THE WILL OF GOD

by James Howell

Excerpts from the Prepublication Draft (2008)

2. The God Who Wills

Before we can say anything meaningful about the Will of God, we have to ask, Who is God? and what is God like? Sometimes we are tempted to say something or another about the will of God that frankly casts God as an unsavory brute, or as an iron-fisted despot, or as a spongy player of games. We need to say true things about God, and if we can divine who God really is, then we may as a natural reflex understand God’s will.

In the intellectual climate in which we have been reared, much like the philosophical world in which Christianity was born, God is defined with lots of omni-, in-, and un- prefixed words: omniscient, omnipotent, infinite, ineffable, unchanging. But do a string of grand adjectives tell the deep truth about God? In their effort to safeguard God’s greatness, do the omnis, ins and uns somehow close a curtain on the heart of God? Does the Bible insist on so many expansive adjectives to explicate who God “by definition” must be?

The miracle of the Old and New Testaments seems to be that God is better than all the definitions. God is more like a story, a poem, an experience, intensely personal, breaking your heart and then thrilling your soul. Yes, God is all-powerful, but God’s power is consumed with love – and not some wispy, flighty kind of love, but love that is solid, strong, courageous, enduring.

The phrase “God’s will” might feel like cold steel, an inflexible decree etched into time by a mighty potentate. But the will of the God of love is fraught with emotion. God is closer to me than my next breath, and God is determined to have a personal relationship with me. God loves me more than I love myself – and when you love, you will the good of the other person. You have desires for them; you desire love from that person, you long for excellence in them. God has wishes, God has a purpose, God makes choices, God is pleased (or displeased), God promises (and keeps promises), God delights, God grieves.

To know God’s will, we must know God’s heart. As shrouded in mystery, and as occasionally baffling as God can be, we can know God’s heart – and perhaps it would be helpful to think back into the recesses of time to weigh what is in God’s heart.

When God was Young

Let us go back to the beginning… or even before the beginning. Think back, far back in time, before your grandparents lived, before the great inventions of the modern world, before the Roman Empire, before the dinosaurs roamed the Earth, before the Big Bang, or however it is you think the world came to be, before time itself, back when God was young.

God had a very important decision to make: “What kind of God am I going to be?” A perfectly understandable option would have been for God to settle on “I’ll just be God,” and no one would have questioned God. But this God felt in God’s heart some urge to make something instead of dwelling in divine isolation, however splendid. That urge in God’s heart to make something is the beginning of the Will Of God. God willed to make something.

As we now know, God made something that is so mind boggling, so grandiose and yet delicate, so ridiculously massive and yet unfathomably tiny, that you could spend your lifetime trying to comprehend it – and you would never get your mind around one millionth of it. God cast the galaxies across the expanse of space, God made this earth with a stunning array of life and wonder. You cannot begin to take it all in.

God decided to make something – but that wasn’t enough. As much as God delighted in constellations, nebulae, mountains, glaciers, forests, bacteriae, orangatangs and wildflowers, God was lonely. Or so it seems: God wanted some creature with a peculiar affinity to God’s own heart. Having made something as extraordinary as the universe, God then made us. A woman, a man, a child, more women, men, children, and finally you, me, us.

At this crucial knot in time, God had another important decision to make: “How will I connect with these creatures that I’ve made?” God had a number of options. God could have said, “I will fashion a network of strings, and attach them to the heads, hands and feet of each person. I will control them like marionettes, manipulating them so they will always do my will. They will never do wrong. They will never hurt one another. My will never will be left undone.” But God decided not to attach those strings to our heads, hands, and feet.

God could have said, “I will overwhelm them by my power. I will impress them with miracles repeatedly, I will make them tremble in awe so they dare not cross me. I will dazzle them with displays of my might, and guarantee that my will is done.”

But God decided to do something more impressive. Instead of manipulating us, instead of overwhelming us, God decided to love us. What a terrible risk for God to take! If you have done any loving, you know your heart gets broken. God wanted to love, God was and is Love, so God took the risk, knowing fully well that his heart would be broken. This was the most wonderful moment in the history of the universe: when God decided to love.

Looking back, we need not be surprised. God is love. God within God’s essence has never been anything but love. As we will see, before God made anything, God was a communion of love. Not to love would have been out of character for God. Manipulation and domination would in retrospect have been impossible for God, since God is love.

