Latest / Harvest After Sunday / Knowing God's Will for My Life: Theology Q&A
Transcript
- Harvest Media: Welcome to the Harvest After Sunday podcast. I'm Natalie and I'm your host, and I'm here with Stefan Wilson, pastor of preaching and teaching. And today I would love to talk about how to discern God's will for my life. I think that's the common way that we're used to kind of hearing it. And I don't know if that phrase even is a product of the kind of Christian culture. That I grew up in, we grew up in, there were certainly books and things and ideas circulating that presented this idea of like God has a plan for me and my life specifically. And so when I'm pursuing a spouse, when I'm deciding on a career, there's some sort of plan that God has set for me and I need to discover it. Right. And I could miss it. Yeah, I might miss it. I might make a mistake. How do I know? I don't think that the desire to seek God in a decision is inherently wrong thing. But I think fr potentially it's problematic to frame it in how do I discern God's will for my life. Yeah. so I'd love to talk about that and and how should we be thinking about this? Cause I I had a conversation with someone recently and they were describing how they knew that God wanted them to make a certain decision and I was asking about what that process was like for them and and then I think it's you know, we think of it in terms of the big decisions, the jobs, are we gonna move, my spouse, should we have kids? What do we do with this money? You know, those kind of things when there's time to seek and pray and discuss and get wise counsel, which again are wonderful things. But we need to be thinking and acting in a moment sometimes. When we're in a conversation with someone, when we're parenting our kids, and we want those actions to be glorifying God and in his will. How do we know how we should be responding in a moment's notice? So let's talk about even the framing of that question. Let's start there. Because what I'm hearing already is it's it's a little bit focused on me. How do I discern God's will for me and my life? So maybe that's problematic as a start. I think that we're a product of the society in which we live and the age in which we live and the way we talk exposes just how much that age has influenced us. and we in the last hundred and fifty ish years, it's been a very individualized focus, increasingly so with each passing decade, where the the individualistic nature of the way that we think would then cause me to say, Okay, what is the will of the Lord for my life? And as a result, I'm really only going to ask that question about things that I deem significant enough to warrant taking the time to ask the question rather than seeing it and this kind of gets at the I think the better way of looking at it rather than seeing it as something that marks my entire life. And so there is really nothing too big or too small for me to be reflecting on what is the Lord's will in this thing. So even what you what you apply that question to is already revealing what you care the most about. Sure. And it and I would go one step further and say it's really revealing just how much you think God's involved in your life. If I talk more about that. If I'm if I'm only Well, let me back up. I'll give I'll give you an example. I was a teacher. I taught seniors for four years and they always had the same questions every year. And I could basically mark it on the calendar when they were gonna start asking the questions. you know, in the spring it was always what what's God's will for what school I'm gonna go to for college? what is God's will for who I'm gonna marry? They would They would start talking about, what if I missed the one? You know, I'd I I I really believed that this girl was the one. you know, what if what if she is the one, but she marries someone else? And I would always say, well, then she wasn't the one. Some of these some of these questions are actually really easy to answer. Yeah. well, in their lives, they almost never talked about God's will for their words and for their desires and for their hobbies and how they spent their time. Obeying their parents. Right. Right. Because because in their minds at that point in their life, they had they had disconnected God's involvement in their day to day lives and they were seeing God's involvement in their life as being the one who was expecting them to just make the right decision and was going to punish them if they made the wrong decision. So what's actually happening in reducing the will of the Lord for my life to just a set number of questions and decisions, it's really exposing I have a view of God where he really only cares about the big decisions that I make and really he's just expecting me to get them right and he's gonna punish me if I get them wrong, and so I need to make sure to get them right so that I stay in his good graces. And that's just such a foreign yeah picture of God than what scripture presents. Yeah. and so I think the question, how do I know God's will for my life, it bec it I can totally understand the framing of the question because at root it's a desire to