Roy

It sounds very presumptuous to talk about knowing the will of God. The idea that we can hear God borders on both arrogance and danger. But properly understood, with humility, being reminded that God created us for relationship, it is not presumptuous to think that God will speak to us and communicate his desire for our lives and that of the world.

God calls us to be in relationship with him and with other human beings to work together, co-creating and redeeming that which is broken and lost. To enter into a relationship with God is to join hearts and hands in seeing his kingdom come here on earth as it is in heaven. We become collaborators with a God who has given us the power of creativity which passes to us the responsibility to carry out creative acts, to bless the Earth on which we are to tread gently.

It is out of relationship, in communion with God, that the will of God is known. Communion is the arena of communication.

It was the Quaker, George Fox, who said: Dwell in the life and love and power and wisdom of God, in unity one with another and with God; and the peace and wisdom of God feed your hearts, nothing may rule in you but the life which stands in the Lord God.

So discerning the will of God comes from relationship and is discovered through myriad means. The Scriptures are indispensable in discerning God’s will. Take the 10 Commandments for example. They are so deep and powerful but if humanity embraced them, life would be transformed across the globe. And Jesus’ teaching on the Sermon on the Mount is absolutely foundational to how we are to live.

The inspiration of the Scriptures, the information that we glean by observation, study and research, by exploring with others, valuing different perceptions and insights together with an often neglected deployment of intuition and imagination, all help in discerning the will of God.

Simon

I like a lot of what you have written here. Since I don’t believe the future exists yet, God can’t know it, although the kind of God I believe in can know every possibility and therefore ‘know’ some future things very accurately, even though what actually happens is technically unknown. I read prophecies either as God’s promises, or as a parental, ‘If you do this, then that will happen.’

Within that context I think, like Dave, that God has goals. The Greek word for goal is telos, and Jesus says that The Father is teleios, which might reasonably be translated as ‘always achieves his goals’. I’ve done a whole series on what it means that Jesus says we need to be teleios too (Matt 5:48), especially when Jesus makes this statement immediately after calling us to love our enemies. So I think that God tries to lead us towards this ultimate goal as we live out our goals or purpose.

I believe that in every moment we have the choice to live towards our own ‘fulfilment’ (in the sense of fulfilling our godlike purposes and the fulfilment of others around us. However, we are not always attuned to either the best choice in the moment or even our own godlike nature. I draw a lot of encouragement from the image of Jesus with the woman caught in adultery, picking her up and telling her to get on with her life without condemnation and never to sin again. He must know that she will sin again, yet in that moment all is forgiven and her first step is a good one.

So whilst I don’t think there is a single plan that God has for my life, such that every time I stray from it I am doomed until God gets me back onto that one, true line, I still want to practice spiritual disciplines that help make discernment of ‘the good’ easier.

Firstly, I want to keep learning how to get beyond all the noise and find the secret, silent, dark place where God might occasionally be discovered. I absolutely believe that we will sometimes hear a voice saying, ‘Here is the way; walk in it’ (Isaiah 30:21). There will be moments in our life when God wants to say to us, ‘Not that way, this way!’ So that means that I need to have a regular practice of listening to God. I would dare to say that my own intercessory prayer and Bible study can get in the way of God speaking. I’m talking about cultivating silence, including silence of the mind.

Secondly, I want to become the best version of myself so that I instinctively behave in more Christlike ways. There will be lots of moments in my life where the right thing is obvious and it is more a question of character whether I do the right thing or not. Then there might be times when God is genuinely open about the future and I have some free choice in the matter. In those moments I still want my instinct to be with the ways of Jesus. In order to do that, I think there are disciplines that are the character and personality equivalents of ‘fixing the roof while the sun shines’. For example, although I am not in a particularly difficult or stressful stage of life, I’ve taken the decision to seek psychotherapy because the last time I was in a very stressful period, I reacted in ways that were surprising and sometimes I made decisions or found myself in thought spirals that were definitely not who I wanted to be.

Finally, I want to address the elephant in the room, which is the (exegetically) criminal way that Christians use Jeremiah 29:11: ‘For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.’ Many translations use the word ‘prosper’ as a translation of the Hebrew word shalom, which is crime enough, but the main fault is the individualisation of this verse, originally spoken to a nation. Humans are profoundly social animals, and it is almost 100% certain that God doesn’t have any kind of plan that just involves you. Discernment of what God is up to in your life must necessarily be a social experience. If God is calling you towards something, it seems unlikely that you will be called alone. Contrary to all the evangelistic preachers who tell you, ‘Following Jesus is a decision you must make on your own’, I would counter that following Jesus is something that you can never do on your own.