When God was young, God courageously took on the risk of evil – and a hidden aspect of that risk was that God’s own self would be shrouded, concealed behind the smoke of God’s people behaving badly, questioned and even disbelieved when God’s people couldn’t see God out in the open running the show smoothly. It seems that God understood what was at stake, and perhaps even how marvelous it would be when we did notice the love of God in the thick of mystery and even peril, how the virtues of an open world, with light and shadow, with freedom squandered and then graciously returned, with love’s failure but then love’s restoration, outweigh what any other world might be like. Yet even if we wish the universe were different, at the heart of literally everything is this: God decided to love.

Is God in Control?

Funny thing about love: Love can do many things, but Love never controls. Believers ask, Is God in control? Surely God is in control! But God is love, and as Paul wrote so eloquently, “Love does not insist on its own way” (1 Corinthians 13:5). God has something God wants you to do, to be; God very passionately wants things to turn out a certain way, a good way. Because of this, God loves. A God who loves cannot pervert love by acting as a tyrannical megalomaniac who must have his way or heads will roll.

Is God in control? In a way, Yes – long-term, eventually, big picture, Yes. But day in and day out, No, God does not control things that happen, or you and me. At times I do God’s will, but often I do not, and you don’t either. God chooses not to determine everything; love does not insist on its own way. So we cannot simply conclude that whatever happens equals God’s will. God’s will doesn’t happen lots of times. Otherwise we needn’t bother hunting down terrorists or criminals (unless we want to reward them for doing God’s will).

If God loves more immensely than we can fathom, and yet if God does not insist on having God’s way in every little thing, then God’s heart is broken – all the time. “Love bears all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7) – and we see this God of extraordinary grace grieving throughout the Bible, and history. God waits, quietly, arms outstretched, pleading with us: “I was ready to be found by those who did not seek me. I said ‘Here I am’” (Isaiah 65:1). Instead of huffing and puffing and blowing our house down, God stands at the door and knocks (Revelation 3:20).

But to say that God does not control everything, to say that God is not a divine manipulator begins to feel like we are saying God is remote, God is uninvolved, God doesn’t care. Or else, God cares, but God is rather helpless, sobbing in exasperation on the sidelines when his team has just fumbled the game away. God is far from uninvolved. God cares, more than you and I do.

God sees each one of us at every moment, with the intensity of a parent who looks up at the stage during a ballet recital: yes, there are two dozen ballerinas circling after an echappé, but the parent sees just one, my daughter, the love of my life. God, with extraordinarily focused panoramic vision, can pull this off for me, for you, for everybody else reading, those not reading, a few billion people simultaneously, not to mention my dog and the bird that just flew by my window….

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3. God’s Will For Me

What does God want me to do? How would I know such a thing? To many of us, the question feels mystifying. We wish God would just shoot us an email or a memo; a whisper in the ear might do the trick. If God has something God wants me to do, God really ought to be more forthcoming with directions. If I don’t do God’s will, can’t I just plead ignorance?

But then we all know people for whom God’s will seems utterly clear. A few years ago, a couple exited worship, beaming with excitement. “While you were preaching, we saw the Holy Spirit on the back of your head.” I assured them that it was my gray hair, a bit more luminescent than usual from the late morning light filtered through the stained glass behind me. But they went on to say, “The Holy Spirit (on top of your head) told us that it is God’s Will for us to move to Colorado.” I tried to reckon whether this was good news or not.

So many people think of God’s will this way. Somebody’s grey head, the lights flicker, a chance occurrence, the door was open, a curious coincidence: a “sign.” Bruce Waltke, in his very fine book on God’s will, called this the “Hunch Method.” You have some kind of hunch. You’re looking for some kind of sign, and then it becomes…..God’s Will. Fond as many religious people are of this method, we have to admit that Waltke is right when he concludes, “Too many people have used the ‘hunch’ method to rationalize poor decisions or excuse their carnal living.”¹

Isn’t it usually something like “We were driving down the street, and at precisely that moment a realtor was hammering a ‘for sale’ sign in the yard of the dream house we’d always wanted; how cool that God let us know it was time to move”? or “The morning after we read about Jesus saying ‘Follow me’ in Bible study, my boss called me in to offer me a promotion to move to San Diego”? Why don’t we ever hear people say “I was walking downtown, saw a beggar, and knew God was calling me to leave my law practice and become a missionary to the Sudan”? or “I was playing poker, was dealt the three of hearts, and figured God was telling us to take three abandoned children into our home”?

