Knowing the Will of God

Romans 12:1-3, 9-13
Ephesians 5:15-21

We talk much, as Christians, about the value of prayer within the body of believers for those who are sick or needy or both. We conclude that our prayers need to factor in the will of God but that God’s will may conflict with the answers we want for each other and for ourselves. We talk about the danger of prayer being used as a whip to challenge God to do what we want Him to do, rather than accepting His time and His way. The words of Jesus at Gethsemane are most helpful: “If it be possible, Father, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done.”

Most of the time – perhaps as much as 99% of the time – we are not faced with the kind of life or death situation with which Jesus and the later Christian martyrs were faced. Most of the time we operate on instinct and do reasonably well. Instinct, however, is different for every one of us – honed in cultural setting from the time we were born to the time we die.

I used to consider instinct to be some kind of measure of common sense, as though common sense were an objective standard consistent everywhere. Unfortunately, common sense is inconsistent and dependent on too many sinful human factors. That’s why God’s will is critical to our lives.

Working in the prison has caused me to think through a bit more carefully about common sense and God’s will. Every one of us has at one time or another stepped over some imaginary line in the sand and perhaps paid a painful price, swept away by the moment under the influence of something other than God’s will.

Theologians and pastors commonly divide God’s will into two segments. Some call those segments the “general will of God” and the “specific will” of God. Others call them the “sovereign will of God” and the “permissive will” of God. Still others, like John Piper, call them the “decree will” of God and the “command will” of God. What all of this suggests is that God somehow has an overarching will that cannot be violated as well as a will that can be disobeyed and violated, the obedience of which leads to an understanding of His overarching will.

In the case of Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, God’s sovereign will was that Jesus was to die. That was His plan – His decree. In the process, Jesus’ death required the sins of certain key figures – Herod, Pilate, the soldiers, the Jewish leaders and even Peter in denying Him twice. They all sinned in fulfilling God’s sovereign will that His Son be crucified – that His plan – His decree – be carried out.

God sometimes wills things to happen that He hates, such as the sin that was necessary to bring to pass the death of His Son. Sometimes, suffering serves the same purpose. It may be God’s will that Christians suffer for doing good. 1 Peter 3:17: “It is better to suffer for doing good, if that should be God’s will, than for doing evil.”

The Apostle Paul is insistent on God’s sovereign and inviolable will being carried out no matter what it takes. Ephesians 1:11: “In him (Christ) we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will.” The will of God is His sovereign governance over all that comes to pass. If not one sparrow falls to the ground without His knowledge; if “The plans of the heart belong to man, but the answer of the tongue is from the Lord” (Prov, 16:33); if “The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever he will” (Prov. 21:1), then we can come to no other conclusion but that God has sovereign control over all things.

What that says to us is that even in those things on which we look back over our lives with horror, God allowed them to happen in order that His sovereign will might be carried out – including our sins and our sicknesses. God’s sovereign will cannot be broken.

That leads to that part of God’s that we can disobey and fail to carry out – His “command will.” Remember the words of Jesus in Matthew 7:21: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” We have many examples of the “command will” of God. 1 Thessalonians 4:3: “This is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality.” He hits us where we live, but we can add to that any number of commands – gossip, anger, pride, covetousness, anxiety, jealousy, envy – those things that rise up in the heart with no conscience reflection or intention. We sometimes refer to obedience to disobedience of God’s “command will” as instinct.

The “command will” of God is a catalyst for His sovereign will which comes to pass whether we believe in it or not, even though the catalyst may be deep hurt or great loss. The assurance for us as believers is belief in a God who is strong enough and sovereign enough to turn our sorrow to good, while, on the other hand, empathizing and grieving with us. The flip side is belief in a God who is willing to forgive when we grievously break His commands.

The will referred to in the 12^th chapter of Romans is God’s “command will”: “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and discern what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will.”

I often pray publicly that God will help us to be faithful in the little things so that we may be entrusted with the big things of His sovereign Kingdom. God’s sovereign will is made clearer to us in stages and in accordance with our desire to obey His “will of command.”

In the movie, “What About Bob,” psychological progress is made in “baby steps.” That’s the way it is with knowledge of the will of God – baby steps.

