At the end of the day, we will have to decide what the will of God is! We get very readily confused here about false ideas of the nature of God's guidance. We look for supernatural revelations, when God means us to live by his word. We want to abandon our normal thought processes, when God wants us to bear the burden of thinking through his purposes for our lives. We want to know immediately and intuitively what we are to do, when he wants to prepare us for the task by the slow, and sometimes painful process of waiting.
Time and time again people who have read the 'standard' books and booklets on guidance complain that they did not really find them helpful. What they often mean is that they did not discover their personal calling by reading a booklet on guidance! As if God would deposit his personal, eternally purposed will for the life of every Christian in a booklet! No, his will cannot be known apart from the process of discovering it as time unfolds.
The biographies of God's people in Scripture should make this principle clear to us. Take Abraham. Did he not go out not knowing where he was going, not really sure of what God had planned? (See Hebrews 11:8.) But he acted on the clear revelation of the will of God. Or, take Joseph. God had given him some intimation of his destiny in the dream he foolishly and insensitively blurted out to his family (Genesis 37:2-11). He could never have imagined the manner in which that dream would reach its fulfillment! He could never have worked that out himself! It was a long, slow, sometimes painful unwinding of the cords of grace which eventually led him to the final purposes of God.
The reason for this, of course, is that God is not only concerned that we know his will. His relationship with us is not merely intellectual. That is the great mistake many young people with the benefit of a college or university education are likely to make. In later life we will look back on it with a sense of what buffoons we were to think that God was simply a great Mind with whom we had come in contact. God is, instead, concerned with our personal, spiritual, emotional development. That is why he so often takes his time with us, in order to fit us for the work he has planned.
God is not in a hurry. That is what you must learn. That is what you can learn from the exhortations in the Psalms to wait for the Lord. He has long ago prepared the good works in which he wants you to walk (Ephesians 2:10). There is no need to panic or to be anxious. He is not only your Life Planner. He is a Father; he knows what we need before we ask him; he has numbered the hairs on our heads! We, who lack the patience for such an enterprise, should learn to trust the all-knowing wisdom of God...
All impatience can be traced back to a disbelief in God's ultimate goodness. That is why, if we are to appreciate the wisdom of God's guidance, it is important for us to understand not only the nature of his guidance, but the character of the Guide himself. Trust him for his goodness, and we will trust him for his guidance!
Do you doubt the goodness of God? Is there, lurking within your whole approach to him, a suspicion that he is other than he revealed himself to be in the Lord Jesus Christ? Hold to Paul's words:
"He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all - how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?" - Romans 8:32 (NIV)
- Sinclair B. Ferguson, Discovering God's Will
Links: Wait! Wait on! He is worth waiting for! (27 Dec 09), Wait for the LORD (19 Jun 10)
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