“The difficulty of walking by faith based on His commands and principles often leads to mysticism taking hold in both the culture and the church, for example in the nature-focused ‘enchantment movement.’ One needn’t dive into ‘enchantment’ to spot popular—yet equally suspect—methods of seeking God’s will” - BJU Seminary
“These are all reasonable motivations, but how can a man know if/when it’s time to make a change? If God called you to the pastorate at Church A, how could you know if he is now calling you to Church B?” - London Lyceum
“My purpose here is to ask the kind of question that people in the pews are asking…. Does the fact that God is in control strip away responsibility for our choices?….do we see each and every event in life as part of God’s foreordained plan?” - Church Leaders
“God wants us to live. He wants us to make our own decisions. He provides the boundaries of his will in those matters the Bible makes clear, but then leaves it to us to operate according to wisdom and desire.” - Challies
“’You gave a wide place for my steps under me, and my feet did not slip’ (Ps. 18:36)….The Lord has not set us on a tightrope. He has given us a wide place to walk, a place where we take steps with confidence” - TGC
Reposted, with permission, from DBTS Blog.
I’ve been reading, recently and with great interest, a blog series defending what is sometimes called the “traditional view” of Christian decision-making—the view that (1) God has an “individual will” for believers and (2) that it can be “discovered.” My intent in this post is not to offer a point-by-point analysis of that series, but rather to offer a succinct statement of an alternative view, together with some hesitations I have with the “traditional” view.
It is a commonly held belief among Christians that one of the most perplexing problems we experience is knowing what the will of God is for our lives. The reason for this is not hard to find. For one thing, we are most sensitive to this question in times of stress, when the stakes are high and our emotions are perturbed. We want a clear path to appear in front of us—we want to know what our heavenly Father would have us do. In these situations we turn to God and pray for guidance. But frequently we discover that the help does not come to us when and how we think it should, and we begin to wonder if there is some secret key to the will of God which we need to discover.
Everyone is familiar with what Gideon did when he wanted absolute assurance that he was not deluded, but that the Lord truly had told him to take on the Midianites—he laid a fleece out, not once but twice (Judg. 6:36-40).
