Knowing the Will of God

Part 2

27^th March 2009

Last week, we began looking at how we can know the will of God for our lives. We can never know all of His will, but we should surely aim to know as much as He wants to reveal to us. We looked at two of the most important keys to knowing God's will :

Genuinely wanting to (this is far less straightforward than some might think)
Reading, obeying and remembering the Bible (this must be our lifestyle)

This week, we look at the next key - prayer.

Prayer is essential in knowing God's will

David wrote this:

Psalm 25v4-5
Show me your ways, O LORD, teach me your paths;
guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Saviour, and my hope is in you all day long.

David could not have written this unless he had believed certain things:

There is a God.
God listens to our prayers.
God can communicate with us, teaching us and leading us.

I believe these things. I believe them partly because I cannot conceive of a universe like this existing by chance. There must be a God. And I cannot imagine a God who created you and me but wants nothing to do with us.

But I also believe them because God does communicate with me. It's a scary thing that when a Christian admits that God speaks to him, some non-Christians think he must be insane. But God speaks to all Christians, although we vary as to how well we listen.

If, like David (and me) you believe that God is real, that He hears our prayers and that He is capable of communicating with us, then it's no more than common sense to ask Him what to do. We have important decisions in our lives: where to work; where to live; whether to marry, whom to marry, which church to belong to; how to invest our money; how to invest our time; whether to have children; and so on. It would be crazy to decide these things ourselves, without consulting God.

Even Jesus needed to pray. One of His major decisions was whom to appoint as the twelve disciples:

Luke 6v12-16
One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God.
When morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose twelve of them, whom he also designated apostles: Simon (whom he named Peter), his brother Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James son of Alphaeus, Simon who was called the Zealot, Judas son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.

Jesus was so serious about prayer that He prayed all night. And He heard God.

And God will choose our leaders for us, if we pray:

Acts 13v1-4
In the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers: Barnabas, Simeon called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen (who had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch) and Saul.
While they were worshipping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them." So after they had fasted and prayed, they placed their hands on them and sent them off.
The two of them, sent on their way by the Holy Spirit, went down to Seleucia and sailed from there to Cyprus.

This is how Paul and Barnabas found God's will for their lives: by praying and fasting with other Christians, and by obeying God when He spoke.

And we should only travel where and when God wants us to:

Acts 16v6
Paul and his companions travelled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia.

Do you pray about when to go on holiday, and where to go? Isn't it rather silly not to? Don't we want His blessing on our holidays (not to mention our ministry trips)? Or do we want to make our own decisions about such things, as if we stop being God's servants when we go on holiday?

I could come up with lots of other examples about things in our life which we should be praying about, both because it's the right thing to do and because God's will for us is better than our will for ourselves. But do we really believe that? As I started out saying last week, do we really want God's will for our lives?

In short, if you and God were on a car journey, would you be driving, or would He?

More about finding the will of God next week.