know what God wants you to do and we can we can commend that. James says that if we lack wisdom we should ask. Right. And God gives freely. and he doesn't give. The wisdom of the world, he gives the wisdom from above. And so we can go to the Lord, ask for wisdom, believing that he's going to give us wisdom so that we can make the decisions that we need to make. So that's absolutely a proper application. but if we're not careful, the way that we'll talk about discovering God's will will become very reductionistic to a very small subset of decisions in my life. And that's what we want to avoid because that's not all that it is. I'm thinking as you're talking, for some reason I'm envisioning like a train and we're trying to discern like which car we should jump on, otherwise it might pass us by. Yeah. Like it's something that could be missed. Right. Or there's some kind of a road map, and if we're not on the right path, somehow we need to get back to it or we've taken a wrong turn. But that's not necessarily how we should be viewing this. The desire to know how God wants me to live and and seek wisdom in it and seek his help in discerning it is a good desire if that's what's truly driving my heart. But am I hearing you say like you can't miss the will of God. putting that in air quotes just for the listeners, or there's not some plan that could be messed up or thwarted, or parts of it skipped over or done incorrectly. That that would be a wrong thinking. Now not that we can't make mistakes, that we can't sin and there's consequences. But that's a totally different way to think of it than I'm on the wrong path. I made a wrong turn. I might miss something. Yeah. I think I would probably I would probably paint a picture of two digits That we might fall into that are equally erroneous and then try to find the middle way. so one of the ditches is fatalism. Fatalism is that everything is so determined that the decisions that I make really don't matter because everything's gonna happen the way that it's gonna happen because it's foreordained. So what does it mean what I do? that view. what it what it retains is you're not gonna miss anything because it's already set in marble so it's not gonna it's not gonna change. You're not gonna miss anything. How your life goes is how it goes. The problem is fatalism, there is no human responsibility element whatsoever. The other side is libertarianism, liberty, freedom. Libertarianism is I am truly an autonomous agent. free will is its most its most like liberal in the sense of free form. and so I'm just making decisions. At which point what's retained then is human responsibility, but what is now sacrificed is any semblance of confidence that you that you are going to be where the Lord wants you to be unless you just make all the right decisions. And I think that we if we're on the if we're on the libertarianism side, what we're gonna do is we're gonna say, I know that I'm in the will of the Lord when things are going great for me. and I feel like I'm I'm confident I'm making the right decisions. They're working out the way I thought they were gonna work out. That means I'm in the will of the Lord. That sounds way more like prosperity gospel stuff to me. The other side on fatalism is I know that I'm in the will of the Lord because I exist. Therefore No matter what's happening, I'm in the will of the Lord even when I'm sinning. Okay, well that's obviously wrong. I think the middle the middle way is to say we live in in a reality over which God is sovereign, providential, and in complete authority. and we talked in the predestination podcast a while back about what providence means, that that it is how God orchestrates my life to and and he orchestrates all things to accomplish his will, his purpose that he's established. so while there is freedom that we experience as we make choices, and there are consequences for those choices, there is still a bigger picture that is still completely under God's control. And so then we have we can look at that and say, okay, then what does that look like to be in the will of the Lord in that kind of reality where God has entrusted to us the responsibility to make choices and we live with the consequences of those choices, yet He is still providential and sovereign over all things. and if we jump then to the big decisions we make. Then I think we're skipping a really important middle ground. But if we talk first about that middle ground, then we can start to say, okay, well, if we if we understand this middle piece, from my current state to the big decision that I need to make, the the middle piece is my daily life. then we can say, okay, if you're living here, no, you're not gonna miss the will of the Lord for your life. You you If you could, that's actually an accusation about the impotence of God. and we don't want to do that. And I don't think anybody would obviously say that. But it becomes it becomes that when what we end up doing is saying, I I did everything right and I missed the opportunity that that was God's will for me. Well, no, you you didn't miss anything. That wasn't that wasn't God's will for your life. You thought