the king just needed some tips to find, but that the act of humbling ourselves and seeking God is actually the victory.

            

Perhaps God does not have an exact blueprint for our lives that we need to search out but more of a ‘game plan’. Osbourne says, “A game plan is very different. Rather than spelling out everything in detail, it sets forth general guidelines and principles, with lots of freedom and flexibility for adjustments as the game unfolds.”[1]

Picking a spouse

Some of the college students really want to know if the person they are dating is God’s perfect person for them. Now some choices are indeed better than others. Marrying an unbelieving spouse could lead you astray, similar to how the Jews were not to marry outside of their faith. Solomon’s wives were pagans and it says that in his later years he followed after their gods.

            

But apart from that, God entrusts us with choice. Whoever you marry, you will need to make adjustments to. The older couples here know that and smile when they hear this kind of naivete. Think about it, if God had the perfect person for you to marry and you married the wrong one, that would mean that you took away the perfect spouse from someone else, and so on, potentially messing up every marriage on the planet!

            

So that is the reason a specific answer to a decision in our lives is so hard to find – maybe it isn’t there. Maybe God cares about you, and your relationship to Him, but he doesn’t care whether you become an optometrist or an opthamologist. Maybe He is willing to give us freedom in that area, and that if we change our minds later he is totally cool with that.

Sometimes He does have specific plans

            

However, sometimes God does have specific plans for us. But a study of such passages shows how unusual this is: “He told Hosea to marry Gomer. He told Moses and the children of Israel exactly where to camp and when to move during their wanderings in the wilderness. He sent Jeremiah to a potter's house and told him to watch for an object lesson. He changed the apostle Paul's itinerary and would not allow him to go into Asia or Bithynia. But these kinds of explicit instructions are exceptions, not the norm— even in the lives of our biblical heroes.”[2]

            

I can imagine the general precepts of Scripture calling us to marry a follower of Jesus, but there are a lot of choices within that guideline. I felt God calling me to go into ministry, yet even within that there were a lot of choices I made. Some people think that unless you are employed full time in a ministry profession you are letting God down. I felt that way myself for a while but just saying it out loud makes it clear that it isn’t true. However, should I have gone into exotic dancing, that would clearly have violated God’s will! The reason for the pic above is that one of my choices led us to PRBI. That isn't to say for a minute that God's hand was not involved in that process but that I don't think he would somehow be mad at me if I had made a different choice.

            
So what do you think? Can you think of any dumb beliefs we have?

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[1] Osborne, Larry (2009-04-04). Ten Dumb Things Smart Christians Believe (Kindle Locations 855-857). The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[2] Osborne, Larry (2009-04-04). Ten Dumb Things Smart Christians Believe (Kindle Locations 879-882). The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.