On "The Will of God"

How do we know the will of God, whether God is “leading” us to do this or that?

This is an important question. Followers of Jesus are committed to syncing their lives up with the will of God. John says, bluntly, that “the one who does the will of God lives forever” (1 John 2:17).

I’m not sure you could set the stakes higher than that.

Since there’s no chance of covering all that we might say about this in a single post, I’ll tell a quick story, and offer a couple thoughts. 

(Note: some of the details of the following story have been changed.)

Years ago a young man came to meet with me, wanting some pastoral counsel. He had finished college with a degree in law, and at the time of his graduation had two terrific options in front of him for law school. One was very prestigious, and would virtually guarantee excellent career opportunities, but was also more expensive and halfway across the country, far away from friends and family. The other was less prestigious, but still solid, and closer to his community.

Torn, he did what we would all do: he prayed, hoping for direction. And while his time at prayer did help him clarify which option he was favoring, it definitely did not result in a clear “leading” from the Lord. 

So he kicked the process up a notch, running his impending decision by a few of his Christian friends. After much discussion and even some prayer with them, the counsel seemed to be leaning towards one option over the other (it also happened to be the one he was favoring). The group said to him: “We think God is leading you to X rather than Y…that X is the will of God for you rather than Y.”

Emboldened by their confident affirmation, he made his choice. And the experience was uniformly disappointing. So disappointing that in the end, he decided to abandon his dreams of a law career. At the time he and I met, he was occupationally adrift, working at a restaurant and trying to figure out his next move. 

“Andrew,” he said to me, “I don’t know what to make of this whole situation. Why would God lead me into such disappointment? What am I supposed to do now?” The shattering of his dream had not only left him occupationally adrift, but spiritually bewildered. “I can hardly pray anymore,” he confided to me. 

Now how would you answer that? 

Here’s what I said to the young man (let’s call him Tom, since I’m getting tired of telling a story without using a proper noun):

“Tom,” I replied, “I really can appreciate your disappointment. And I am so sorry you went through that. But I think your disappointment with God is entirely unnecessary. It’s one thing to make a decision and come up empty. Everyone goes through that—multiple times in their lives usually. It’s another thing to make God responsible for those decisions and then blame him when they don’t go right.”

“What do you mean?” he asked. I went on:

“It’s clear to me as you tell the story that from a very early stage in the process, you wanted to do X rather than Y. Which is fine. But since you weren’t totally clear on that at that time, you took it to your friends, and it seems to me that they sensed from you that you wanted to do X, and confirmed it back to you by saying that GOD was LEADING you to do X rather than Y.”

He stared at me somewhat blankly.

“What they should have done is said to you something like the following: ‘Tom, it’s clear that you are favoring X over Y. Have you weighed the pros and cons of X vs. Y? Are you fully aware of the risks and rewards of X against those of Y? Are you willing to take responsibility for choosing X over Y? If so, go get it man. We’re in your corner. And God be with you.”

“The problem,” I went on, “with how this whole thing was set up was that it made God responsible for your decision. But God was never responsible for your decision. God is responsible for you, since you’re one of his kids. But you are responsible for your decisions. If you don’t understand that, you’ll blame God when things don’t go the way you want them to. Which is what’s happening now. But God isn’t to blame here. God loved you and loves you still and was with you and is with you still. He was with you in option X. He would have been with you in option Y. The ball just didn’t bounce your way on this one. That’s life. It happens. But that’s not God’s fault.”

This all was kind of messing with his head. He took it in for a bit and then finally asked, “If all this is true, how can I ever know the will of God? How will I ever be able to trust his leading? Does he actually lead?”

To this I answered: “Of course you know the will of God. It is revealed in the Scriptures, in the Ten Commandments, and above all in the life and character of Jesus Christ. That is the will of God for you—as much in option X as option Y as option Z as option AAA. That is how he is always leading you—to become like Jesus Christ: a beloved and mature son of the Father in heaven.”