it was, you wanted it to be, but that wasn't it. And maybe it's hard to come to grips with that right now, and that's okay. A day will come where you'll look back and you'll say, Man, I'm so glad that wasn't the will of the Lord for my life. Even though I thought it even though I thought it was going to be perfect, I now see it wasn't. And God was actually protecting me by keeping me in his will. I didn't miss his will. So that that daily life piece I think is the is the missing ingredient when we talk about the will of the Lord in comparison to big decisions. Yeah. And it still s like it a lot of The security or affirmation that we have, it sounds like it's reflective. Like we can look back. We don't want to to judge it by saying, well, that didn't go the way I wanted or hoped or whatever. So maybe I was wrong. Maybe it wasn't the will of God. But even in what you just described, there might be a time of reflection where you say, even though I was disappointed or suffering at the time, I can see how God is good. But what if we can't see later still how God was good? I think is Question A and then question B is how what is what does it look like to seek God in advance of a decision? If we truly desire to seek wisdom to make a godly decision and there is time, what does that look like? Because I also hear people describing that well, I I know God is telling me, I have a sense of peace about it. Yeah. So maybe talk a little bit about those two. We'll wrap up that is it always just we Can look back and if we feel like we can see God's goodness in the rearview mirror, then we know. Yeah. What if we don't see God's goodness? And then we'll tackle how to move towards a godly decision. Yeah, this is where there are a few passages in scripture that utilize dramatic irony in the text. One is the life of Joseph. The other is I mean there's a few, but the two most prominent are Joseph in Genesis. And then Jesus before Pilate in John nineteen. and in each of those circumstances, the reason they're dramatic irony is because the reader knows what's going on. But the people in the story don't. Okay. that's what irony is. Like you're watching, and you as the audience are like, I like I see where this is going, and you don't see where it's going, and it's good it's gonna end up in a in a way you're not expecting as the actor in the show. in the life of Joseph, aside from aside from being obnoxious to his brothers about the dreams that he had. Like, there isn't much to say that he was like obviously doing the wrong things. in fact, throughout the narrative about Joseph's life, we see him doing things that are honoring to the Lord. And each time it works out very poorly for him until he's forgotten about in prison. And it would be very easy to look at that and say, I mean, obviously he's not in the will of the Lord. I mean he ended up prison. How f how far out of the will of the Lord can you get? Until we realize that that was actually all the will of the Lord in order to get him to the place where he would be second in command of all of Egypt And he knew that famine was coming, so they stored up grain so that the people could come and get food for the seven years of famine, and people not die of starvation. of of which people who came to get food were his family, all the sons of Jacob, and then Jacob even came. Had Joseph not been sold into slavery by his brothers, falsely accused by Potiphar's wife, forgotten about in prison. Had that all that stuff not happened, Jesus would never have been born because the lion of Abraham would have died out in starvation and famine. Sometimes you don't see the will of God in your lifetime. I mean you see glimpses of it, but like the will of God in Joseph's life was to preserve the Abrahamic line so that Christ could be born so far down the line. Joseph didn't see that. Yeah. He saw circumstances. But he didn't see the whole picture. you know, the other the other irony is in John nineteen, where Pilate where Pilate is or the the religious leaders are falsely accusing Jesus. They bring him before Pilate. Pilate says, I see nothing wrong in this man. and Pilate says, Don't you know I have the freedom to or I have the power to set you free? And And then Jesus says, You don't have any power except what's been granted you by the Father. And Pilate brings him out and says, Behold the man. and they say, Crucify him, and they take him away to crucify him. And as the reader, you're like, Yeah, this needed to happen. This this whole situation needed to happen because Jesus was innocent, Pilate needed to capitulate to the people. To give them their will, even though that was not the right thing to do, so that Jesus would go to the cross and die for our sins. Had Pilate actually done the just thing and set Jesus free, you and I would still be dead in our sins. Like we look at those situations and we you see things in the narratives where you're like, that didn't go the way it should have gone from our perspective. But when you have the whole picture, you can say, no, it went exactly how it needed to go for the will of the Lord to happen. And so I don't think that we can necessarily always