God’s first stage is that His will of command is revealed with final, decisive authority in the Bible. Without a renewed mind, however, there is no transformation of our and very little knowledge of God’s will. Without a renewed mind, we will distort the Scriptures to avoid those radical demands for self—denial, love, purity and satisfaction in Christ alone. God’s Holy Spirit speaks through these commands and enables us, through time and experience, to obey these commands.

Romans 12:2 tells us that the more we move away from the behavior and thought patterns of this world, the more we will be transformed by the renewing of our minds – transformed into people who will be able to test for and to discern the perfect, sovereign will of God.

The logical conclusion from this is that as our minds are renewed, we can learn to accept pain, suffering and loss because of an assurance that God’s sovereign will is being played out through our pain, suffering and loss.

The more discipline we can direct toward those actions and attitudes that are commanded by God of His people in their daily walk, the more we can discern His ultimate, sovereign will in our lives and accept those things that happen to us that are beyond our control. The more we can learn to control, through the direct action of the HS, our thoughts and behaviors, the more we can grasp the big picture.

We will not become transformed unless our minds have become renewed. If we are not transformed, we will react to our circumstances the same as the world reacts – “Why me, Lord,” or “Why would a loving God allow bad things to happen to people?” “Lord I thank you that I am not like that sinner over there!” Those shallow reactions indicate a failure of the renewed mind and the transformed life – the first step toward acceptance.

I performed a committal service recently for a person for whom I have no idea of her faith experience. However, it was clear to me that she had done something that was life-changing. She had taken care of a severely disabled daughter for 64 years with no complaint. What that said to me is that in order to do that, she must have had in mind a higher goal than this life. How many of us, even as Christians, would consign our lives to such a task unless our minds were renewed and we had become transformed to such a degree that we could see this as the unfolding of the sovereign will of a God who cries over our pain and suffering?

More to the point, how many of us would sacrifice even an hour for a person who offends our Christian sensibilities?

When we get to Ephesians 5, we find a more specific cautionary note as to how we might be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Paul is telling us not to be foolish and do things irrationally and unthinkingly. He makes the clear distinction in verse 17 between being foolish and understanding what the Lord’s will is. There are two paths – foolishness and God’s will.

A story is told of a middle-aged farmer who always wondered in the back of his mind whether God really wanted him to be a great evangelist. One day he took a break and lay down under a tree. Looking up into the sky, he saw in the clouds what seemed to be the letters P and C. He hopped up, sold his farm and went out to P-reach C-hrist.

The problem was that he was a terrible preacher.

Finally a compassionate friend said to him one day, “Could it be that God was just asking you to “P-lant C-orn”?

Most of our questions about God’s will come not from the sovereign will of God but from specific circumstances in our lives: “Who should I marry? Should I take this job or that? Should I move somewhere else? Should I continue chemotherapy or not?” We get worked into a tizzy over God’s incremental or permissive will for us, while we fail to ground ourselves in perceiving His sovereign will for our lives in permit us to share in the unfolding of His sovereign will for His Kingdom.

I get a lot of that in prison. Many Christian inmates come to rationalize their incarceration on the grounds that God has a mission or a purpose for their lives. It gets pretty bizarre when you can assume that you killed somebody or raped somebody in order that God might bring you to prison for a purpose.

The fact is that if you had paid attention to becoming transformed by the renewing of your mind, you would not have landed in prison in the first place. Your instincts, or common sense, would have, instead, been Godly instincts. You would have been able to test and discern God’s sovereign will. Now that you are in prison, God’s sovereign will remains in place, but you will never be able to test it nor discern it unless and until your mind is renewed to the place where it should have been before you committed your crime.

Thinking that God put you in prison for a higher mission is fatalism rather than transformation. It is rationalization rather than brokenness. It is the foolishness that stands foursquare against understanding and accepting the will of the Lord. You are there because you disobeyed the God’s “will of command” and were therefore not renewed and transformed to the place where you could or can test and discern God’s sovereign will.

That does not mean that it is too late. But unless and until you seek transformation through renewal of the mind, even in prison, your actions and reactions will be foolishness rather than based on an understanding of the Lord’s will.

