The Will to Find the Will of God

I think that many evangelicals have been really, really poorly taught on the subject of God’s will. Things were good theologically in the Reformation era, but then the enlightenment hit, and man and his feelings and thoughts took center stage, and existentialism and pietism came to the fore as a reaction against the more rational brand of Christianity of the reformers. That followed with German liberalism, which just generally muddied the waters of theology altogether, and topped off with the Spirit-focused Christianity of the twentieth century. We’re left today with pieces from all these popped balloons and a fragmented understanding of how God works in our lives. Because of liberalism, we’ve pushed away from the Bible’s declarative role in our lives. Because of existentialism, we focus more on feeling than fact. Because of subjectivism, often confused with the leading of the Holy Spirit, we trust our impressions and think our thoughts and intuitions to be directly connected with the will of God. All of this leaves many in evangelicalism in a morass of confusion.

But there is hope. The question of “what does God want for me?” need not distress us and leave us paralyzed in fear of doing the wrong thing. I can state this with confidence because I believe in the Bible and know it to be the prescriptive revelation of God and His will to His people. This does not mean that the Bible has a ready-made answer for every single decision we face. There are no passages we may find that explicitly instruct as to whether we should go shopping or do laundry. There are, however, several scriptural principles that we may highlight that will give us significant help in figuring out what God would have us to do. Consumed is now starting a brief series on a number of these principles in the hopes that this material will help people to understand God’s will.