What is the Will of God?
What is the will of God?
A teacher has been dissatisfied with her district for years. Her work is extremely important because of the impact she makes with her kids, but the district leadership continues to make it difficult to do her job properly. She’s faced with a choice: Does she stay and continue to do the best she can for the sake of the children? Or does she seek other employment? How is she to know God’s will in this situation?
A young family struggled through the past few months of isolation due to the Covid-19 pandemic. They’re now faced with multiple choices: Do they feel comfortable sending their kids back to public school in the fall? Do they decide to enroll their kids in online-only learning? Should they look into homeschooling their kids? What could God’s will be in this situation?
Another husband and wife were shocked to find out that the wife’s test results showed stage-4 cancer. She passes on within a few months of her test results, leaving behind her loving husband. Her death has left him with significant legal decisions to make, which would drastically impact his life in the midst of his grieving. He cries out to God in search of His will.
A missionary just learned that his family could be in serious danger simply because they are preaching the gospel of Jesus. Do they continue to serve the Lord in this area or do they consider doing mission work elsewhere? What’s the will of God for their life?
The list of people seeking God’s will could go on and on. But the issue is that we often think of God’s will as this divine plan that’s specifically tailored to our own individual lives. But as we learned last week in Part 1 of our sermon series, What Does God Want?, God’s will is not unknown. His will is His redemption plan for bringing people back into His family. That’s the overarching characteristic to God’s will. He has a plan for His creation, but every detail about that plan is motivated by the metanarrative of redemption.
“God’s will is not unknown. His will is His redemption plan
for bringing people back into His family.”
So when it comes to making decisions, God directs the details of our lives according to how He can best use us to accomplish His overarching will – which is to connect poeple to Jesus so that through faith in Him alone they can be adopted into His family. This is an eternal perspective to the will of God. We might sweat the details, but we need to remember that the details of our lives are a small, yet significant part of God’s overarching plan.
This perspective might be a shift in thinking for us. We tend to have a bottom-up perspective of God’s will. We’ll ask the question: “What’s God’s will for my life?” That’s a great question to ask, but we need to remember that God’s will always begins with a top-down perspective. God’s will pertains to what God wants in light of His overarching plan for His creation.
There are many things that God wants. God wants us to remain faithful to Him (Hebrews 10:23). He wants us to love Him and love others (Matthew 22:37-40). He wants us to be kind to one another, while forgiving each other as the Lord forgave us (Ephesians 4:32). Again, everything that God wants is motivated by His bigger picture: His overarching plan of redemption.
So when it comes to God’s will and making choices in your life, I suggest thinking about the type of impact your choices would have on God’s plan of redemption. In other words: How might you maximize your moments for the will of the One who is King of every moment?
In a way, this should be freeing to the Christian who is seeking God’s will because we already know God’s will. It’s really not about finding God’s will. It’s about how our lives fit into the accomplishment of His overarching will.
For more on this, join us for our new sermon series: What Does God Want?