At the top of the list, Paul begins with: “Be very careful how you live.” The Christian is to live, not as unwise, but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. That doesn’t leave much room for rape, pillage and plunder, does it? Neither does conniving to embarrass the prison administration by demanding pseudo rights. “Be very careful how you live.”

Paul is telling us that the most practical way toward transformation of our lives is through how we spend our time – how we respond to every opportunity.

If you are like me, you have been asking all your lives, “Am I in God’s will in this area or in that area?” That is at it should be. Paul begins his answer, however, with the words, “Be very careful how you live.”

One of the features of this care in how we live is the 18^th verse, “Don’t get drunk.” This addresses a pattern of the world that is pervasive in America. That pattern is escapism. As Christians, we are supposed to deal with reality. We are not to run away from our problems – even our bad marriages, or our illnesses or our financial problems. We are not to try and anesthetize pain in our lives, be it with drugs, alcohol, illicit sex, denial, religion or running off into a fantasy world out there somewhere.

It is a chain reaction. When we don’t deal with reality, we are not obeying God’s will of command. When we don’t deal with God’s will of command, we are not being transformed by the renewing of our minds. When we are not being transformed by the renewing of our minds, we cannot know or understand God’s sovereign will.

Nowhere in Scripture does it say that it is God’s will for you and me to be happy or pain free. It does say, however, that it is God’s will that you and I deal with reality. That is what it means not to be conformed to the pattern of this world. That is what it means when He tells us that we cannot love both Him and the world. That is what it means to be a resident of the world but a citizen of the Kingdom.

Instead of finding ways of escaping reality through sex, drugs and rock and roll, Paul tells us, we are to be filled with the Holy Spirit. To be filled with the HS is to open my life to Him – not just up to my waist where it only appears that I am walking with Christ; not just up to my neck, where my heart is usually in the right place; but up to the very top of my head. It is only there that my heart and mind and entire being is being shaped toward the mind of Christ.

That is the essence of transformation – knowing God’s will of command, obeying God’s will of command as the Spirit gives us ability and thereby learning to think like God.

Socrates once said that the unexamined life is not worth living. People are in prison because they are paying the consequences of living the unexamined life. That is why people get married too soon and divorced too readily, as well. That is why all too many Christians, in prison or outside prison, are failing to redeem the time – failing to make the most of every opportunity – by focusing on the Lord’s return rather than living in His presence now.

Martin Luther once said, “If it were the will of God, I would plant an oak tree today, even if I knew Christ were coming tomorrow.”

Somebody once published an article entitled, “If You Are 35, You Have 500 Days to Live.” The article went on to say that when you subtract the time you spend sleeping, working, tending to personal matters, eating, traveling, doing chores, attending to personal hygiene in the next 36 years you will have only 500 days to spend as you wish.

That’s a frightening thought, isn’t it?

In closing, this matter of the will of God has far less to do with epiphanies and handwriting on the wall than it does with how we face life daily.

If you could go back and change the past, how would you have better used your time? The things we regret are precisely the things that probably would have turned out quite differently had we paid attention to God’s commands – His will of command. The fact is that every single day, time and time again, there is a replay of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. We are presented with the option of either conforming to the pattern of the world or being transformed by the renewing of our minds.

The will of God is that we be transformed by the renewing of our minds in order that we might test and discern His good, pleasing and perfect will.

Conformity to this world, on the other hand, is acting and reacting in a way that brings us pleasure – sex, TV, the books we read, the gossip about others that we so enjoy – any number of things. The most apparent result of this pattern is the terrible harvest of crime and divorce. The pattern of this world – especially America – is to make our own worldly comforts the primary focus of our lives, forgetting that at the end of the day, the death rate is still 100%.

When this life is over, all our power is gone, all our material possessions are gone and all our pleasures will be forgotten.

“How, then, can I know God’s will?” You cannot know God’s sovereign will for your life until you have committed to being transformed by the renewing of your minds. You cannot be transformed by the renewing of your minds until you have determined to know God’s commands and to strive through the HS to obey them – all of them; not just the easy ones for most of us, like homosexuality and abortion. Only then can we understand what is God’s good, pleasing and perfect will for us.