How Do I Know God’s Will?

AND HOLDING ON TO IT ALL WITH A LOOSE HAND

How do I know God’s will? By holding it all with a loose hand and having an understanding of what scripture says about God’s will we can thrive in our everyday and walk freely in His grace.

“Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” 

James 4:13-15

Have you ever scooped up a handful of sand and watched it slip out of your fingers slowly back to the ground? Did you, maybe, tighten your grip and watch it escape more rapidly?

How about in life? Have you ever felt like the harder you try to hold on to your plans and ideas about how things should go or what life should be like, the faster it seems to slip out of control?

Take a few minutes and read James 4. Its a short chapter.

This whole chapter in James is about worldliness; that friendship with the world is enmity (OPPOSITION/HOSTILITY) with God. From it you can ask yourself where your hope (and your allegiance) truly lies: with the world, or with God? Do your actions, your perspectives and worldviews, your words reflect that?

WHERE IS YOUR HOPE?

James reminds his readers, and us, that life is a whisper of time compared to eternity. We are living as exiles in a foreign land. So, should we worry ourselves endlessly about temporal things that are a gift of God’s grace each morning? No, we should greet each day bolstered by our eternal hope, walking in the Spirit, abiding in Christ, and living the will of God.

HOW DO I KNOW GOD’S WILL?

We often find ourselves questioning what God’s will is for our life. Should I do this or should I serve here? It can almost be crippling, because then our thinking is, “What if I misunderstand God and choose the wrong thing?” In these situations, I encourage you to shift your thinking more toward which one most glorifies God, or where/how you can best glorify God. Instead of frozen in fear and unable to act, you are free to discern how you can glorify God in your action.

Scripture clearly speaks of the will of God which is…

• to be saved (1 Timothy 2:1-4 & 2 Peter 3:9)
• to be filled with the Spirit (Ephesians 5:17-18)
• to be sanctified (1 Thessalonians 4:3-8)
• to be submissive (1 Peter 2:13-15)
• to be a sufferer (1 Peter 3:17 & Philippians 1:29)
• to be obedient (Romans 12:1-2, Ephesians 6:5-6, Colossians 1:9-10, & Hebrews 13:20-21).

There is freedom when you know God’s will as laid out in scripture! And the best part is that the Holy Spirit enables us to walk in this perfect will. From salvation to obedience, through the work of Christ alone.

OUR BEST LAID PLANS vs GOD’S PLANS

Do you have big life goals? Or caught up in the planning and dreaming of your future? Swept away by a hope for what it will be like, feel like, look like?

Did those plans turn out exactly as you had envisioned and worked for? Did they change directions and have a little different outcome? Or maybe they got completely derailed, and you get to pick up the pieces.

Part of being a believer is learning to live in the tension. And by that, I mean, the space between. The space between striving and grace, between now and eternal, the space between confidence and humility; and so on. This side of heaven, the already and not yet, we get to live and serve in that tension.

THE TENSION BETWEEN YOUR DREAMS AND GOD’S WILL

There is nothing wrong about making plans or having dreams for the future. Where we run into trouble is when we leave God out of the planning and dreaming process and find ourselves totally off course or in a pickle. You become so focused on the dream that you lose sight of the present. You’re so driven that it consumes you and distracts you.

But James says our life is a mist that appears and then vanishes. So then, what is the point of all this striving? Is it in vain? Ecclesiastes 1:14 says, “I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.”

THIS IS WHERE THAT TENSION COMES IN…

“All the ways of a man are pure in his own eyes, but the LORD weighs the spirit. Commit your work to the LORD, and your plans will be established.”

Proverbs 16:2-3

Certainly, we should dream and plan for a future, one that points to and glorifies God. This Proverb encourages that. Our dreams are right in our own eyes. We can only see the now and what is in front of us. So, we lay our plans before God, and work and grow through the process of chasing that dream. But we also know and trust in the sovereignty of God, who knows all things and sees all things, that he writes the better story.

So then, if He decides to change our plans and send us on a different path, we obey willingly. Now that you know the will of God, you can trust that He knows above all what is for our highest and most good, and live for his glory!

We journey through each new endeavor and season of life, saying, “If the Lord wills, I will live this dream out and do this thing. But if not, He is still good.”

How does this apply to your life right now? We would love to pray for you. Let us know how in the comments!