Gods Secret Plan

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No secret plan: Why you don’t have to ‘find’ God’s will for your life

Cancel at any time. But this directive doesn't tell us exactly what to do in every situation. That's how the notion of "finding God's will for your life" gets its foothold. We have specific decisions to make about things like career or marriage, and the law of God doesn't tell us to choose this job over that one or this potential spouse over that one.

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So how do we know what to do? Once again, the "how do you know? If you're looking for a formula or method for making decisions, then you're looking for the wrong thing. There is no recipe. There is only wisdom, the heart's intelligent skill at discerning good decisions from bad ones. This skill is not a method—not a formula you can apply to particular situations simply by following the rules, but a habit of the heart you have to develop through long experience of your own, which includes making mistakes from time to time.

The concept of wisdom is what every method for finding God's will leaves out of the decision-making process. It's left out precisely because the project of finding God's will is an attempt to guarantee that you won't make a mistake. All such guarantees are falsehoods, attempts to short-circuit the hard work of acquiring wisdom.

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Think of the work of a steward, beginning the day after his master leaves town. He has been given a commandment to do business see Luke What he hasn't been given are instructions about which investments to make. Those decisions are up to him.

Conceivably he could learn to make good investments by following a formula or detailed instructions from his master. But learning to make good investments really means acquiring the kind of skill or virtue that the Bible calls wisdom, which is centered on the ability to discern between what is good and what is bad. In this case, it's the ability to discern between good and bad investments. To develop this ability, there's no substitute for practice—making many decisions and learning from experience which kinds of investments are profitable for his master's kingdom and which are not.

So there's a major reason why the new evangelical practice of finding God's will is not in the Bible.

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It would defeat the purpose of stewardship, which is to learn in our own hearts how to carry out God's work in the world. For this we need to acquire the virtues and wisdom needed to do God's work well, so that his work becomes ours and we become co-workers with God, as Paul says 1 Cor.

We can't learn this if we don't make our own decisions—which includes making our own mistakes and learning from them. That's why God disapproves of it; the steward who tries to avoid making his own decisions is the one he condemns as disobedient—the one who buries his talent. To make a good decision, you need to start with a good question—a question about what is good: Is this a good way to invest my talents? Is this a good person to marry?

Ephesians 3:3-13

Can we be good parents together? But in answering such questions there is no formula and no substitute for wisdom. Which is why when young people have to make a big decision—say, about marriage—it is utterly appropriate that they learn from the wisdom of those who have had to make such decisions before. They need help from outside themselves.

Above all, they need help from God, which is why they should pray. What they need to pray for is help in discerning between good and bad ways to invest their talents and their lives. But that's simply another way of saying they must pray for wisdom. Pertinent here is the famous prayer of Solomon, the son of David, when he becomes king after his father's death. As king, he is the steward of Israel's true King enthroned in heaven, the Lord God himself.

But he's just a young man—"only a little child," he says—and he's worried that he's not up to the job 2 Kings 3: But when the Lord appears to him in a dream, Solomon does not ask God to tell him what to do. He does not ask about God's will for his life. He already knows that: God has made him king, so God's will is for him to be a good king and govern well. He doesn't need God to tell him that. What he needs is wisdom. Solomon's description of what he's asking for shows us what we should be asking for too whenever we face difficult responsibilities: Wisdom means discerning between good and bad, like a king discerning between good and bad decisions in governing his people, or like a steward discerning between a good and a bad investment of his talents.

What Solomon realizes, and the new evangelical theology does not, is that the crucial terms to use when making decisions are "good" and "bad" see also Heb. This includes moral good and evil, for which our guide is God's revealed will and his commandments. But it includes many other things as well, for there are many ways of making bad decisions that are not immoral, as, for example, in making a bad investment. It is not a sin to make a bad investment—unless, of course, you're motivated by greed or some other immoral purpose. But if you're a steward who's still learning how to make good investments, you're bound to make a few mistakes, and that's not a morally evil thing to do.

So everything points toward the Lord's wanting us to make our own decisions and even our own mistakes, rather than ask him what to do. It was Peter, the weak ditherer, the one who was always getting things wrong, and who finally denied Jesus, who was chosen to be the rock on which the Church was founded.

He saw the essence of that plan moments after he had been thrown off his horse on the road to Damascus. The very people whom he had been despising and persecuting as heretics were within Jesus in his risen life, within his mystical body.

No secret plan: Why you don’t have to ‘find’ God’s will for your life | The Christian Century

Jesus who had been put to death, had indeed risen from the dead. Then, filled with the Holy Spirit, he sent out that same Holy Spirit to draw all who would receive him into his human but glorified body. Through him they would return to the Father who had sent him, and who had created them in the first place. When human beings love, their love is both physical and spiritual, but as God has no physical body, his love is entirely spiritual.

As a mark of reverence therefore, his spiritual loving has traditionally been called the Holy Spirit. This is the loving that completely restored Jesus to the fullness of life.

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Furthermore, it was this loving that flowed out of him on the first Pentecost Day, and on every subsequent day.