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What is God’s will for me? It is a question which resonates deep within our soul. It is the central question of faith both for those who have spent a life time within the body of Christ and for those who are for the first time brave enough to enter a church to hear who God is. It is a question on the largest scale: where is God calling the church, how is God leading us to transform the world, how should the church understand this issue or that issue or should we have an opinion about an issue at all. It is also a question near to each and every human heart; should I take this job or that job, should I change my major, is he the one for me, should we have children? As deep and powerful and life-changing this question is, “What is God’s will for me” is not where we need to begin.
Let’s take the question back two words from “What is God’s will for me,” to “What is God’s will.” Psalm 19 reads, “The heavens are telling the glory of God and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.” God’s will is the story of God. How is it that God goes about ordering the world according to a divine will and desire? Maybe you’ve heard the phrase, “God is in control,” but of what is God in control? If God is in control, how does God control?
Is God in control? Well, yes and no. God is in control of the big picture. Four Sundays from now we will hear how God concludes the story, how God has taken it upon himself not to destroy evil, but to transform it, to overwhelm evil with the power of love. So, yes, God has written the story and has shown us the ending, but God does not control us, the reader. God does not force us to read it or to follow it. God is love, and as our scripture says today, “Love does not insist on its own way.” We are not marionettes tethered to a divine control bar. When God created the heavens and the earth, God chose not to be a dictator, overwhelming us with his power and might. I’ve said this before, but when God created Adam our scripture says that God took him and placed him in the garden. He did not take him by force like a doll in a garden-themed doll house. God wooed him and called him like a shepherd calls for sheep, “They will hear my voice and know me,” Jesus says.
It’s like this. If I put a cookie jar in front of my daughter I know what she is going to do. She’s going to take a cookie. It’s not that I forced her to take it or not to take it, it’s that I know her better than she knows herself. Yes, God knows our future, but it’s not because it is dictated. It is because God knows us better than we know ourselves.
But the question, “What is God’s will,” is not to be our starting point either. Let’s take yet another word away. Instead of asking “What is God’s will,” let us ask, “What is God,” or rather, “Who is God?” In order to know God’s will we first have to know God, and this begins with faith. Faith is a gift from God to which we respond. Faith does not begin with the self. If we try to discern the will of God by first looking into the mirror we are missing half of the equation, even though looking into the mirror with an honest expectation of transformation is an act of courage few are willing to take. Faith is a gift. God moves toward us before we move toward God, and it’s not that God moves toward us because God has to in order that we might know the divine. I think we can know the goodness of God even if God were silent. We are all made in the image of God, so we have been designed to see the dim flicker of God’s goodness even if we have not been shaped and formed by the church. Jesus tells a parable in Luke 15 saying, “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of the them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it.” It’s not that the shepherd has to find the sheep. The sheep may very well figure out how to rejoin the ninety-nine. The shepherd searches because he loves the sheep. The shepherd doesn’t have to search. The shepherd wants to search. God is love and love bears and believes all things . . . even us. God is filled with a desire to be with us even if we fail to recognize who God is. It is what we United Methodists call “Prevenient Grace;” God’s desire to reach toward us even before we notice that the other ninety-nine are nowhere to be found. It is the beauty of infant baptism, a family bringing a child before God and the church. The child is completely dependent on the parents or guardians for food, clothing, learning . . . as we are to be dependent on God for our nourishment and joy.
Who is God? God is love. God is filled with a desire to be with us. The desire is so powerful within the heart of God that God took on flesh and bore our failures and sin and crucified them so that we might respond and give thanks and transform the world according to God’s goodness. Dr. James Howell writes:
Before God made the first star, God made up God’s mind to make the world and to make us in the world, and God decided we would be mortal—knowing that hearts would be broken . . . So when God decided to make us mortal, God at the same moment decided that mortality is so bad, death is so painful, that I will let my own heart be shattered; I will send my Son. The world will unleash its fury on him—or really on us. He will suffer a terrible, unjust, untimely death, when he is too young. And when that happens people will know that I understand their pain and anguish from the inside. But I won’t leave my Son dead in that grave. I will raise him up so that the people that I will have made and that will lose so much will trust me, and always have hope. God decided that before God decided anything else.
