Not too long ago I published a post titled “What is the will of God for my life?”. Afterwards the Lord continued to work on my heart about the words I had written and the overall message. There were certain parts of it I just did not get right, and other parts that needed to be embellished. So to celebrate the one year anniversary of Alabastersky on WordPress, here it is again, reworked. I decided to change the title to “I Am Willing” because in essence, we have to reach the point in our walk with Him where we are willing to allow His will and purpose for our lives to be greater than our own, and to become one with our own. Caught up and lost in our desire to love and serve Him, we look back one day years later to realize we have lived His will for our lives, and would not have had it any other way.
“What is the will of God for my life”, you ask?
What are you really wanting to know when you ask that question? Where do I go, what do I do? What will my life look like? Who should I marry? What career path should I follow? Should I be in a full time ministry that is sanctioned by the church?
On one hand, I can almost sense the stress! On another hand, the “Name It, Claim It” mentality permeating many of today’s churches, along with social media and the likes, have systematically drilled into us that with the right formulas we can use God like a lottery and “pull the slot machine lever” hoping to hit the jackpot of personal comfort and reassurance of our future. It almost reminds me of Magic 8 balls that were around when I was a kid. You would ask a question and turn the Magic 8 ball upside-down to reveal the answer displayed in a little window, and somehow that was meant to magically solve all our decision making crises!
I will let you in on a secret. The “detail” part is your will for your life, and God has left those choices up to you. As Oswald Chambers may have put it, it becomes a transaction of will and not of emotion. I know, decisions are hard and we want someone to hold our hand! Trust me, I get it, and I can almost hear you saying “It isn’t enough, I need those details”!
I’m not saying that God doesn’t care about the details. Quite the opposite, He does! If the scripture tells us that He has numbered all the hairs on our heads (Matthew 10:30), whatever would make us think He did not care what we ate for breakfast (or any other seemingly small detail)?
So then does God hold our hand through this process? The answer is yes. Psalms 37:23-24, NLT says “The Lord directs the steps of the godly. He delights in every detail of their lives. Though they stumble, they will never fall, for the Lord holds them by the hand.”
But the decisions you make in life are still yours to make. He will not make them for you.
Proverbs 16:9 NASB says “The mind of man plans his way, But the Lord directs his steps.
So the idea is for us to plan our own path and future, allowing Him to direct our steps in the process. I know, that sounds too simple!
Am I saying that you will never make the wrong decision or that it is impossible to miss His will? No, I am not. There are enough examples in scripture of those who made or could have made deliberate choices against such. What I am saying is that when we are focused on Him, we don’t have to be afraid of making wrong choices. Although we are given a free will and free choice, He LOVES us! He loves us so much that He delights in every detail of our lives, and knows the path that we will choose long before we ever walk it. He wants us to call on Him, confide in Him, seek Him, and ask Him through intimate relationship and conversation so that He can guide us down that path. Just as Christ did what He saw His Father doing, and spoke what He heard His Father speak, so we too can have that closeness, to understand and discern the path before us.
Consider a few things…
“For David, after he had served the purpose of God in his own generation…”
This scripture is taken from Acts chapter 13, verse 36. In context it is speaking of prophetic references in the Psalms about Jesus Christ being raised from the dead. But here we find a message hidden within a message. When we look at this small portion, it offers a clue about God’s will for our lives, which is to serve God in our own generation. What does that look like for you?
Although we may have been taught to think that to serve God means we must quit our jobs and go into ministry full time, whether in the mission field or in the pulpit or in some other church sanctioned capacity, sometimes that is not always the case. It is but just one facet. The main thrust that we are forgetting is that we are the salt of the earth and the light of the world (Matthew 5:13 & 14). Serving Him is not relegated to church sanctioned careers and activities; it means that we must be out in the world as well. It can be summed up in one phrase, the two most important commandments – to love God, and to love others.
Psalms 37:3 says “Trust in the Lord, and do good; dwell in the land and cultivate faithfulness.”
Putting those two together, what does it mean to dwell in the land and cultivate faithfulness in your own generation? It means to take the opportunity within your own sphere of influence to lift Jesus high, and bring honor & glory to your Father in Heaven wherever you are, in whatever you are doing, here in the moment!
For the one who chooses to live his/her days with their focus on Christ, through obedience and deliberate choices to cultivate and cherish that closeness and relationship He desires, you will not miss God’s will for your life! His ability to work simultaneously within multiple dimensions and weave your Christ-centered, Christ-impacted choices into both His overall plan as well as His perfect plan, is unhindered.
Philippians 2:13 NASB says “For it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.”
Romans 8:28 says “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.”
Just as Paul describes in Philippians 3:13-14 – “Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus”, our job is the same, to keep our eyes focused on Christ, who is that prize! You will look back on your life one day and realize you have accomplished exactly what you were supposed to accomplish within His will, no matter if you did it through missions, from a pulpit, from the sweat of your brow in a field or factory, from your home or from an office chair in the corporate world; no matter if it was in a comfortable bed or an uncomfortable one, with or without, in perfect health or not. And the Lord will say “Well done, thou good and faithful servant” (Matthew 25:21).
Alabastersky 