Divine
Guidance–Part 4
1 Samuel 23:1–29
We have gone through 10 points in the opening of our
discussion on the doctrine of the will of God and divine guidance. This is a
topical study flowing out of our study in 1 Samuel 23.
There David has
a number of decisions to make. Each time he makes those decisions he goes to
the Lord in prayer, asks for God’s guidance and direction, and talks to the
priest, [he uses] various methods. People have historically gone to passages
like that and I believe have misused them in teaching how people can know the
will of God.
Ultimately, we know the will
of God the same way that David did, and that is through special revelation. But
special revelation in the Church Age has ceased. It is finalized in the Canon
of Scripture.
The way we know God’s will
is always the same. He reveals it to us through special verbal revelation, but
since He doesn’t do it anymore, we go to the Scripture, and the Scripture gives
us that which we need to know.
It’s like our lives are an
open book test and all the answers are there in the Book, in the Scripture.
There is a lot of confusion
because of the way this is taught. So, I just want to review the definitions.
“Will of God,” describes
three different aspects of divine volition in relation to His creation, so this
is a break down theologically. What do we mean when we say, “I want to do God’s
will”? These aspects have different meanings.
The first category is God’s
sovereign will. This is a secret will. Other words are: His decreed will, or
decretive will, His secret will, His permissive will.
We don’t know it ahead of
time. If I’m saying I want to know God’s will, well, God’s sovereign will
involves the sin, the evil that He allows to take place in creation, so that’s
not what we mean when we say “I want to do God’s will tomorrow.”
One way or the other we will
always do God’s sovereign will because that is what God allows us in the
freedom of our volition. We only know God’s sovereign will after the fact.
The second category is God’s
moral will, which is sometimes referred to as His revealed will. It refers to
what God has revealed to us in His Word, what He desires for us to do. That’s
expressed through all of the positive commands to do certain things in
Scripture and the prohibitions.
When we talk about
specifics, whether I should go to this school or that school, live in this
country or that country, go into the Air Force, serve in the military at all,
or go into the Army, Marines, or Navy.
Those kinds of questions are
not necessarily,
that’s the key word, a focus of God’s will. It might be. It might be that God
wants you to go into the Marine Corps and so when you go down to sign up for
the Army they’ll reject you.
Then you’ll go to the Navy
and they’ll reject you, and then you’ll go to the Air Force and they’ll reject
you. But when you go to the Marines they’re going to see something nobody else
saw and that’s what you’re going to get.
The same thing is true in
many areas of life. We think we want to go to work for some company and we go
there and they reject us. We apply for this job, that job, and eventually the
job that opens up is where the Lord is leading us.
That’s our opportunity to
serve Him. God doesn’t put a road sign out there and say, “This is where I’m
leading you.” That is overt. This is more covert and we don’t get the road
signs.
God’s not revealing new
things to us through feelings, through some sort of liver quiver, through some
sort of emotional state of peace and calm.
He will override our bad decisions.
If He does not want you to live in Houston, Texas you won’t be able to get a
job in Houston, Texas. But if He does have that as a specific, then you will,
and you won’t be able find anything anywhere else.
Sometimes that is
frustrating for folks.
I use a diagram of two
overlapping circles. The circle on the left is all of God’s sovereign will,
what He will allow to happen, His secret will, it is what God permits.
It includes both sin and
evil because God permits volition, individual human responsibility. The freedom
to succeed, to do the right thing, is comparable or is directly related to the
degree to fail.
If we’re not permitted to
sin, then we’re not really permitted to succeed. God permits certain things
that are sin. So, you have two areas: sin and not sin in terms of God’s
permissive will.
But in terms of God’s moral
will it’s all
not sin. It’s doing what God commands or prohibits in the Scriptures.
We are to live inside of
God’s moral revealed will to the degree that we can. When we sin we are outside
that circle. When we confess sin, we are back in the circle.
Learning to live in the
circle is what the New Testament describes as living in God’s will. It doesn’t necessarily
relate to geography, it doesn’t relate to some of these other areas of
specifics. It doesn’t necessarily relate to being married to a right person or
going to a right church.
Somebody once said to me
that if you think you have a right pastor and he’s in Houston or Pennsylvania
or Los Angeles and you’re somewhere else, then you would necessarily be outside
the will of God if you didn’t move there. That’s a true statement but it’s all
built on a fallacy, that there are these specifics in the will of God.
