How Can I Know God’s Will For My Life?
God has purpose for our life. We can see in Ephesians 2:10
“For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”
Because we are Christians God has a purpose for us… a destiny for us to fulfill.
1st – God has said very basic things about His will for your life
Ø He wants you to be saved
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever would believe in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” John 3:16
Until we meet that purpose in our lives… nothing else matters. And if you don’t belong to Jesus Christ this morning you need to make that decision. (sooner rather than later)
Ø After we’re saved, God wants us to reflect Him, by being His Witness. In fact, He wants you live your lives as a model for the world to see.
1 Peter 2:15 tells us “For it is GOD’S WILL that BY DOING GOOD you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men”
We should live such decent lives that even those who hate Christ won’t have anything to accuse us of.
Now that’s just generic “Will of God” stuff that will be true for every Christian. But how to know HIS Perfect will in our life ? (There’s Will of God & Perfect Will of God)
God is very clear on how we can know His will for our lives. It means, God does not speak to us with secret codes or whatever about what His Will is in our life. He gave us His WORD (THE BIBLE !) Let’s read in Romans 12:2
“Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. THEN you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is— his good, pleasing and perfect will.”
You see, the key to learning God’s will for your life is to make yourself ready for the time when God wants you to do something.
How do you make yourself ready?
You make yourself ready by learning to think like God thinks by:
• Reading your Bible
• Going to church
• Attending Sunday School
• Going to Bible Studies
In other words, you soak God’s thinking into your mind.
ILLUS: That’s exactly how some of the great men and women of the Bible prepared themselves for God’s purpose. An excellent example of this is the story of David.
We usually think of David as just appearing out of nowhere to confront a giant on the field of battle. But in reality, David had been preparing for that confrontation long before that fateful day. As a boy, David had spent his days out in the fields watching his father’s sheep. But he had not been idly spending his time gazing on the flocks in the field and the clouds in the sky. No. He had been spending his time meditating on the law of God "day and night” (Psalm 1:2). In fact, David was so involved in this activity that he began to write songs that spoke of the glory of God that he found in Scripture… and David was honored to be brought into the court of King Saul to ease that King’s tortured mind with the Psalms he had written while he was out in the fields.
Thus, when David went out into the field of battle against Goliath, he had long been prepared by his constant exposure to God’s mindset… so much so that he became offended by Goliath’s taunts and went out on the field of battle to declare:
"You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the LORD Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied.” 1 Samuel 17:45
David had allowed God’s thinking to TRANFORM his own.
But there is a kind of thinking that competes with God’s. It’s called the “Pattern of this world”.
The world constantly tries to conform me to it’s way of thinking. It does this by the books it turns out, the movies and TV shows that many of us could watch, and the video games that we could play.
Now I don’t mean to say that every TV show we watch or book we read has to be “Christian.”
But we’ve got to be careful what we allow into our homes and our minds.
The key to learning God’s will for our PERSONAL lives is soak “God’s kind of thinking” into our minds so that we’ll be READY when He wants to make use of us.
Now is it possible that we might MISS OUT on God’s will???
Romans tells that the ways we can miss out on God’s will is by
1. “conforming my mind to the pattern of this world (Romans 12:2)
2. and by putting myself 1st – by thinking more highly of myself than I ought to (Romans 12:3)
By contrast, Paul talks about the kind of thinking that will ALWAYS allow me to be in God’s will. In 2 Corinthians 8:5, he praises the actions of the churches in Macedonia, and he tells us:
“…they did not do as we expected, but they gave themselves FIRST TO THE LORD and then to us in keeping with God’s will.”
In other words… the churches in Macedonia were doing the will of God BECAUSE they put God first in the choices they made.
The churches in Macedonia were doing God’s Will BECAUSE they put God’s priorities first, and, because of that, God made use of them.
If you put God first in your decision making, God will Always find a way to use you. God will always find a way to reveal His will to you – so you can do it.
There are a lot of people who are afraid they might miss out on God’s will by being in the wrong place. They tend to look on God’s will, as it were same to a bus station. Some believe that if they’re not at the right bus station at the right time, God won’t be able to find them. And since He can’t find them He won’t be able to make His will complete in their lives.
Let’s get something straight here…
If God wants you or I to do something special…
Or wants to do something special in our lives…
There is NO CHANCE that we’ll ever miss the bus
Do you need proof of that?
ILLUS: Well, let me tell you the story of a man named Jonah. Do you remember what God told Jonah to do? God commanded him to preach to the city of Nineveh, to convict it of its guilt and bring it to repentance.
So, what does Jonah do? He gets on a boat headed for Tarshish which just happened to be on the other side of the known world.
Jonah didn’t want to preach to Nineveh. It was a wicked city and Jonah just knew that if he went and preached at Nineveh, the people there would probably repent and then God would spare their city. But Jonah didn’t want Nineveh to repent… he didn’t want them spared… he wanted them annihilated.
Jonah disobey the WILL OF GOD.
He didn’t just miss God’s will… he actively refused to do it.
But, did he succeed?
No. In fact, God took him fishing and explained His will to him a little more succinctly.
My point is this: if God really wants you to do something… He can find you anywhere. There isn’t any place you can go to that you could even hide from God if wants you to do something.
YOU WILL NOT MISS THE BUS!
The key thing is: always be available for God to use you.
THEN you’ll always be ready for God to do His will in your life.
God has a purpose for our lives… a destiny for us to fulfill.
And you know the really great thing about this is that when God wants us to something, He will always prepare us for that deed.
Romans 12:6 tells us: “We have different gifts, according to the grace given us.”
The key here is to make sure we GIVE HIM the best we have, and let HIM make use of it.
