Monday, November 28, 2005
God's will
How do we even know what the will of God is anyway? Sure, we can feel a sense of peace. We can feel discontent. We can know for certain that some things are against God's will just because it contradicts commands that have been given in the Bible. But when people get involved, which we are most of the time, we screw up the will of God like crazy. We can feel a false sense of peace or a false discontent. As Phillip said, "People are wildcards." We pray for God's will to be done and then assume that it will be just because we prayed it. And then we assume that if something weird or flat out bad happens, it must have been God's will because that's what we prayed for. When all the while, the very people who are praying that God's will be done are the ones keeping it from being so. Can God ultimately do anything he wants to? Of course. But we have free will to make terrible and wacky decisions all day long and then turn around and claim the outcome was desired by God. I've done it. You've done it. Just the phrase, "It wasn't in God's will" really gets to me. Who are we to claim that we know the will of the Almighty God of this universe? The more I learn about God, the more I realize I can't figure Him out. How does He put up with us anyway?
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5 comments:
I'm totally with you on this. I hate to tell people that I'm a Christian sometimes because of how people will do this. Not that I'm am the least bit ashamed of Christ. Just His followers sometimes. I get the nervous sweats when people start to do as you've described -- it's sort of like tugging on Superman's cape. You don't know for sure what's going to happen. Trying to discern the Will of the Omnipotent, Omnipresent Creator of the Universe? I mean seriously, who the heck am I?
Dang, I'm going to be chewing on this all day. Good post...
According to Scripture, there's really only one will God has for all of us: to be conformed to the likeness of the image of His Son.
That's it.
If we do our best to be like Him and we truly live our lives as best we can in accordance to purposefully trying to become more like Him, we are walking in God's will for us. It's not archaic. It's not confusing. It's not a hidden truth. God wants us to be like Jesus, as cliché as that sounds nowadays.
Obviously, the difficulty is in doing that — which is where we all stumble and fall and crash and burn. We do our best, we ask for guidance, we refer to His Word, and we hope that we walk somewhere close to what He'd most want us to do.
And here we come to a Theological debate point: does God know the future? By definition, God's omniscience doesn't have anything to do with "seeing the future" in the sense of Him knowing what we will do, when we will do it, and how far "off the mark" we'll be from His "will." Since we have been given freedom to choose our own paths, God's omniscience makes Him able to address all of our choices in such a manner that He will be glorified no matter what we do.
For instance, I was called into ministry when I was 13 and from that point through post-college, that's what I worked toward (hence my degrees and whatnot). However, I didn't follow through and I'm not a minister now.
Did I miss God's will? It doesn't matter any longer. Why? Because He wants me to be like Him now. Did I miss a prime opportunity to be one of God's agents back then? Certainly! However, His omniscience enables Him to push and pull me as I try my best to be like Him so that He can fashion what Maury is now into what He wants Maury to be now. Yes, I may have "screwed up," but I can't go back in time.
So when it comes time to worry about whether or not we're in "God's will," we should ask ourselves how hard we're trying to be conformed to His image. If we aren't working at it, we aren't in His will.
After 2 ministry degrees and a lot of reflection on myself and observation of others I have come to the conclusion that at the root of it all people make the decisions that get their needs met after it is filtered through their paradigm (life experience, religion, culture, etc.). While having good intentions, we often give God credit for the sound of our own voices whether we want to admit it or not. That is how a well meaning Baptist and a well meaning Catholic can come to entirely different views about God's will and commence to condemn each other for their conclusions. Maybe the greatest commandment said it all.... Love God with all your heart and neighbor as yourself... the rest is just details that should fall into place as we practice the first.
Maury- As you have struggled with ministry like I still do (deist one day and believer the next for me) I encourage you to explore why it is ministry appealed to you and it will tell you something about yourself. I realized that it met a need for security and acceptance for me and I came to a point of realizing why I was a minister and why those reasons were not good enough to serve with integrity. In real church life, we know that the church can't meet those needs for us anyway. They are just imperfect humans.
My ministry calling, I believe, was primarily to put me in a place to keep me from going overboard and "down the wrong tracks." While I did my share of not-so-good-things in college and before, my feeling of being called helped keep me on the straight and narrow and has placed me where I am today.
My calling has changed, and I think part of that is due to me choosing to change via my burn-out. And as i said, even through my burn-out, God still has me ministering by blessing me to play in our church band and help with our Small Group, etc.
I changed paths to my calling, but I'm called just the same — as we all are. God, in His omniscience, is making sure I still have opportunities to serve Him as He asked me to so long ago. These are the "doors" he opens for us as we choose the path we walk upon.
His desire is that we walk through one in keeping with the will of being more like Jesus.
That is a good positive point Maury. If I hadn't had the calling on my life or felt it at the time who knows how I would have turned out or how many regrets I may have today if I had chosen another path. Being a teacher is growing me and I can see how God can use this experience if I ever feel led to go back.
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