know because of the circumstances that we're in the will of the Lord. Yes, sometimes we can look back and be like, man, God was protecting me from that, and I see it now, and I'm grateful for it. Other times you are in the midst of conf confusing circumstances. But that doesn't mean that you're not in the will of the Lord. The way to be confident that you are in the will of God in your life is that today you are saying, Lord, let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be pleasing to you. That the actions that I carry out and the way that I reflect you brings you glory in my conversations, in my conduct in traffic, it at my job. Let me bring glory to you because your way matters most to me. I think that's so significant. So I wanna take a second here to really emphasize that because it reframes our whole conversation from understanding, you know, exact circumstances that need to happen. happen or how it may or may not go and if we're pleased with that and if it quote works out for us or not to glorifying God. And what I'm hearing you say in the few examples you just gave there, there's really no situation or other person that could thwart me glorifying God. That's right. Not how another person is treating me, not my current health situation, not my employment state where I live, how the strength of my marriage or my family relationships. there is no situation or person that can stop me from glorifying God. Right. now in how I am thinking and acting and responding. you said the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart. And so that really reframes it from seeking specific circumstances and decisions that I'm gonna make and be here and be with this person and do this thing. to viewing my life as how can I glorify God in this, where I am right now, in this moment, when I have to, you know, be a good neighbor, respond to my child, tend to someone who's sick, deal with, you know, an unfair treatment from my boss, a spouse who is unfaithful or unkind, in all of these scenarios. I can say, how can I glorify God? Right. So it's really more about viewing my life as glorifying God and then I'm making Biblical choices. So it's really more about how can I make biblical decisions than how can I know God's will for my life. Right. About specific circumstances and decisions. Right. Because perhaps we're asking for insight into something that we don't get to have insight into. Yeah. But I can certainly know in this moment what is a decision that is in line with scripture. Yeah. And And if it's a if it's a decision that neither option is sinful, right, do I take this job or this job? Well, let's back up. Jesus says in the Beatitudes, Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Now, if you put your faith in Jesus, he has purified you so that you are without sin when you stand before the throne of God. yet in our daily lives we give ourselves over to all kinds of impurity. And how can I be confident of a choice that I am making that honors the Lord when I am filling my mind and my eyes with all kinds of impure things? So that now my heart is blocked from being able to rightly perceive the leading of the Lord in my life. That's Paul Paul uses the same kind of language when he talks about grieving the spirit or resisting the spirit by the way that we live. When I am living out of step with the daily expectation of the will of the Lord, and that is just my Christian life. When I'm consistently living out of step with that. I am going to then be prioritizing the wrong things and be acting out of folly rather than wisdom because I'm embracing folly in my daily life. Whereas instead, if I am saying, Lord, in my life today, I want to honor you, lead me by your spirit, help me pursue that which is good and right and noble and pure and pleasing to you. transform my mind that I might discern what the will of the Lord is, what is good and pleasing and perfect. That's that's daily life kind of stuff. What in my life today is the goodness that I should pursue from a transformed mind so that my life more accurately reflects the God in whose image that I'm made. Now, as I'm pursuing that, because God is my delight and I want to honor Him. And then I'm presented with a fork in the road. Why would God lead me down the wrong road? He wouldn't. He would lead me down the road that I need to walk down for me to be more conform to the image of Christ. And so I think that a lot of times we get to these these decisions and we're like, I just I don't know, this house or this house, this job or this job, this college or this college. Whatever the choice is. And my going back to my students, they would ask me, you know, what college should I go to? Yeah. What's the will of the Lord for what college I should go to? And I would say, Are your parents gonna pay for it? And they would say, Yeah. And I said, Where do your parents want you to go? GCU. And I say, Well, it lopes up. You're going to GCU. You know why? Because the will of the Lord for you is for you to honor your parents. Yeah. And you know how to do that. And by honoring your parents, you know what's not going to happen? You're not going to go to