The Will of God

1 Thessalonians 4:3-4 - "For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that is, that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each of you know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor."

How do I know the will of God? It is a question that I have asked myself repeatedly over the past many, many years. I can't count the number of times that I have prayed for God to reveal Himself and give me a sign as to which job I should take, which college I should attend and, (shocker!) who I should marry. It's funny, I spent years as a non-believer praying that God would reveal to me His will. Okay, it's not really funny. Maybe. I guess you had to be there. I have prayed that He would have a certain person talk to me if I was to make X decision, that I would close my eyes and listen for fifteen minutes for Him to say "Yes" or "No" on whether to take a new job, that if I was to marry a particular woman she would come up to me and (in typical romantic comedy fashion....which I don't watch....) break down, professing her love for me and I could declare mine in return and the birds would sing and the sun would shine and Lucky the Leprechan would bound down the freshly formed rainbow and give me his pot of, um, marshmallows. And, in typical reality fashion, nothing happened.

God has spent the past two weeks giving me a spiritual smackdown. Currently, my pastor is giving a sermon series on the will of God, and I don't think I could use anything more . I have been convicted of two major things through the preaching. The first is that I have used prayer about God's will for my life as a way to avoid that to which I know He has called me. How? As my pastor said yesterday, people will often come up to him and say that they have a feeling that God has called them to preach to their neighbors and tell them about Christ. His response? Um....yeah...the Bible clearly says that. I use the excuse that I don't feel God telling me at a particular moment to give to the needy, to preach the gospel, to flee from a particular situation that could lead to sin. The fact is that God has revealed to all believers, through the scriptures, how to think, how to act, how to love, how to live. We don't need His voice to give us direction. Or, rather, we don't need His audible voice. We have the Bible, which is the written word of God. There is no excuse for not knowing God's will for our behavior, because we have it recorded in one of the ten or fifteen Bibles sitting around our home.

Another thing that I was convicted of was that many times, if not most, my focus is more on the will of God, than in knowing the God whose will I am trying to discover. As my pastor said, "we wonder why He is vague about it, why He doesn't put it on a billboard. It is because He won't allow us to worship His will, He will only allow us to worship Him." More than I would like to admit, I pray for the situation, that God would reveal to me the correct direction to go. I spend relatively little time praying that God will use the situation at hand to mold me into the image of Christ. I believe that that points to what my heart values. I have spent countless hours day dreaming about (name withheld to protect the innocent) and wondering if she is in God's will for my life. How often do my thoughts turn to how I can please Christ, how great my love for Him? How often do I meditate on the words of the Lord, or read scriptures, or spend time praying that He and He alone will be sufficient for me? Not nearly enough. And another idol is revealed.

I believe that God has a specific will for my life. I truly do. As stated in an earlier post, I can look back over the past few years and see how God has been working through a variety of seemingly random circumstances to bring me to Himself. I don't, however, need to know that specific path that my life will take in order do the will of God. The will of God for my life that I can know, that I can follow, is found throughout the Bible. The will of God for my life is that I live in obedience, that I conform to the image of Christ. That I can know for certain. The rest will follow.