A hunch about God’s will might by sheer luck coincide with God’s will, but can’t we do better? Does God speak only to the intuitive? Can’t we admit we look for signs that work to our benefit and ignore any that might demand serious sacrifice? Should we rely on quirky spiritual happenstances, or instead rely on our closeness to God? Leslie Weatherhead wisely suggested that “The greatest help available in discerning the will of God is reached when we deepen our friendship with him.”

The good news is that such a friendship is possible! To me, when thinking about what God wants us to do, we return once more to Ephesians 1:9. “God has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will.” God’s will is a mystery, indeed. But God has made known that mystery. God has provided tantalizing, powerful hints of who we are to be, how we are to live. God wants you to know God’s will. In fact, God is far more eager to tell you God’s will than you are to figure it out.

Can we know God’s will with impeccable clarity? Of course not. But we can know enough. God has told us enough so we can live out God’s will. You and I will never become masters who have God’s desires totally mapped out. But God has given us enough; God will always give us enough. How hopeful! Like a mother loving her son, like a husband wanting to know his wife’s heart, like the laborer doing his best, like the artist striving toward something envisioned in the heart, we never love or work or know as fully and flawlessly as we might like. But it can be enough.

The Script We Follow

How do we know enough of God’s will? If signs and hunches are unreliable, where do I find this Will of God? “Your Word is a lamp to my feet, a light to my path” (Psalm 119:105). The lens through which we understand what God wants me to do, what God has already willed, and is about to will – in the world, and in my life – is the Bible. We get too hung up on whether to take this or that item in the Bible literally, and we forget that the Bible is something God wanted to happen, and God’s desire is that we read, listen, immerse ourselves in it, and view everything in our lives from its perspective. The Bible is our script, stage directions for players performing God’s will.

To cynics this “Bible answer” might sound corny, and we can understand the ways Bible reading is hard, and has brought us up empty more than once. But God’s will is there; it really is. Why phone up God with some appeal (“God, tell me what your will is on this major decision?”) when we haven’t patterned our lives today, yesterday, and last year on what God has willed to put right in front of us all along?

People who are deeply involved with God via Scripture don’t agonize so much over God’s will, because they are “in shape” spiritually, they sense the grammar, they have strong footings on which their quest for God’s will is constructed. So, you can start planning now to figure out what God’s will might be next year or in twenty five years: become a student of Scripture.

To people flailing over many of their decisions, I am tempted to say, “If you just had a passing familiarity with the basics of the Bible you could resolve this easily.” There is so much that’s so clear, so simple, so do-able in the Bible; you could spend your entire lifetime keeping busy with what you could be absolutely positive is God’s will. “Do not get drunk” (Ephesians 5:18), “Do not judge” (Luke 7:37), “Care for orphans and keep yourself unstained by the world” (James 1:27); “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, self-control” (Galatians 5:22). It is God’s will that we be holy, lift up the poor, reconcile with enemies, avoid gossip, keep promises, attend worship, clothe the naked, and express gratitude.

Reminding myself of this demystifies God’s will for me, and frankly makes it feel more comprehensive – and daunting! – than merely waiting until a crisis and thinking “Now I need to know God’s will.” For knowing God’s will is a matter of developing holy habits. Over years of reading the Bible, we find crafted within us a mentality that mirrors Christ; we learn to act and to think theologically in the face of tragedy. God is a God who makes and keeps promises, and so God’s will is trustworthy long-term, able to weather any storm. God owns everything, so it’s never God’s will for me to be possessive or grasping. God sacrificed his Son, so God’s will probably involves me making sacrifices. If you notice gifts in you (are you smart? good with numbers? do you cry when children suffer? is there money in your pocket?), their proper use is for the glory of God, not your personal advancement. The more I practice what I know is God’s will, the better prepared I am to improvise in a sticky, less than clear situation.

Improvise? Indeed: we have to grapple with the fact that I have decisions every day, but there doesn’t seem to be a handy Bible passage that helps me get a handle on what to do. Is God silent on such matters? Or is some creativity required? Sam Wells suggests that the Christian life is a kind of “improvisation.”² Well-trained actors learn their characters so well that they can cope when an entrance is botched or someone forgets their lines; you know your character, you stay in character. You improvise together, not being original or innovative, but consistent, faithful to the story.

God does not seem to have supplied us with complete instructions for what to do this afternoon or tomorrow. We have to improvise – but not randomly! We can live out what is unscripted because we know what has been scripted. The Bible is a training school; our regular worship is a rehearsal. Christians make mistakes! but like actors in rehearsal, the mistakes become opportunities to learn, to grow, to improve.