the wrong school. Yeah. You're going to be where God wants you. Are your parents gonna pay for it? No. I I got scholarships, I'm gonna pay for it on my own. Okay. are you desiring to walk with the Lord in your daily life? Yeah. When you sin, do you run to him in repentance and do you grieve your sin? Yeah, totally. Okay, so you're being led by the Spirit in your daily life? Where do you want to go? Well, I really want to go to this school. Do you have enough money to pay for it? Yeah. Then go there. Like those kinds of decisions can actually be that simple. Yeah. Because what I'm saying is, Lord, I actually trust you enough to even lead my heart, to even give me the desires that I should want. When I'm delighting in you, you're gonna give me the desires of my heart. You're gonna help me to desire the right things. Then I'm just gonna pick one. And I'm gonna trust that that choice was you leading me. when I went to college I was accepted to U of A because I grew up in Tucson and I thought I was gonna be a wildcat my whole life. And April of my senior year, I just thought, you know, I think I would like to get some space. And so I said, I'm just gonna go to NAU. It was a whim of a decision. I mean, as an eighteen year old, it was true it was not well thought out. but During that semester, I was pursuing the Lord like I had never pursued him in my teenage years. And I just wanted, I wanted to know his word. I wanted to spend time with him in prayer. I wanted to be around his people. Like I just wanted to honor him with my life. And what felt like, I'll just go to NAU ended up being where I met my best friends. Yeah. Led to me meeting my wife. Yeah. Led to me getting the call to preach. So the reason I bring all that up is to say we need rather than fixating on the big decisions to where we neglect our daily lives, we need to instead emphasize, let me walk in step with the spirit today, trusting that the spirit will lead me in those decisions. And then the like you you referenced a minute ago Like how can I know in the midst of it that I'm in the will of the Lord and the Lord? Yeah, I think people they seek and they pray and they maybe get wise counsel and the a lot of the things you just mentioned. And then they maybe say things like, Well, I really feel the Lord calling me, telling me, I really feel a peace about this. Again, I'm not not that those things are objectively wrong, but is that how we discern? Can we know that the There's a peace from God because we're seeking him and relying on him, or maybe the peace comes because we're pursuing our own desires. So of course we feel peace because we feel great about that. I got what I wanted. We're getting the comfort that we seek or the approval that we seek. And that's why we feel peace. you know, you described being anchored in God's word and submitting to the Lord in prayer and depending on him and even getting wise counsel and the hope would be that those things are refining and sanctifying and revealing a heart that truly wants to honor the Lord and not seeking something else. Yeah. But is it enough to just say, Well, I prayed and I have a peace about it I think that's a really common thing that we hear. Yeah. I don't think I don't think that we can actually be confident that we're in the will of the Lord in isolation. So I prayed about it. I have peace, therefore I'm good. So seeking wisdom from another believer is I think one of the one of the things one of the things that can affirm that I'm in the will of the Lord is that other mature believers can say, Yeah, that's right and good. Mm-hmm. If they're saying, Listen, I know you think that's right and good, but there's a serious problem with how you're thinking. Yeah. I love when it comes back to the one another. It's you know, it's how we were challenging. It's really challenging. It is, 'cause people are hard. And when we stay on our own, we can do a lot of justifying and reasoning and Just really convince ourselves that we are doing the right thing, thinking the right thing. Totally. I had I had a conversation recently with somebody who believed that the Lord revealed to him that a sinful and overtly, objectively sinful decision was the right thing to do. And I said, The Lord did not reveal that to you. Something else did. whether it's your own heart or spiritual deception, it's one of the two. Because the Lord's never going to lead you to do something that goes against his word. So when you're when you isolate yourself, you can justify all kinds of stuff. So you need godly counsel in the abundance of counsel is victory. But the man who isolates himself brings himself to destruction. Like there is there is just biblical wisdom that God has entrusted to his people that we need one another for. So I can know I can be confident I'm in the will of the Lord when one I am walking in pursuit of keeping in step with his spirit every day by his grace. That I am I am pursuing him and seeking to honor him. Two, I am seeking his his wisdom in this particular thing. Three, I am seeking counsel from his people, and they are affirming that what I'm sensing is right and good. For when my peace about it is