The Will of God as a Way of Life: How to Make Every Decision with Peace and Confidence

by Jerry L. Sittser

Overview

Practical help for understanding and following God's will for your life.

"God has a plan for our lives," but what does that mean in practical terms? How do we know God's will for important life decisions, like who to marry, what job to take, what church to join? How can we be free if God has a perfect plan for us? Does suffering mean we are off track? How exactly does God speak?

Author Jerry Sittser explores these questions and offers a biblically based approach that is truly liberating. No matter what decisions we've already made, he points out that it is still possible to live out God's perfect will--even if we think we've married the wrong person, chosen the wrong career, or landed in some kind of serious trouble. This new edition includes study questions designed to help individuals or groups who are faced with decisions--large or small.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780310864769
Publisher:	Zondervan
Publication date:	12/15/2009
Sold by:	HarperCollins Publishing
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	568 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jerry Sittser is a professor emeritus of theology and senior fellow in the Office of Church Engagement at Whitworth University. He holds a master of divinity degree from Fuller Theological Seminary and a doctorate in the history of Christianity from the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, including A Grace Disguised and The Will of God as a Way of Life. Married to Patricia, he is the father of three children and two stepchildren, all grown, and nine grandchildren.

 

Read an Excerpt

The Will of God as a Way of Life

How to Make Every Decision with Peace and Confidence

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By Gerald L. Sittser

Zondervan

Copyright © 2004 Zondervan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-310-25963-0

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Chapter One

We Never Know How Things Will Turn Out

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I spent the first twenty years of my life feeling certain I knew the will of God for my life. I was going to practice medicine. I was as sure about the future as I was about the difficulty of getting there, for making it to the end seemed a daunting task to me. While still in high school, I talked seriously with a plastic surgeon about joining his practice when I completed my education, and he invited me to his summer home to show me slides of his work. By the time I entered college, I was eager to enroll in science and math courses to prepare for medical school. I had one goal in mind. Everything else was a distraction and inconvenience to me, like having to do chores on a hot summer day.

But I made a fatal mistake in selecting a college. Hope College, located in Holland, Michigan, was a liberal arts institution, which meant that it required students to take a broad range of general studies courses. If I ever wanted to earn a degree from Hope, therefore, I would have to do more than study science. I would also have to read Dostoyevsky, listen to Beethoven, study the causes of the Crimean War, and write a persuasive essay.

I was about as eager to study the liberal arts as I was to read a dictionary for weekend pleasure. But I had no choice. In my first semester I signed up for a freshman writing class. For years I had read literature only under duress and had avoided writing altogether, except when my teachers forced me to put pen to paper. Fortunately, my writing professor, Dr. Nancy Miller, knew my type. Savvy and sociable, she was adept at handling people like me. When I griped one day about the writing requirement, she ignored me as if I had just made a bland comment about the Detroit Lions. When I told her that I simply did not need the course because I was not planning to write for a career, she replied, "You never know, Jerry, how things will turn out."

She was right, of course. I ended up doing something far different from what I had assumed was God's will for my life. I did not attend medical school; I enrolled in seminary. I did not become a medical doctor; I became a minister instead. Later I returned to graduate school to earn an advanced degree. Now I serve as a college professor, and I write in my spare time. Words are therefore central to what I do. The writing course I took my freshman year of college became very useful to me, and my writing teacher proved to be a prophet. As it turns out, both course and teacher helped to prepare me for a vocation I never imagined at the time I would be doing.

Inability to Predict the Future

From this experience, I learned a valuable lesson I will never forget: We never know how things will turn out. What appears in our minds to be the pathway we should take might change as suddenly as weather in the Midwest. So we would be wise to be attentive and responsive to God along the way, even in matters that appear to have little significance, such as crafting good papers in a freshman writing class. Perhaps our attention to these little things is the will of God, and our preoccupation with the future a foolish distraction.

As I look back on my forty-nine years, I see a pattern emerge. At various points along the way I thought I knew the pathway I was supposed to take, but I ended up doing something quite different. This different "something" turned out to be the will of God. At twenty, I was sure that God wanted me to pursue a career in medicine; I became a minister instead. At thirty, I was planning to stay the course in pastoral ministry; now I am a college professor. At forty, I didn't aspire to be an avid writer; now I am finishing this, my fifth book. At every step along the way I thought I knew God's will for my life. I thought I had it all figured out. But it did not turn out as I had planned.