There’s no such thing as a
right pastor. There’s no such thing as a right church, and there is no such
thing as a necessary geographical will. If you’re in Nacogdoches, Texas, then
God’s will is for you to be involved in a local church, if there is one there
that is reasonably acceptable.
Fortunately, today we live
in a world where there is a lot of solid Bible teaching available outside of
your geographical area. I taught this one time when I was in Connecticut and I
got an e-mail a couple years later from a guy up in Vermont.
He said, “The best church in
this town where I live doesn’t believe in the virgin birth or the deity of
Christ. I’ve gone there a few times and I think my son ought to grow up in
church, but I’m not really sure that that’s what you mean.”
I said, “No, that’s not what
I mean. If there isn’t a church anywhere in your vicinity that teaches any
measure of truth, it may be an inch deep and a mile wide, maybe God wants you
to go there so you can have a ministry.”
One guy who listened to me
years ago got involved in a local church where he was stationed in the
military. The pastor said he’d been looking for somebody who could teach the
adult Sunday school class and gave him that assignment.
He taught the adult Sunday
school class, and he taught dispensations and free grace and all kinds of other
things. He didn’t go there and say, “Well the pastor got these five things
wrong. I don’t agree with him.”
They weren’t heresy, so he
had the opportunity to serve. God wants you to be involved in those ministries,
and you can supplement with whatever is available on the Internet.
If your pastor who you think
teaches you the best, that’s not necessarily what the doctrine of right pastor
meant, but if you think that the pastor who can teach you the best is not in
your vicinity you can listen to them, but that doesn’t mean you don’t get
involved in a local church.
All of that by way of quick
review to understand the terminology and let’s look go on to look at what the
Scripture says. I’ve got about nine more points. I think we can wrap this up
tonight.
As we learn doctrine, and
the Holy Spirit stores the doctrine in our soul, that’s called retention. Then
in decision making the Holy Spirit is involved in retrieving the information for
application; that is called recall.
The point I’m making in this
is that the will of God is for us to regularly, consistently, day in and day
out, meditate on God’s Word. That is Psalm 1:2, “… day and night.” Tell me a time period
that doesn’t fit within the category of either day or night.
Day or night we meditate on
His Word. That doesn’t mean every second of the day. It’s talking about the
totality, that this is the general characteristic. That as we go through our
lives we continuously think about the Word of God.
So, we are to study the Word
of God. And as we do in this Church Age, walking by the Spirit Who is the
dynamic of the spiritual life.
The Holy Spirit not only
helps us to understand the Word of God, He is the one who stores it in our
souls and brings it to our minds when we need to use it.
When I first became a pastor
and I was pastoring at a church down in La Marque, Texas, I remember that the
first two or three weeks I would get up and teach, and all of a sudden verses
that I had memorized a long time before, as a kid at camp or in church or
wherever, would suddenly pop into my head. Perfect application, a perfect verse
for what I was teaching.
That’s what God the Holy
Spirit does. It’s not something mystical. He brings the Word to our minds when
it’s time to apply it. That is the process of recall.
He stored it but if we don’t
take the time to learn the Word, to memorize the Word, so that we give the Holy
Spirit the tools that are necessary, then He doesn’t have anything to bring to
our memory when we need to apply it.
If somebody has never
memorized any promises, then they get in a situation and they can’t even say,
“Trust in the Lord.”
That’s why I repeat those
verses over and over again. Those may be the only verses a lot of people ever
memorize because they’ve heard me say them 100, 200 times.
This is the process, and
this is how God helps us understand His will, through the recall of the
Scripture we have learned.
This is very much a part of
the day-to-day process in the Christian life. We learn the will of God by going
through the process of studying the Word, and the Holy Spirit stores it in our
soul.
When I concluded last time,
under point 10, I was reciting verses such as Psalm 32:8 where God says, “I will instruct
you and teach you in the way you should go. I will counsel you with my eye upon
you.”
In that verse what we see is
that God is the One who is initiating and directing the process of our
spiritual growth. But if we are not putting ourselves in the position of
studying, reading, learning, then that’s not going to happen.
I’ve used the illustration
many times that the Holy Spirit is in the process of completely overhauling our
life. It’s like taking a car that was totaled 40 years ago in a wreck, and it’s
been sitting in a junkyard. And now it has to be made not only completely
serviceable, but better than new.
