The excerpt below was extracted with permission from the book Making Decisions according to the Will of God, by Heber Campos Jr. , Faithful Editor.
The evangelicals’ confused vision of the discovery of God’s will conveys the idea that God is playing hide-and-seek with his will, but the truth is that he does not fail like some parents, who scold their children on the basis of unclear orders and thus anger their children. God doesn’t hide what he wants from us. We cannot blame you, God does not play to hide His will from us. He presents himself through the scriptures as a revelatory God. Your will must be something much clearer than we’re used to thinking.
- Are we talking about Discovery? God’s will.
- As if he were hiding it.
- However.
- The Bible commands us to understand it (? Try to understand what the Lord wants?Ephesians 5:17).
- You’re supposed to know each other.
- We must not pursue what God does not intend to reveal.
- But we must know well what He has revealed to us.
- From the first chapter of Genesis.
- To the climax of revelation in Jesus Christ (Heb.
- 1-1-2).
- Our Lord is a speaking God.
- And when I say that Christ is the pinnacle of revelation.
- I mean that He affirms that He has made known to us all that he has heard of his Father (Jn 15:15).
- It’s a blunt phrase! Christ spared us nothing we needed to know.
- On the contrary.
- He wanted to send us the Spirit to strengthen and complete this revelation.
- Which reached its climax in Jesus (John 16:12-14).
- Such strengthening and complementation occurs in the ministry of the Apostles.
- Who provided us with the foundation of Christian life (Ephesians 2:20).
- There is nothing but the scriptures we need to know for a life that pleases God.
Therefore, we can never blame the revelatory God for hiding important things from us. He himself promises his people: “I will teach you and teach you the way to follow; and, in my opinion, I’ll give you some advice. “(Salt 32,8).
In addition to a distorted concept of God, evangelical confusion on the subject has generated a false expectation of what Christian life is like. First, doing God’s will becomes totally uncertain, and by trial and error, we put together the most complicated. God’s plan puzzle for our lives. This long process generates anxiety in research, as we have already mentioned, and is a sin.
Second, the sense of judgment increases the weight of responsibility in decisions. Some Christians suffer from the principle that “God’s will for my life?”It involves only one option, as if the other were false, displeased God. Isn’t there a morally just or wrong choice, such as choosing to live in a particular city, one should not imagine that one of the options is unacceptable to God. This kind of reasoning can get worse, if we think that the bad choice will lead to God’s judgment, if we understand a situation where everything goes wrong, because we do not seek God’s way. Careless choices can have bad consequences, but when there is no violation of the precept, there is no reason for Them to judge that there is judgment on God’s part. If God were to blame us for not fulfilling a hidden will on our part, inaccessible to us, God would be evil.
Third, the desire to know an unsclosed will in the scriptures is to look for what James Petty calls “toxic knowledge. “Future knowledge of what will happen to us, whether we follow this or that path, is forbidden to us on our own. It would be harmful to have this level of knowledge, because Jesus tells us that we are programmed to deal only with the concerns of every day (Mt 6:34), just as the tree of science of good and evil was a limit benefit of what Adam could know, God sets limits for our knowledge that are beneficial to us.
The danger of this problem lies not only in the implications for the Christian life, does it open doors to the spiritual?Dangerous, used by countless charismatic evangelicals in our country.
The degree to which the use of these media among charismatic media is accentuated varies; on the one hand, there are theologians like Wayne Grudem, who violate his concept of revealing prophecy in an orthodox understanding of God’s will; He says that God normally does not reveal these decrees to us (except in prophecies about the future), and therefore it really constitutes the secret secret will. Gods. ? Grudem says it shouldn’t be our usual expectation that God will reveal the future to us, though he does so occasionally. On the other hand, there are more radical writers like Herman H. Riffel, who says that God speaks in several languages, including (and very often), in dreams and visions. The secret is that everyone learns, by himself, to recognize god’s voice. The author’s suggestion is identical to what the world expresses in music and movies: “Listen to your heart”.
Riffel also suggests that we learn to recognize God’s voice by obeying what “we believe God tells us. “If we are not sure that this is God’s voice, we can ask for confirmation. Riffel then backed his claim with the stories of Gideon (Judges 6 and 7) and Ahaz (Is 7:11-12).
Many evangelicals in traditional churches reject these charismatic methods without realizing the danger of the methods adopted by themselves. Isn’t it strange for Christians, and even pastors, to think that we know what God is?For us through a combination of circumstances, a spiritual impulse, inner voices and tranquility. In other words, if the conditions are unfavorable, it is a sign that God does not want me to do that; if something pushed me inwardly to do something, it must have been God; if my conscience is calm it is because it is God’s will that I take this path.
For a more traditional evangelical, such methods can never escape God’s commandments and a life of prayer; In other words, they would never legitimize someone to say that they felt pressured by God to do something sinful, or to remain in an immoral state, simply because their conscience is calm. However, being guided by God in decisions that correspond to the correct standard of living is not made by ordinary means (reading the Word and life of prayer), but by “extraordinary” means. James Petty says that such an attitude remains a form of immediate direction (in contrast to the direction mediated by the enlightenment of our minds by the Word), which requires no interpretation, because it is presented in a seemingly clear way. This direct communication is what many want, that is, God clearly tells me what to do.
What is the problem with these ways of discovering God’s will?Why aren’t they reliable? Contrary to what people used to think, are you looking for these?Supernatural, it’s not a “spiritual” attitude. On the contrary, those who seek these things begin to live from sight and not from faith, many expect a first trailer for the film of their lives, a sufficient sample to assure them that God is guiding them. Open his inbox and find a message from God, however, God never promised this kind of communication as a way of life, not even to whom the Lord appeared. Abram, for example, was ordered to go to a country that God would show him. The chapter of faith, Hebrews 11, declares that the patriarch is gone – not knowing where he was going?(Heb 11. 8). God gave him no prior knowledge of the journey or the final destination.
There is also a desire to rid yourself of suffering. When we make a decision, we carry the consequences. Since no one likes to stumble on their decisions, “discover God’s will?”It becomes fundamental. Basically we want to be free from negative consequences, although we do not always do so, we want divine advice to be followed in the choice of university, work or ministry because we do not want to look back with sorrow and curiosity. What if I’d chosen the other way? Turns out God doesn’t promise to keep tripping us. The afflictions of the righteous are numerous (Salt 34:19).
In the midst of all this confusion, we must find a better way. Our teaching cannot be to reveal God’s will for specific situations in someone’s life, but to teach the believer to understand how to persist fruitfully in God’s will.