This was an email sent to follow up on the sermon ‘Prayer – Thy Will Be Done’ from January 1st, 2012. You can listen to that sermon here.
To Those Doing the Will of God,
Elizabeth was married with six children when it happened. She awoke one night in a cold sweat having seen the most vivid dream she had ever witnessed. An angel of the Lord was standing over Africa calling her name. Before she got married Liz spent time in Uganda and never lost a heart for the African people. She knew what she had to do. It was gut wrenching and hard to do, but she knew it was God’s will for her to leave her husband and her children and go to Africa, God was calling her to the mission field.
What would you tell this fictional friend if she were real? How would you as a responsible citizen of the new kingdom keep this family intact?
More bizarre things than this have happened all by people claiming that it was God’s will or God told them. Everything from God telling a Virginia man to kill his son to protect him from the antichrist (Feb. 12, 2009 also more recently in June 2011), a crazed 55 year old killing seven gay and lesbian people in 2000, to God text messaging an adulteress instructions to kill her boyfriend’s wife (July 4, 2004), to a women hearing God tell her to divorce her husband (Yahoo Answers), as well as a whole list of bizarre and grotesque things done because “God told me to” recorded in a popular book, God Made Me Do It.
Even today, the court ruled in just five minutes of deliberation against a man who killed his mother and attacked the mother of his child stating quite clearly, “I ain’t mad, I’m not crazy, I don’t hear voices, I serve a God much greater than myself. These are the things God expects from me. He expected me to judge her.” (Jan. 4, 2012). Also today Pat Robertson reveled that God told him who the next President would be…but he won’t share (Jan. 4, 2012).
So, is God’s will an important topic for you to understand? I think so!!
God never, ever, ever, tells us to do something that goes against his revealed, moral, prescriptive will, EVER! This is why 1 John 4:1 warns (nice article on this here),
“Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether
they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.”
We can tell our fictional friend Elizabeth above that it is most decisively NOT God’s will for her to leave her family and go to Africa to do “His work.” God may allow her to make a horrible decision and may not correct her, in fact, he may even bless the fruit of her work while she is there, but that is not because God condones it, rather, it is because he blesses IN SPITE of our sin and poor judgment (Romans 8:28 does not say everything that happens is good, but that God brings good out of it!).
God’s Sovereign Will is his secret, hidden, will of decree, decretive will. We do not search for it because we cannot find it. We know it because (1) His Word reveals it to us via prophesy, (2) in retrospect; you will know what God’s sovereign will for today is tomorrow.
That is because…
God’s Sovereign Will is divided into two angles, active and passive. God may passively permit or allow things to happen (like the weather) or God may actively decree something to come to pass (like the flood).
The incident of Pharaoh and God is a key example here and knowing the wills of God clears up a deep theological mystery.
In short, some places in Exodus record that Pharaoh hardened his own heart (Ex. 7:13, 23, 8:15, 32) and other places Moses explicitly records that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart (9:7, 10:20). Exodus 9:34-10:2 put them both together in the same context.
The problem: If God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, then God would be actively working sin and rebellion in his heart against himself. That means God would be sinning which we know he cannot do (James 1:13; Habakkuk 1:13).
BUT…
If God allows or permits Pharaoh to sin against him and does not stop him, change his heart, or strike him dead, then God can use Pharaoh’s free decision to follow his own desires (i.e. sin) for his own glory. So God can passively, permit, allow Pharaoh to act freely according to his own desires, without himself being tainted, or accountable for Pharaoh’s voluntary decision. At the same time, the inspired writers of Scripture recognize that if God is allowing something that he could stop, then in the large, big picture sense, it is part of his overall infinitely wise plan. PROBLEM SOLVED!
If you don’t like the reasoning…take it up with the Apostle Paul in Romans 9:1-24 
Of course, just because God permits something does not mean he condones it or he will overlook it. God permits sin but will one day punish all wrong doers. God permits Satan and the fallen angels to exist, but will one day reckon them with his justice.
Yet, God may use sin or Satan to accomplish his will. Satan was used in the divine plan for Job’s life. Sin was used in the divine plan for the Savior’s life (e.g. Judas’ betrayal, Jesus’ innocent death).
Summary and last Will: So we have God’s sovereign will divided into his active and passive, or will of decree and permissive will. And then we have God’s revealed, moral, declarative, perceptive will; his holy Bible. This is the one that is most clear, the one Paul prays we understand in Romans 12:1-2, and the one we are to seek to embody all the days of our life on earth as we become transformed and conformed into the image of the Son of God. It is the ten commandments, the “law of Christ” as the New Testament says, all of the commands and precepts laid out for us.
Lastly…God’s Personal Will for your life
Someone might wonder, “Should I sell my house and move to Florida?” or “Should I take that job offer in another town?” What is God’s personal will for me? Personal will is best discovered through the use of both the permissive will of God and the prescriptive will of God. As long as you are not doing anything immoral (which means you are within the prescriptive will of God) then God permits you to make your own decision. You can live in Florida or Japan or Timbuktu, a real town in West Africa. But God has prescribed principles for you to make a wise decision in his holy word and he wants you to follow them. For example, pray for wisdom, seek wise counsel, listen to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, pay attention to the providence of God in the circumstances of your life, test the prophetic word someone might speak to you. Most of all, God prescribes that you “Commit your works to the LORD And your plans will be established” (Prov. 16:3), and “Commit your way to the LORD, Trust also in Him, and He will do it” (Ps. 37:5), and “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight” (Prov. 3:5-6).
But Christians will labor and twist themselves into a knot aching over a decision because they are afraid of missing God’s personal will for their life. Listen, we are never told to seek God’s personal will for our lives, nor do we see anyone in Scripture cry out that they have missed God’s personal will. If the Holy Spirit does not want you to go somewhere, he will keep you from going there (Acts 16:6-10). If he wants you somewhere, he will direct you there like Philip (Acts 8:26) or Peter (Acts 10:1-23) or Paul (Acts 9). You only need worry about living God’s prescriptive will within his permissive will with wisdom and spiritual insight, and God will make sure you don’t miss anything along the way.
Resources for Further Growth
- The Will of God by R.C. Sproul (2 messages, 23min. 1 is free, great wisdom)
- Knowing God’s Will by R.C. Sproul (5 messages, 1 is free)
- What is the Will of God and How can we know It? Piper
- Some people do not like the idea of God’s two wills. Piper answers questions about this and gives a great defense of why God has two wills: Are There Two Wills in God? Divine Election and God’s Desire for All to Be Saved.
God bless,
Pastor Corey