You can either give the
mechanic all the latest tools, and computers, and analytics, and everything
that that’s available, or you can give him just a screwdriver and a hammer.
A lot of Christians expect
the Holy Spirit to overhaul their life by giving Him a screwdriver and a
hammer.
They don’t study the Word.
They don’t learn the Word. They don’t internalize the Word. They don’t have
anything, and they expect somehow that God’s going to do these miracles in
their lives.
God can do the miracles, but
that isn’t how He has defined the process in Scripture. The more we study the
Word, the more tools we are giving the Holy Spirit to use.
He doesn’t operate in a
vacuum. It’s not a mystical thing where He’s just going to override 20 years of
bad decisions and refusal to read the Word and to learn the Word and
internalize the Word, and say, “Okay, now that you’re in a bind I’m just going
to wiggle my nose or snap my fingers or whatever, and the doctrine that you
never took the time to learn is just going to pop into your head.”
That’s not how it works. The
will of God is for us to be diligent in our in our study.
12. Specific doctrine for
specific teaching. That is what the word “doctrine” means, what the Bible
teaches about different circumstances and situations.
And we learn the Word and we
are fond of the word “categorical”, which is what this is, a categorical study,
because a categorical study summarizes the breadth of what the Scripture says
on a particular topic and then targets it.
That is what is going on
here: along with specific teaching for specific situations doctrine also
produces sort of an overflow effect of developing wisdom in our lives.
We have studied wisdom many
times. We’ve studied it in the Psalms; we’ve studied it in Proverbs. The
biblical idea of wisdom is not intellectual activity, which is how the Greeks
described wisdom.
It was the wisdom of the
philosophers, the ability to think through things, the ability to use rhetoric
a certain way, the use of logic.
That’s not what the Bible
refers to by wisdom. Wisdom is an Old Testament Hebrew concept of skill. The
word chokmah
that is used for the skill for living in Proverbs and the Psalms is the word
that was used to describe the skillful abilities of Bezaleel and Aholiab.
They were the craftsmen who
oversaw the various guilds or groups working on making the articles of gold,
silver, wood—the craftsmanship in all that was involved in the making of the
tabernacle. That was a skill to create something of beauty from raw materials.
What we see in the biblical
concept is that wisdom in the Christian life is the ability to put into
practice the raw materials that we learn in Bible class, the raw materials we
learn in our Bible reading and Bible study, and to create something by means of
the Holy Spirit in our spiritual life. It’s a work of art that will bring glory
to God.
Wisdom becomes a framework
that enables us to face issues in life and take that wisdom and apply it to
those situations. We are making wise decisions as opposed to foolish decisions.
That produces a spiritual work of art.
The idea, therefore, isn’t,
“God, what do I do in this situation?” but, "based on the doctrine that I
know what would be the wise thing to do; what is it that produces glory for
You?”
When we are walking by the
Spirit we are filling the commands of Scripture related to staying in
fellowship. The issue is: as long as the decision we are making brings glory to
God it’s the will of God.
But within that hierarchy
there are decisions related to that which is good, that which is minimal, and
that which is excellent. So, the choice for the growing, maturing believer is
often a decision between, not what keeps me in my comfort zone as long as I’m
still walking by the Spirit, but what is it that really brings glory to God?
What is it that is the pursuit of excellence?
There is a quote that I ran
across recently from Vince Lombardi. A great quote that says, “Perfection is
not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.”
Isn’t that a great quote? We
know we can’t achieve perfection in the spiritual life. I’ve thought about
making that a motto and sticking it on the Dean Bible Ministries website. We
know we can’t achieve perfection in the Christian life, but if we shoot for
perfection maybe we will hit excellence.
We need to have a high
standard for our spiritual life. That’s not legalism. Often what I’ve heard
when I was growing up, sometimes as a rationalization, was that fanatical,
intense, obedient study of God’s Word is legalistic.
It was lowball: I don’t
really want to have to fight with my sin nature that much, so I’ll just
pre-bound. I will confess my sin ahead of time and then that’s okay, and I
don’t have to struggle too much.
Wisdom is the pursuit of
excellence in the Christian life. We need to make decisions based on that. How
are we going to spend our time?
