The will of God – Part I

By Titto Thomas

PART I

At the very onset I can hear people saying “Right on Titto, this is a great topic! Tell me 10 steps to know the will of God”. Well, frankly that is just like asking “Give me 10 steps to drive a car”. Mind you I have no issues in giving you 10 steps to drive a car, but “I ain’t gonna give you my car to try it out (as I don’t think that the 10 step recipe is what my car was designed to run on)”. Many of us, even though we may not ask the above question, definitely feel this way about God’s will. I don’t plan to make this article a comprehensive one, but I do hope to touch on some major points.

CONTRADICTING FALLACIES

One of the major reasons why we have such trouble in the area of the will of God is because we cherish some wrong concepts. We must deal with these wrong beliefs first. The ramifications of such concepts are dangerous and implications preposterous. Consider this, did you ask what God’s will was before you drank your cup of tea (or whatever) this morning? Do you ask God if it is His will before you go to work or study? Along this line of thinking, we find that questions become even more humorous! For most of us our attitude in this matter is very much the same. The point I am trying to make is that if we meticulously walk in this flawed concept about God’s will, we cannot even take a breath without asking God…and waiting for an answer!

THE OBVIOUS

Let’s consider another scenario. Suppose you are walking along with your friend, and suddenly he slips and falls. What do you do? How many of you would at that point raise their hands to heaven and say “Father, show me Thy will regarding this matter!” I am sure none of us would. Our first reaction would be to give him a hand and help him up (I hope!). What I am trying to drive home through this example is that we shouldn’t fall into the vicious cycle of asking for His will all the time. As a young Christian, I myself have erred in this area, spending an inordinate amount of my prayer time just enquiring the will of God in matters big and small! Looking back, I see that I had been wasting precious time because the truth of the matter was that I had already settled in my mind what I would do in most of those situations. So, in fact, I was asking Him for the sake of asking! More correctly, I ‘felt’ I had to ask God.

YOU HAVE A WILL

We must also not forget the fact that we too have a will and God does not violate it except in judgment. If He were planning to take our will away, God would not have given us our will in the first place. All that He has given us is precious and we must learn how to handle our will. Our will must be subject to Jesus and His Word, the important point being that our motives will far outweigh our actions in His sight. I like to have a cup of coffee in the morning, and the question that arises there is not “Is it wrong to drink coffee or not?” but why do I drink it. Many young Christians are pretty torn apart here too, because they fail to realize that it is for God’s glory that He has made man and all praise needs to go to Him for giving man that ability to enjoy that cup of coffee! We must not cow over the fact that we have a will and that we have our taste buds but rather we should praise Him for it because he has allowed us to have those sensory neurons. He made us a perfect being!

Once we have rejected the above mentioned fallacies from our system, I believe we are in a position to consider the will of God. To conclude, before I share with you what scriptures say about this matter (in my next post), we must not make the mistake of restricting God’s will to our plane of mind. In the Bible we have seen a lot of people, especially during Jesus’ ministry, coming up to Him and asking all sorts of ‘what I should do’s. Let me cite a particular example. Jesus tells us in Matthew to go two miles with a person who compels you for one. The reason he said that was because the Roman soldiers would ask the Jews to carry their baggage for a mile. Jesus is giving an answer that forces us to think out of the box. All throughout the New Testament we see that the will of God is not about just being in the right or wrong but to adhering to a far higher standard – a law of life, His life!

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