It occurred to me a few years ago that either I had developed the bad habit of missing the will of God for my life, or I had a mistaken notion of what God's will was and is. The first alternative terrified me, for I had lived far too long and had made too many irreversible decisions-like getting married and having children-to wish I could start over in a vain attempt to get back on track. Besides, I have had too much evidence at my disposal-such as contentment of life and joy in my work-to assume that I had missed the will of God. It struck me as odd that I could wander that far off course without intending to, and yet not know it.

So I concluded that I had misunderstood what God's will really is. Like a detective who had followed leads to one dead end after another, I decided to pursue another course altogether. I began to explore a different way of approaching the will of God. It proved to be one of the most exciting decisions I ever made.

Suffering Loss

The inability to predict the future was the first clue that set me searching in a different direction. But it was not the only clue I had. A second clue came from suffering loss. My wife Lynda and I had four wonderful children, two girls and two boys. We were deliriously happy. But that happiness-what we assumed was the "will of God" for our lives-came to a sudden halt in the fall of 1991 when a drunk driver jumped his lane and collided with our minivan, killing Lynda, my mother Grace, who was visiting us for the weekend, and my daughter Diana Jane. Four of us survived. John, then only two, was seriously hurt. Catherine (eight), David (seven), and I were injured, though not badly enough to require hospitalization.

That experience set me to thinking about the will of God. I had assumed that my marriage to Lynda was the will of God, that our family of six was the will of God, that the happy, stable, prosperous life we enjoyed together was the will of God. We were, as so many said, "the ideal family." How could God allow such a tragedy to happen?

I could not believe that God had suddenly changed his mind about what he willed for us-a good marriage and a healthy family. How, then, could my life as a single father of three traumatized children also be the will of God? The accident forced me to reconsider my assumptions about God's will. Did God plan only "the good life" for me? If so, I wondered how I could integrate suffering into my understanding of God's will. Or did God plan something very different for me, something still good, but also hard and painful at the same time? If so, I had to face the prospect that my approach to the will of God was entirely mistaken.

I started to read the Bible with fresh eyes, too. The Bible provided the third and final clue. As I will explain in the next chapter, I discovered that the Bible says very little about the will of God as a future pathway. Instead, the Bible warns us about anxiety and presumption concerning the future, assures us that God is in control, and commands us to do the will of God we already know in the present. Over time I scrutinized my assumptions and reconsidered the "conventional" approach to the will of God I had followed up to that point.

The Conventional Approach

I am not sure how or where I first learned the conventional approach to the will of God. I think I simply accepted it from the very beginning as gospel truth without much reflection, much as I accept the way letters are arranged in the alphabet.

Convention teaches us that the will of God consists of a specific pathway we should follow into the future. God knows what this pathway is, and he has laid it out for us to follow. Our responsibility is to discover this pathway-God's plan for our lives. Unfortunately, it is not always obvious. If anything, it is often ambiguous. We must figure out which of the many pathways we could follow is the one we should follow, the one God has planned for us. If and when we make the right choice, we will receive his favor, fulfill our divine destiny, and succeed in life.

When a decision has to be made, everything suddenly becomes like a maze. We believe there is only one way out. All the other ways are dead ends, every one of them a bad choice. We believe that God knows the right way. He has, after all, willed it for us, and we must discover what that will is. The consequences of our choices are therefore weighty. If we choose rightly, we will experience his blessing and achieve success and happiness. If we choose wrongly, we may lose our way, miss God's will for our lives, and remain lost forever in an incomprehensible maze.

As a result, we pray for guidance, we look for signs, we seek advice, we read the Bible for insight, and we search our hearts. We wait in the hope that God will give us a clear signal. We think that a voice from heaven would be nice. The moment finally arrives, however, when we must choose. We must select one college among the many to which we have applied. We must accept or decline a job offer. We must marry or get out of the relationship. We must take one pathway, turning away from all the others.

Meanwhile, a nagging question hovers in the back of our minds. What if we make the wrong decision?

What's Really Important, Anyway?

For many years I followed this conventional approach to discovering the will of God for my life. Not that I did it consciously or critically. If I had been more critical, I would have certainly raised questions about it. I simply assumed it as true and then pursued it with considerable anxiety. I wanted to get it right the first time around.

But over time I discovered problems with this conventional approach. For one, it focuses our attention on what appears to be the important decisions, which might not be as important as we think. For example, we think long and hard when we choose a college, a job, a career, or a spouse. This makes good sense, considering how consequential these choices are. But we give little thought to how much TV we watch or how often we talk on the phone or how seldom we praise our children. Yet the little choices we make every day often have a cumulative effect far exceeding the significance of the big choices we occasionally have to make.