Too much of our praying happens when we are in dire straits; too often we think of Christian ethics as making a hard decision in a crisis. But our goal is to be near Jesus all the time, so that being about God’s will is as normal, as constant as breathing. Wells is right: “Ethics is not about being clever in a crisis but about forming a character that does not realize it has been in a crisis until the ‘crisis’ is over.”³

Much of the will of God is clear. But for the rest that is less obvious: how will we know and then do God’s will? We don’t know just yet. So we will study the script, learn our parts, and then improvise, and in a way that will strike onlookers as fitting, given the beginning of the drama, given the way God has acted in history, given the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus, given the great examples of saints who have gone before us. Despite our foibles and sin, God trusts us, and gives us immense responsibility. “Response-ability”: God has made us able to respond to God’s grace.

So we do what we know is God’s will: we listen to Scripture, sing hymns, pray, discuss, give money, serve at the shelter, knowing that we are being shaped to respond appropriately, faithfully, courageously to the grace of God – and that wherever we find ourselves on the stage of life, in that place God will be loved, and the will of God will be done.

Testing ‘God’s Will’

So I’m about to do what I think is God’s will – but is it really God’s will? Or, I just did what I thought was God’s will – but was it really God’s will? Early Christians were warned: “Do not believe every spirit, but test to see whether they are of God” (1 John 4:1). In a way, we are freed from fretting too much about this: the very desire to please God pleases God. And we know that doing God’s will is like a toddler getting his legs under him: you wobble and bang your head a lot.

Sometimes we latch onto bogus indicators. We think “If it was God’s will, then it should have succeeded marvelously.” But sometimes God’s will yields no obvious results. We follow God in hope – hope being that dogged determination to do what is right and good whether it has a decent chance of working out successfully or not. Often things succeed splendidly – but God wanted something else. What God calls us to frequently plunges us into what feels like failure or suffering. How well did things turn out for Jesus at Calvary? or the martyrs? or even you the last time you took a stand for God and somebody sneered?

Extremely dubious is what I call the “open door fallacy.” Someone says “The door opened, so it must be God’s will.” But there are many open doors through which you most certainly should not walk; and sometimes to do God’s will you bang on a closed door repeatedly until you crash through. The promotion to San Diego is an open door; so is the person willing to have an extra-marital affair with you. Don’t take the open door. During the early days of the Civil Rights movement, America said “No,” but citizens kept marching and had jail doors slammed behind them. Trying to find housing for the homeless mother who wandered into your church seems impossible, or you feel trapped in a job that demands you compromise your faith. Take the closed door, break the thing down if you have to.

If I am doing God’s will, then will I find myself busier than ever? – and tireder than ever? God’s will isn’t necessarily a whopping increase in doing, for the devil “often tries to make us attempt and start many projects so that we will be overwhelmed with too many tasks, and therefore achieve nothing,” as St. Francis de Sales⁴ taught us. Just before Jesus said “Take my yoke upon you,” he offered a tender invitation: “Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 10:34). Not “I will give you even more to do,” and not “I will really wear you out.” God’s will involves those bizarre habits portrayed in the Bible, like observing the Sabbath day, or the liberating request from a loving God: “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10).

Some say doing God’s will brings peace to your soul. Indeed, we never know peace until we get in sync with God’s will. But doing God’s will isn’t the end to all your problems, the absence of conflict, smooth sailing or an easy chair. In fact, if we do God’s will we introduce a whole new set of problems, challenges, and difficulties into our lives! Serving God is hard – which is precisely why it is meaningful.

Beyond any question, God’s will isn’t measured by good feelings and sunny results. Doing God’s will may bring suffering in its wake. No: doing God’s will absolutely will bring suffering. Jesus did God’s will, and suffered, as did all his disciples, and countless Christians through history. Mother Teresa spoke of “love in action”:

You must give what will cost you something… giving not just what you can live without but what you can’t live without or don’t want to live without, something you really like. Then your gift becomes a sacrifice, which will have value before God.⁵

Perhaps we don’t grasp the will of God because we cling so tightly to what we think is ours; we want to give what is convenient instead of what is costly, and so unwittingly we insulate ourselves from the Will of God. Only when we feel that ache of yielding something precious do we embrace God’s will for us. In a world that vaunts itself arrogantly against the grain of God’s goodness, why would it even be conceivable to do God’s will and not clash with the world and wind up taking a drubbing or two?