Ephesians 5:17 tells us that
we are to redeem the time. That means we only have a certain amount of time and
we need to decide how we’re going to use it.
What’s the best use of our
time in terms of what we are going to study for eternity? The final exam that’s
given at the Judgment Seat of Christ is not going to focus on how you spent
your leisure time in terms of relaxation, unless you didn’t use it for your
spiritual life when you could. That’s going to be the focal point.
Everybody has to make their
own decisions based upon where they are in life. We can’t let somebody else
judge us. That’s a problem with judging others. You don’t know what’s going on
in their life.
The issue in decision-making
is always going to relate, not always to the ultimate decision, but also the
process of the decision and the Lord is looking at those things.
It’s that stored doctrine
that gives us the discernment to recognize when some decisions might involve a
specific or distinct geographic or operational will from God.
Some situations are that
way. We have to learn that discernment. I’ve had situations in my life where I
knew that God closed all the doors and there was a specific geographical will,
but there are other times when there’s not, and that’s okay.
Some people think all that’s
awfully loose. No, if God has a specific point where He wants you every single
day then you need to be asking yourself, “Where does God want me
geographically? Does God want me to drive from West Houston downtown via I-10
or should I go down Westheimer?”
If God has a specific
geographical will for your life, then there’s a difference between taking Route
1, Route 2, or Route 3.
We don’t carry it to that
extent, but that’s the logical implication. Doctrine helps us make a wise
decision and glorify God in that process.
13. When we talk about the
geographical will of God It relates to operating in a specific location: Jonah
in Nineveh and Paul in Rome are examples.
There are other situations
that we have in Scripture in which individuals needed to be in specific places,
but that didn’t always mean that.
I constantly go back to the
second missionary journey of Paul, when they wanted to go back to Asia. We
aren’t talking about China and the Far East; we’re talking about the Roman
province of Asia, which was the southwestern area of what is now modern Turkey.
Ephesus was at the heart of
that. After they went and revisited the churches they had been to in
south-central Turkey on the first missionary journey, they want to go to Asia
and have a ministry there.
The text just says the Holy
Spirit prevented them, it doesn’t tell us how. It could have been through
circumstances. It could have been through special revelation of some sort. We
don’t know and it’s not important for us to know.
But the Holy Spirit said,
“No, you’re not going there.” Then they thought, “Well, we’ll go to the north
northeast and we’ll go to Bithynia.” The Holy Spirit said, “No, you aren’t
going that way.”
So, they just went up
between those two regions, and they didn’t know from day to day where they were
eventually being directed until they got to Troas.
Then there was a dream,
special revelation, as to the fact that they were to cross over and go into
Europe and take the gospel. Eventually on that journey the first place they
went to was Philippi.
There are clearly times like
that, but not always. Not always. And so it’s okay. It’s a missionary ...
Somebody asked this question last week, “Well, as a missionary does God call
you to China? Or does God call you to Ukraine, or call you to a specific
country?”
Maybe, maybe not.
Maybe the issue is the decision to serve the Lord in some ministry capacity and
as long as you’re doing that God’s going to direct your paths to some place or
another.
There clearly have been in
church history, I think, people who the Lord has really put on their mind—I
avoid the term “put on their heart”, it’s so vague and spiritual sounding—put
into their mind a particular place, and they really feel focused on that.
A person like Hudson Taylor,
from the time he was a young man, was focused obsessively about China. I think
that’s the Lord working, but for other people, it wasn’t that way.
What the Lord was doing with
Hudson Taylor wasn’t a pattern that should be true for everybody else.
Unfortunately, that’s what happens. We think, “See, what a wonderful ministry
he had. God called him to China. Where is God calling you?”
Well, maybe not. I know of
people who were convinced that God was calling them to a ministry in South
America. Gordon Whitelock, who founded camp Peniel here in Texas, graduated
from Moody Bible Institute in the early 30s.
He married his wife Alice
and they both were convinced that God wanted them to be missionaries in South
America, but they needed to raise support. In the meantime, they had an
opportunity to come down to Houston to a place called Pierce Junction, which is
now generally known as Alameda.
It was a place where you had
oil companies and pipelines that came together, and it was just an oil patch
down south of Houston. So, he came down to pastor the church for a year or two,
and took advantage of the opportunities that God brought to him.