As I look back now on the ordeal of deciding between medicine and ministry, I am both amused and embarrassed. I was preoccupied with that decision for months. I prayed, sought advice, and thought long and hard about the benefits and defects of both options. I wanted to know which one was God's will for my life. But regardless of how fervently I searched, I could not make a decision with the assurance that I would know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the one I chose was right. Like a traveler on a long journey who comes to a major crossroad with no signposts marking the way, I had to choose without the sure knowledge that I was going to end up on the right path. I felt confused and miserable.

In the meantime, I did not realize what was happening to me. I had become as self-absorbed as a child standing in front of a mirror and as unpleasant to be around as a nervous cat. My wife, Lynda, finally jolted me out of my self-absorption. "Who really cares what you decide?" she asked. "I just want my husband back!" Ironically, I was worrying so much about my decision that I had ignored what was staring me right in the face. I was neglecting Lynda, losing interest in my studies, and overlooking mundane responsibilities. I thought almost exclusively about myself.

As it turns out, Lynda asked the right question. It broke the spell of obsession. I began to ponder the choice itself. "Does it really matter which option I choose?" I was familiar with physicians and pastors who were rogues. So I knew that neither profession guaranteed that I would become a good person or serve a noble cause. How I functioned in either field of service would depend on the quality of my character, the depth of my convictions, and the degree of my competence, which are developed as we do our daily routines.

I finally concluded that the choice of medicine or ministry was beside the point, for if I was not attentive to the little choices I made every day-to be a diligent student, a kind husband, a disciplined Christian-then whichever path I chose would never lead to the kind of fruitfulness I really desired for my life.

We do not, therefore, need to fret when we have to make big decisions about the future, worrying about the terrifying possibility that we might miss God's will for our lives. We simply need to do what we already know in the present. God has been clear where clarity is most needed. The choices we make every day-to love a spouse after an argument, to treat an unkind coworker with respect, to serve food at a soup kitchen-determine whether or not we are doing the will of God. If we have a problem, it is not lack of knowledge; rather, it is our unwillingness to respond to the knowledge we have.

As we will see, of course, we still have to make difficult choices regarding the future, as I did when I had to choose between medicine and ministry. But these choices are secondary all the same. Who we choose to become and how we choose to live every day creates a trajectory for everything else. Perhaps that is why the Bible says so little about God's will for tomorrow and so much about what we should do to fulfill his will today.

Is God Hiding Something?

The conventional approach to discovering the will of God has a second problem. It betrays a false and negative view of God. It implies that God for some reason "hides" his will and thus forces us to look for it, as if God were playing the celestial equivalent of "hide-and-seek" with us. According to this way of thinking, God hides his will, and we must go searching for it. In the process, he appears to delight in making things difficult for us. He prefers hiding over being found, frustrating us over making us joyful.

Raising my own children, however, has changed my understanding of both God and the game of hide-and-seek. When my children were little, we used to play hide-and-seek indoors during the winter or on rainy days. I was better at hiding than my kids were. But I always gave them hints, like little squeaks or hoots, to help them find me. When they discovered my whereabouts, they would squeal with delight because they loved to find me. I never once wanted to hide so well that they would never find me, because the joy of the game came in being found, not in hiding.

Playing that simple game with my little children helped clarify my understanding of the will of God. Is God's will something he hides? Does it consist primarily of what we don't know? I assume, rightly or wrongly, that God is always clear when he needs to be. He does not play a celestial game to frustrate us. He cares about us much more than we care about our children. He delights in us.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Will of God as a Way of Life by Gerald L. Sittser Copyright © 2004 by Zondervan. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

	Foreword	9
	Preface to the New Edition	13
	Acknowledgments	15
I.	Knowing God's Will
1.	We Never Know How Things Will Turn Out	19
2.	Our Astonishing Freedom	29
3.	Obstacles That Get in the Way	41
II.	Making Decisions
4.	Simple Obedience as a Way of Life	55
5.	God's Clear Commands for Life	67
6.	Attending to the Little Things	83
7.	Making Choices	94
III.	Grasping Time
8.	Facing What We Cannot Change	109
9.	Redeeming the Past	120
10.	Preparing for the Future	130
11.	Living in the Wonder of the Present Moment	142
IV.	Discerning Our Calling in Life
12.	Distinguishing Between Calling and Career	157
13.	Discovering What We're Supposed to Do	169
14.	Managing Our Many Callings	186
V.	Embracing Mystery
15.	Living with Paradox	203
16.	Suffering Respects No Boundaries	218
17.	Getting Through Suffering	227
	Notes	237
	Study Questions	245

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From the Publisher

'Don't look here for quick and cheap answers, but do expect to be moved and guided toward knowing the will of God as a lifelong journey.' — David G. Myers