not rooted in how I I feel or or how it's working out, but in my confidence that the Lord is going to use it and do in it what He wants. It's a different piece. It's not comfort. It's Lord, I don't know what's gonna happen, but I have a peace that no matter what happens, this is gonna honor you, so I'm gonna do it. I left a to to come to harvest, I left what most people would call a dream job. I mean I I was I was like Christian famous. And I meaning meaning I was well known in a really small bubble. Big fish, small pond. Yeah, yeah. That's that's exactly what it was. I trained Christian educators around the globe and I flew all over the place and I I got treated like a celebrity in all kinds of places I went and first class and nice hotels and speaking in front of thousands of people. And and I sensed that the Lord was leading me toward the preaching ministry at Harvest. And I sought counsel. Jeannie and I prayed about it. and We sought to honor the Lord in how we were living in our individual lives. And the inner peace came from saying, I am this is going to cost us financially. Yeah. we're gonna ha especially because we had to move. this is I'm gonna be giving up something that people only dream about. Yeah. And I've I've got it, like I'm doing it. Yeah. we're gonna have to go to a new place and face new challenges, like all these hard things. And yet we were able to say, but we believe confidently that this is what the Lord wants. And so our peace is that no matter what may happen, we're where he wants us to be. Yeah. That's the peace that we should be pursuing, not cognitive rest. There's all kinds of uncertainty that comes in the in the will of God. That's kind of why faith is a thing. but The peace that I can have is the confidence of knowing that the one that I'm leaning on is gonna take care of everything. Yeah, peace isn't synonymous with comfort. I mean, in the situation you described, you'd be giving up a lot of comfort. It's not comfortable to I mean, there's literal comforts like you said. Sure. Nice, you know, flights and hotels and but the comfort that we feel from n Being in a lane where we're thriving and we know exactly what we're doing. And we get approval from other people and and to give up those comforts, and be looking in the face of that, but still feel peace. So it's not synonymous with comfort, but you said a confidence. Yeah. You know, that you're seeking the Lord and that you're desiring to honor him in it. and then so often I think of Jesus in the garden, knowing exactly what he would face and praying and desiring a different outcome. I mean, praying if it's your will, Father, let this cup pass from me, but if not, let your will, not mine, be done. I mean, what an incredible prayer to incorporate when we're seeking the will of God, to say ultimately, I think this is where you're leading me, or I think this is what I'm desiring, and I want my desires to be aligned with the desires that you put in me and the desire to honor you. But if this is not your will, like your will, not mine. be done. Yeah. And there's just so much humility and surrender in that too. And I think that is synonymous with the peace that can be found. again, it's not comfortable. If if we're looking at Christ's example in the Garden of Gethsemane before his crucifixion, it that's not synonymous with comfort. or a peace that really makes sense to this world. Yeah. unless you've experienced it when you're authentically seeking the Lord. But I love that you gave us the picture of zooming out and seeing the Bible as one story, because I love when we have opportunities to talk about that, the examples that you gave early on where we can't necessarily look zoom in on a life or a situation in scripture and say, that's objectively good. But when we zoom out and we see a more full picture of the will of God and what he's ultimately accomplishing. We can say of course that is a part of his good will. and then the reminder is to just be anchored in God's word and united in community and y using the means of grace that God has given us, his word and prayer and community to be able to no matter the circumstance that we're in, say, God, I w I wanna glorify you. And that is your will for my life. So I think that's really helpful. To practically walk through with people. I love that you talked so much about your students. What an encouragement to hear young people seeking wise counsel and seeking the Lord in their decisions from an early age. And I think that's such an encouragement. And I'm so glad that we value being united in community at harvest and just want to encourage people to go to those people that are in your small groups and your D groups, the pastors, elders, wise friends that you know are also anchored in God's word and seek their wise counsel. As you're praying through decisions, even the day-to-day things and how you're parenting and where you're sending your kids to school and all of those kind of things. So thank you guys for joining us for the Harvest After Sunday podcast, where we help you grow into the image of Christ by applying the truths of his word for his mission. We'll see you Sunday.