The Roadmap

If I had about 18 dollars for every time someone said to me, "I just wish I knew what God's will for me was," I would have at least 576 dollars in my pocket, right now. And if I had 18 dollars for every time I said to someone else, "I just wish I knew what God's will for me was," I would be a millionaire. Simply because that's all I would say to people all the time so as to add to my accruing wealth. You understand.

We have this thing about knowing God's will. That thing, of course, is a desire (kind of) to know it. Part of us wants to know it desperately, so that we can have some kind of validation on our lives and a sense that we're doing what God wants us to do. Another part of us kind of doesn't want to know about it, because we have this sneaking suspicion that it will entail selling our belongings and moving to a country in which the indigenous population has never heard of Tina Fey and indoor-plumbing is something that the townspeople ridicule the local shaman for claiming to have seen in a dream sent by a god who is responsible for making it rain (and not like rappers do in inappropriate places like strip clubs, but like actually rain). But despite that nagging hesitation, the majority of us would say that we would risk such a scenario if it meant getting a clear indication from God concerning what we should do with our lives.

If you are like me, that means you often second guess your decisions, wondering if they had met the approval of the Almighty, and wondering why he wasn't vocal about his opinion one way or the other--or worse, wondering if possibly you weren't listening when he was vocal about his opinion. And so you cry yourself to sleep at night listening to "Title and Registration" by Death Cab for Cutie on repeat, and then wake up in the morning wondering if God was really angry that you just spent your night doing said crying. It is a vicious cycle, as they say.

It doesn't make anything easier that most of the speakers I have heard on this topic have suggested that reading the Bible would give you all the answers you are looking for in this regard. I remember in college listening to speaker after speaker at our campus ministry group tell us that if we would just have our daily "quiet time" with God he would clearly tell us what to do (which, interestingly enough, according to these speakers usually meant working for this campus ministry organization immediately upon our graduation). Which sounds like magic, by the way. As if, somehow, simply by forcing yourself to read the genealogical account of 1 Chronicles 1-9 you would miraculously discover whether or not you should major in accounting, or if you should date Betsy, or if you shouldn't be watching Family Guy anymore because they make fun of Jesus too much. And when I think of magic, I think of crazy talk. Because that's what it is.

Well, all of that to say that I think the majority of us have been seriously misguided in our understanding of God's will. I think that God has made his will very clear to us, and that it is in fact presented in the Bible--but not in the way I've always been told to expect it to be. The view of God's will that I laid out above suggests that God has your life planned out like you would plan a game of chess against an opponent, thinking x number of moves ahead, and, if everything goes according to plan, humiliating said opponent in a swift and expedient manner. But what if that wasn't the way God's will worked? It's not that I think God doesn't know the future--if the Bible is true, then he clearly does. But it's just that I don't think that he moves us all around the board like pawns in his own cosmic game of chess with Satan (who is astoundingly good at chess, I'm guessing).

To be brief, I think that God's will for us is more general. To paraphrase one of the prophets (Micah 6:8): "God has already made clear to you what he wants: act justly, show everyone loving-kindness, and live obediently to God." I think that God's will simply doesn't get any clearer than that. Jesus told his followers to treat everyone in the way they themselves would like to be treated (Matthew 7:12). The OT Law was God's will for his people, Israel, as they were about to enter the land of Canaan. The so-called Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) is a summary of that law, applied practically to the daily lives of Jesus' audience. The Bible makes it very clear what God values, and what he expects from his people, and--as the apostle Paul exhorts us in Ephesians 5:1--we are to be "imitators of God."

If we take the Bible seriously enough to respect the original intentions of its authors, and we take the time to read and understand what it tells us about God, we will in fact discover God's will. We will find, for example, that God cares deeply for the poor, the vulnerable, and the oppressed. That God is humble, and wants his people to be humble. That God doesn't ever wish harm to even his enemies, but would rather see every single person repent and find life, rather than death. If I had spent about half of the time I spent worrying in college about what God wanted me to do when I graduated or whether or not I should take summer classes--if I had spent just half of that time focused on learning about God and doing my best to imitate him in my daily, basic interactions with everyone around me, I think both the world and I would have been far better off.

Planning isn't bad, and neither is consulting God concerning major life decisions. These are clearly good things (the Bible is consistently positive about both of them). But when we start to expect that God wants to tell us where to place every next step we make, we are really starting to live like God is some kind of divine puppet-master who hasn't given his people any choice in the matter (and I hope we all know that isn't true). And one last thing: if you made a choice that you thought God wanted you to make, and then things turned out badly for you--it doesn't necessarily mean that you were "outside of God's will" (whatever that exactly means...). Sometimes, apparently, God allows bad things to happen to his most faithful followers (cf. Joseph, Job, and Jesus--just to name a few Bible characters whose names begin with J). Of course, on the other hand, sometimes we just do stupid stuff and then try to justify it by suggesting we thought God told us to do it...

God's will does exist, and he does communicate it clearly to his people, but it isn't so much a step-by-step script as much as it is an expertly designed framework.