John Calvin spoke in terms of the double will of God. A good place to start is the Ten Commandments. But he has already told you how you are to live, what constitutes a godly decision, what it means to follow his will. Perhaps you have a job decision, and you are seeking God’s will. In that respect, God’s Law is an outstanding help in Christian decision-making. That is God’s plan for your life, so far as your responsibility is in view.
God’s will is that we should obey his Word, that we should glorify him in all things, that we should love him with all our hearts and minds and strength and love our neighbor as ourselves. We do, however, have quite a bit of knowledge about God’s will, not in terms of the details of our lives but in terms of what obedience to him demands. God never tells us to figure what his secret plan is for us. When the Bible speaks of God’s plan, it relates it to the sphere of his sovereignty and not to the sphere of our responsibility. Let me say that there is something of a category error involved here. We are seeking direction, as we should, so we want to know God’s plan. People usually seek to know God’s plan because they have decisions to make, and they don’t want to make them badly. I often say this about our journey through life: out the rearview mirror we can often discern much of God’s plan – although probably not as much or as clearly as we think – but out the windshield it is all faith! 1:17), not by knowing what God’s plan is.
The apostle Paul tells us that “the righteous shall live by faith” (Rom. The question therefore becomes, “How do I know God’s plan?” The answer is that you do not know God’s foreordained plan for the details of your life, at least you don’t get to know it in advance. The matter is made clear by verses like 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 ” and Acts 17:26, where Paul argued to the Athenians that “from one man made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.”Ĭhristians often wonder if God has a specific plan for their life, where they will live, what their life’s work will be, etc., and the Bible clearly teaches that God does. The verse many Christians think of with regard to this is Jeremiah 29:11, which says, “For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” It might be argued that this verse properly speaks of the nation Israel and not of any individual, yet Christians rightly connect this to God’s relationship with believers under the New Testament. Tonight’s question is “Does God have a plan for each of our lives? If so, how does he reveal it? How do we hear him and discern his voice from others?”
0 kommentar(er)