He started one of the first
five Young Life groups in Texas. As he did that, he was going into afterschool
Bible clubs with high school kids and in that process he led my mother to the
Lord along with t I don’t know how many others.
From that he developed the
idea of taking these kids camping. That developed eventually into the Camp
Peniel ministry and he never ever made it to South America. But guess what? He
did what God wanted him to do.
Anybody who knew what he did
with Camp Peniel would say that’s what God called him to do. We see that in
hindsight that was God’s sovereign will. But at the beginning that wasn’t what
he thought was true. There are thousands of stories like that.
So, God doesn’t call. This
brings up another topic. A favorite question that is asked in ordination
services or in the examination is to ask a young man, “How do you know God has
called you to the ministry?”
Gary Friesen in the book
that I mentioned last week, Decision-Making in the Will of God, has a whole chapter on this. I
can’t remember now whether it was he, or someone else said, “Well, I’m not sure
I understand the question. Would you please explain to me what it means to be
called to the ministry? Where that’s defined in Scripture and how I know it.”
All the men on the
ordination Council looked back and forth at each other waiting for somebody
else to come up with something and nobody ever did because it’s not in the
Bible.
When you study the word
“calling” in the Bible we are called to salvation. We are not called to
ministry. We are not called to the mission field other than every believer is
called to the mission field at the instant of salvation, whether that mission
field is your next-door neighbor or somebody on the other side of the world.
Everybody is, in that sense,
called to ministry because we are given a spiritual gift and we are to serve
the Lord in using that gift. The Lord gives us those opportunities, but there’s
no such thing as a call to them to the pastorate.
God gives you the spiritual
gift of pastor, teacher, and you can say well, I believe that God gifted me as
pastor-teacher. I’ve taught Bible studies. This is how I answered the question:
I’ve taught at Christian camps. People seem to respond to it. I enjoy it. I
think this is the best way I can serve the Lord. That’s the way to answer the
question.
There’s no liver quiver.
There’s no navel gazing. There’s no feeling that somehow your ears are struck
with some sort of spiritual lightning or experience. You just recognize that as
you grow and mature that God has enabled you in these areas.
That leads to the 14th
point, that the operational will of God includes both your spiritual gift and
your natural talents and abilities. God the Holy Spirit gives everyone at least
one spiritual gift at the instant of salvation.
There is a lot of debate as
to whether it’s one or more. I think it’s a blend in most people, one or two
spiritual gifts. The measure of the gift is greater for some than it is for
others and as that works itself out in combination in your life with your
natural talents and abilities that came from birth, came from your genetics,
came from your environment, as you apply that, it’s going to look differently
for you than anybody else.
That’s true for every
pastor. Too many young men think they have to emulate somebody else and be
somebody else because that somebody else really impacted their life.
But God has a desire to have
numerous people with the gift of pastor-teacher to minister to many different
people and different personalities in different geographical locations. And so,
the operational will for everybody is to grow and mature so that they can be
more effective in serving the Lord with reference to their spiritual gifts.
Now, does that mean you have
to be able to say, “Well, I know what my spiritual gift is”? Absolutely not.
There are many people who have led lives of tremendous spiritual service and
have no idea what their spiritual gift is.
Of course, one of the
spiritual gifts is the gift of administration. That’s a pretty broad category,
or the gift of leadership, or the gift of serving. That’s a huge category.
You take somebody that has a
spiritual gift of serving and God naturally endowed them with a musical talent.
One of the ways that they can serve, exercising their spiritual gift, is
through using their natural talent to play a musical instrument, or to sing, or
something of that nature. And that’s part of God’s will for our life, because
God’s will is for us to grow and mature and develop in these areas.
Somebody may have a natural
ability working with numbers and they learn to be a bookkeeper. They learn to
be an accountant and they have the spiritual gift of service, so they can take
their spiritual gift of service and use that to help the church in the area of
bookkeeping and accounting, things like that.
That’s how the natural gifts
and abilities work with our spiritual gifts. Some people, they as they grow and
mature, their mentality is, “I’m just looking for an opportunity to help” so
that they probably have the gift of helps, but they never really identify it as
such. As they mature they just see opportunities and they take advantage of
them.
That’s how it is. You don’t
need to take some sort of a skills test to identify your spiritual gift. That
was very popular back in the 70s. I remember there were a number of Christian
magazines, and they would publish these little tests, 15–30 questions. You take
them and then you can score yourself and you’ll decide what your spiritual gift
is.