“Part of that growth in maturity,” I went on, “is learning what the Bible calls wisdom: the art of living, of using discretion and discernment in making choices. God doesn’t usually just lay out in some obvious way what he wants us to do (if he has a strong opinion in the matter). In fact, he usually gives us tons of freedom to choose. And whatever we choose he weaves into the tapestry of his great plan in a way that neither you nor I can ever fully understand, but we can certainly trust. The upshot here is that when things don’t go our way—like what just happened to you—we can put our head in his chest and weep and trust that he’ll bring good out of difficulty, without feeling the need to blame him or be disappointed by him.”

We chatted a bit longer and prayed and I sent him off. He seemed relieved and helped by our conversation, and I was grateful.

I share this story with you to say that I think a TON of Christians get tangled up right here. Having assented to the idea that part of our responsibility as believers is to “do” something called “the will of God”, we assume (a) that said will is mostly about choices we make like what career we should go choose, what school we should attend, where we should live, who we should marry, how many children we should have, etc etc etc, and (b) that said will is capable of being discovered by us.

The problem is, the Bible doesn’t really talk this way. When it talks about the “will of God” for us, for example, it will say things like: “This is the will of God: your sanctification” (1 Thess. 4:3), and then go on to spell that out in some detail—always with a view towards who we are becoming. The full manifestation of the fruit of the Spirit and the character of Christ in us is the essence of his will.

And while God in the Bible certainly does seem (at times) to have some interest in the stuff I outlined in (a) above, it’s important to say that

1. If he wants one outcome over the other, he is perfectly capable of getting it (by manipulating circumstances or shouting loudly or appearing as an angelic visitor), and

2. Our decisions one way or another do not thwart his plan.

Because his plans cannot be thwarted. They can be frustrated. But not finally thwarted. God will get what God wants.

A great example of what I’m talking about here is found in the biblical book of Esther. (I assume you know the story, so I won’t summarize). The moment I love is where Mordecai says to young Esther:

“For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?” (Est. 4:14)

Providence has dialed up a moment for you here, Esther, says Mordecai; so open your eyes, use your good judgment, and do the right thing. But if you decide not to, rest assured that God will get what God wants. But you’ll have missed out. 

Notice, however—and this is critical—that this isn’t an appeal to some inscrutable divine will. Nor does it have to do with many of the matters that we usually fret about when wondering what the will of God is. It’s an appeal to what’s right (the impending genocide of an entire people), given Esther’s position.

And that’s a huge part of my point here. The will of God is that we would be formed to be the kinds of persons who can recognize what’s good and right in this or that situation—and that in the places where it’s “take it or leave it”, that we’d have ever-increasing wisdom and discernment to be able to size up situations and make good choices based on our considered judgment—knowing, of course, that here and there we’ll get it wrong, and that even if the decision we made was a good decision, that certainly doesn’t mean the ball will always bounce our way, for there are other factors at play in the unfolding of the universe than just our will and the ‘will’ of God—the wills of evil people in a fallen world, the will of the evil one, to name two.

“Love God and do what you please” was how St. Augustine put it, and I think that’s great advice. God is not trying to micromanage our existence, just waiting for us to slip up. Nor is he interested in keeping us perpetually infantile, incapable of using our judgment to make decisions unless we’ve gotten a “word” from him. He wants us to be secure and confident in his love, eager and ready to fling ourselves into the wildness of existence, knowing that sometimes we’ll get it right, and sometimes we’ll get it wrong…but because we’re his, we’ll know that whatever happens, we’re loved and we’re going to be okay.

Which gets to the last thing I want to say about this (because this post has gotten a lot longer than I anticipated haha). Christians are people who believe, among many other things, that we are justified by faith and not by works. If that is true, then part of what that means is that we are justified by faith and not by our ability to perfectly intuit and do the will of God. We do our best. And we trust that no matter what we do or what the outcome, the Mercy covers us. Which means we can stop fretting and just live.

I’ve read somewhere that that sentiment was more or less what Martin Luther was getting at when he once said: “Sin boldly…and trust Christ more boldly still.”

Amen to that, I say.

Much love,

A