Or as the second letter to Timothy says, “God saved us and called us with a holy calling . . . according to his own purpose and grace. This grace was given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages began.” God is love, and thus, God’s will is always to love. Paul writes in Ephesians, “God has made known to us the mystery of his will.” If we want to know what God wills we should look to what God has already willed.
So what is God’s will for me? The best way to discern God’s will is to deepen our friendship with God through God’s word and God’s action within the world. To know God’s will is to know what God has willed. Scripture is a script of sorts, revealing to us God’s story. The tricky thing is that there is so much to life that is unscripted. One of my favorite phrases is, “The Bible doesn’t tell you what to do at 2:30 on a Tuesday afternoon.” It’s not written that way. Yes there are specifics: be holy, lift up the poor, reconcile with enemies, avoid gossip, keep promises, attend worship, clothe the naked . . . But instead of giving us a daily schedule, God provided a foundation, so that when the unscripted accidents and failures and suffering happens, we have been shaped and formed in order to respond. As Dr. Howell wrote, “We can live out what is unscripted because we know what has been scripted.” What is God’s will for you and me? Let us begin discerning by doing what God wills: listen to scripture, sing hymns, pray, give money, serve the poor, and when we do this, we find that our question has already been answered. In other words, this is the very reason God became flesh in Jesus Christ. God was born in the flesh to show us what God’s will for us is. When we want to see how God wants us to live, we are to look to Christ. That what Paul means when he writes, “It is not I who live, but Christ Jesus who lives within me.”
It’s not that God has a detailed itinerary for all of us, but God has blessed each one of us with purpose. Does God want me to take this job or that job? The better question is which situation helps me honor God through the gifts with which God has blessed me? We are called to honor God whether we are organizing a meeting of world leaders or we are setting out the chairs so that the meeting can happen. Is God calling me to marry this one or that one? The better question is will my union with this person reveal to others what God’s love is all about? Is God calling me to move closer to home? Is it a move which reveals the beauty of God? God is calling out to us and if we wait and listen, we can hear it. God has blessed us with vocation, a calling. You see, your job is what you do. Your occupation is what occupies most of your time. Your vocation is who you are called to be according to the gifts you have been given. Thankfully, it’s not only up to me or you, but me and you. God has called us, the body of Christ together to lift each other up, to listen to the heart of God together, celebrating the good and lamenting the bad, challenging one another and holding each other when we stumble. As Paul says in the first letter to the Thessalonians: “We urge you, beloved, to admonish the idlers, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with all of them. See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all. Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”
One final thought. How do we know we are doing God’s will? How do I know I’m not making a huge mistake? Sometimes we talk about how God opens doors. That would suggest that God’s will is always easy. Quite often following the Spirit complicates things, produces resistance from the world calling us to carry a cross. Loving the outcast, serving the undesirable, calling people to become selfless is not a lesson the world wants proclaimed. Sometimes the path is not an open door. It is a closed door. Sometimes we are called to break the door down if we have to. Never be afraid to fail, for as Paul says in 2 Corinthians, “God’s grace is made perfect in weakness.”
God is love. God’s will is always to love. God’s will for me and for you is to love God and love each other. Knowing God’s will doesn’t mean that we are biblical scholars or more holy than others or that our prayers are eloquent. God’s will is made manifest in Christ. When we look to Jesus we see, in the flesh, how God wants us to live. You see, Christ was God’s gift to humanity. God’s will is a gift. To know God’s will is to have open hands to receive it, being filled with awe that you have been given the same precious gift that hung the stars and raised the mountains. It is a gift which will raise you as well. Prasie be to God. Amen!