They were no different from
the kinds of skill assessments you get if you went to some job counselor,
career counselor, trying to figure out what in the world you wanted to do. You
would take a battery of exams and it would tell you what you probably thought
you were going to do as you as you grew up.
You don’t have to know your
spiritual gift to use your spiritual gift, but you do have to grow and mature
in the spiritual life to use your spiritual gift.
15. Often, decisions in life
are not related as much to the final decisions as testing the process of
deciding. How are you going to apply doctrine? That’s the test; it’s the
methodology. How are you going to solve the problem in this particular test?
I’ve talked about that the
in past, so we can just go on to the next one.
16. Let’s turn to Numbers in
the Old Testament, Numbers 22. We have an example of these categories of God’s
will in the life of Balaam.
Balaam is an apostate
prophet. It’s clear he does have a gift of prophecy. In Numbers what we see is
the story of Israel coming around on the east side of the Jordan going through
Moab before they go into the Promised Land.
The king of Moab wants to
stop them, wants to prevent them, and he is doing everything he can. He calls
on this false prophet to curse them. But without getting into a lot of the
specific details what happens is that God is working to protect Israel from
Balaam, the false prophet.
In Numbers 22:12 God speaks
to Balaam and says, after he is requested by Balak the king of Moab to curse
the Jews, then God speaks to Balaam, “and you shall not go with them. You shall not curse the people for they are
blessed.”
This is God’s revealed will.
He’s telling Balaam what he can and cannot do. As we go through the story
Balaam keeps trying to push the boundary, just like a disobedient kid. The
parents say you can’t go outside, so they open the front door and they put
their foot right up on the threshold of the door and then they start inching it
out the door to see if they’re going to get some reaction from the parents.
We’ve all either done that or seen that or both.
So that’s sort of what
Balaam is doing here. He really wants the money and the reward. He wants to
figure out a way where he’s not going to curse them but he’s still going to get
the reward.
So, after God tells him he
can’t do it then he goes ahead anyway. But God allows him to go.
Numbers 22:20, “And God came to
Balaam at night and said to him [again we have direct revelation], ‘If the men come
to call you …”
This isn’t a feeling, it’s
not an emotion, it’s not liver quiver or navel gazing, it’s specific
propositional truth communicated in words.
“… if the men come to call you, rise and go
with them.”
God’s going to permit him to
go. “… but only the word which I speak to you that you shall do.”
Okay, you can go. I’m going
to let you go. That’s not what the original command was. What’s the revealed
will of God? You shall not go. What’s the permissive will of God? You can go
but you can’t talk. You can’t curse them.
Then you have the overriding
will of God that we see in the next chapter. For example, in Numbers 23:5 we
see God’s overriding will.
Balaam is going to say
something and God just overrides it.
Numbers 23:5, “The LORD put a word in Balaam’s mouth and said
‘Return to Balak, and thus you shall speak.’ ”
Then in Numbers 23:15 Balaam
is speaking to Balak, “And he said to Balak, ‘Stand here by your burnt offering while I meet
the LORD
over there.’ ”
As we see this, we see God
overriding, overruling Balaam’s constant attempts to try to curse Israel so he
can get the big payday.
So, the principle here is
that even when we make the wrong decision related to God’s geographical will or
operational will, His overriding will kicks in and resolves the problem.
We can’t make a bad decision
in terms of these neutral areas. If God does want us somewhere God’s going to
get us there.
Let’s go back to the New
Testament, Acts 15. This passage goes back to what I talked about last time
when talking about Cornelius, the Gentile, and Peter taking the gospel to
Cornelius.
After that, in Acts 11, he
comes back and gives a report in Jerusalem. But then this whole issue with
“What we do with these goy, with these unclean Gentiles?” They don’t observe
Shabbat; they’re eating bacon at breakfast. They think they can clean the
shrimp by just cutting the tail off and circumcising them. They’ve just got all
these different problems.”
So, they have a council.
Acts 15:6, “Now
the apostles and elders came together to consider the matter.”
That is, “What are we going
to do with the Gentiles?”
This has become divisive
because there are those who are saved, but their background is legalism and the
sect of the Pharisees in Acts 15:5. And they think that they have to be
circumcised.