What about when I look back with regret? I tried to do God’s will but I failed miserably. The inability to do God’s will isn’t evil. God’s will forever exceeds our reach, so we keep striving, we never get puffed up with pride, and we glorify God who can be glorified even in our infirmities: God’s grace “is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

God’s Plan For My Life

If we think about God’s will as a “script,” we have to be careful to resist our understandable tendency to strain to see too far down the road, to thumb ahead to the end of the book to see how things turn out. With great eloquence, Leslie Weatherhead explained our problem:

Sometimes I have made a mistake myself by trying to discern the will of God for years ahead. I have come to the conclusion that God does not encourage us to see too far ahead. One simply must accept the fact that one has no idea where the road one is treading is going to lead. Suffice it to say that when one gets to the crossroads one will know which way to turn, and although we like to think that it is terribly important not to make a mistake – and I repeat one can never be certain that one has not made a mistake… Our mistakes, if made in good faith, will not result in our being lost.⁶

After all, God’s will is a relationship. If I spend a day in the Appalachian mountains with my wife, I am not sure whether she will want to hike a trail on the Blue Ridge Parkway or stop off at the Folk Art Center. But I never get lost. I just stick near her. What is the script? The thrill is in not being so certain. We go here now, and I trust her with wherever we wind up next.

So it is with God. What is faith? Knowing and agreeing to everything in advance? Maggie Ross spoke of faith as “a willingness for whatever.” A precious treasure of mine is a handwritten note someone secured for me from Mother Teresa. What did she write? “Let God use you without consulting you.” Jesus walked up to some fishermen and out of the blue said, “Put down your nets and follow me” (Matthew 4). Where? They did not know yet. But they went wherever Jesus went; their path was defined not by destination but by proximity to Jesus who kept moving around.

Where will God lead you and me? We do now know yet. Faith is risky: we leave the cocoon of our prearranged lives and go – where? We do not know yet. Wherever God leads, that is where we will go. But we know whom we are following, and we want to be near him, and that is enough, for he is the fullness of life, he is the way, the truth and the life.

What is God’s plan for my life? is a question we cannot help asking. But the Bible simply doesn’t talk about such a thing as “God’s plan for my life.” In Jesus’ day, people ground out a living in backbreaking toil, falling asleep exhausted at the end of the day, only to get up the next morning and work all day, hoping it would rain so something would grow and the family could have a few bites to eat. People then didn’t think through a romantic plot for all of life. Today was what mattered. And it was on one of those todays that Jesus said “Put down your nets and follow me.” Where? He did not tell them. If he had, they probably wouldn’t have followed! But they went, one step at a time, one day at a time.

Think of the ancient Psalmist who wrote that God’s word is a “lamp to my feet” (Psalm 119:105). How far ahead can you see with a lantern – and a Bronze age lantern at that, not one of those brilliant outdoor beacons people use today? Not far. But far enough. You see well enough to take the next step, and the next step. The end of the road is all darkness. But it will be lit when you get near enough.

So along the way, you have to do some trusting. Each step is a step of faith. What, after all, is this “lamp to my feet”? God’s word. How much light is there in a word? Can you see a word? Words are not solid, they shed no real light – but they are what we need on the journey. The Psalmist, I think, imagines God speaking gently to us, over and over, “Here, this way, ooh, watch out, good job, over here, step up, keep coming, stop for a minute, rest awhile, get moving now, hurry through here…” The invisible word becomes the sure light.

How do we hear this word? God speaks, and God speaks primarily through the Bible, and we familiarize ourselves with the cadence and accent of God’s voice by hearing it over and over, reading, studying, reflecting with others. Then, on that dark night, and even in the broad light of day, we have God guiding us as we move forward, telling us only what we need to know right now, for the very next step. God’s will is a mystery, a mystery made known, but a mystery.

If we know God’s will, it is not ultimately because our technique, our Bible reading, our praying wrestled the nugget of guidance from God’s hand. God’s will is a gift. We receive it with open hands, stunned to be given something so precious, knowing we could never in a million years have figured this out for ourselves.

The Quakers (not surprisingly, since their worship is about listening in silence instead of directing a lot of racket towards God) have understood the discernment of God’s will in ways that are helpful.⁷ We take time, we listen, we wait, we test, we listen some more, we converse, we wait some more, knowing that ultimately discernment is the gift of God’s Spirit. What the Quakers are especially vigilant about is the intrusion of “self” into the effort to hear God, the nagging persistence of sin even in veterans of seeking the will of God. While the next section of this chapter will feel less sunny than where we’ve been so far, it is as important. For until we confess our inability to know God’s will, and in fact until we expose our ferocious resistance to God’s will, we have no chance to hear, much less do, what God wants for us.