“We have to bring these
Gentiles in under the Law.”
They have a council, the
first church council recorded in the Scripture, and they come together, and
it's described in Acts 15:6–22.
They go this through this
process of describing in Acts 15 what has been going on. Peter stands up and
talks about how God revealed to him that He had declared the Gentiles clean and
he was supposed to take the gospel to the Gentiles and what he did.
Acts 15:9, “And He made no
distinction between us and them, purifying their hearts by faith.”
After he finishes, Barnabas
and Paul talk about how God worked with them among the Gentiles. After they
gave their testimony in Acts 15:13, James draws some conclusions that are very
important.
I want you just look at the
language after he relates what has happened and he goes back to the Old
Testament where he quotes from Amos 9:11–12, that there will be a time when, “The tabernacle of
David [that is a reference to Israel] is fallen down …” and collapsed under divine discipline.
Acts 15:17, which is a quote
from Amos 9:12, “So
that the rest of mankind may seek the LORD.”
There is a purpose in that
divine discipline on Israel: so, the rest of mankind, even all the Gentiles,
will seek the Lord.
What he is saying there is
that God’s intent always was to include Gentiles in salvation. After he makes
an Old Testament application, he says in Acts 15:19, “Therefore, I judge …”
He is making an evaluation
statement. God is not telling them how to specifically handle this situation.
There’s been revelation in the past, revelation to Peter, revelation to Paul
and Barnabas, revelation in the Old Testament.
Now they have to apply that
past revelation to this problem without direct revelation from God as to how to
handle this problem. So, he looks at the data of Scripture.
Acts 15:19, he says, “Therefore I judge
that we should not trouble those from among the Gentiles who are turning to God.”
He’s making an application
point. Furthermore, as we go down to Acts 15:22, Luke writes, “Then it pleased
the apostles and elders, with the whole church, to send chosen men of their own
company to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas.”
It pleased them. They’re
making a decision from wisdom and they say, “How should we inform or
communicate to the church?”
They don’t get out the urim
and thumim and ask God what to do. They make an applicational decision based on
the doctrine and based on wisdom.
So, they’re going to send
some chosen men to Antioch to accompany Paul and Barnabas as they go back to
bring an answer to this question.
They wrote a letter, and God
doesn’t reveal to them that they should write a letter. They’re making an application
of wisdom to the circumstances.
And in that, they make the
statement in Acts 15:24–25, they say, “Since we have heard that some who went out from
us have troubled you with words, unsettling your souls.”
That’s the problem they’re
trying to address. How do we solve this problem?
“… and saying that you must be circumcised and
keep the Law. It seemed good to us …”
You ought to underline that
phrase that begins in Acts 15:25 and you see it again in Acts 15:28, “For it seemed
good to the Holy Spirit …”
It seemed good to us first
of all, and it seemed good to the Holy Spirit second of all. They are not
claiming special revelation in how they should handle the problem.
“We looked at previous
special revelation. We look at the circumstances and then we had to make a
decision related to application.”
“It seemed good to us, being assembled with
one accord to send chosen men to you with our beloved Barnabas and Paul …”
That takes you right back to
that language of Acts 15:22, “then it pleased the apostles and elders …” It’s a point of application.
Acts 15:28, “For it seemed
good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these
necessary things.”
It wasn’t that the Holy
Spirit gave them direct revelation; it’s that the Holy Spirit was working in
their recall and application of the doctrine that had already been revealed to
them.
My point is they have a
decision to make. They have a conflict in the church and the way they handle it
is to go to special revelation to derive principles from that past special
revelation to apply to the current circumstance.
They are not saying, “God
tell us what to do” and expecting God to give them new revelation for this
specific set of circumstances. That’s decision-making and wisdom.
We see it also in Paul’s
statements. After the first missionary journey they come back and report. After
a while Paul says to Barnabas “It’s God’s will for us to go on another
journey.”
Is that what he said? No.
He says, Acts 15:36, “Let us return and
visit the brethren in every city in which we proclaimed the word of the Lord,
and see how they are.”
It’s almost like a common
sense approach to doing the will of God. “We took the gospel to them and we
taught them some of the word, but now we need to go back. We don’t need God to
tell us we need to go back.”
Paul is returning on his way
to Jerusalem at the end of the third missionary journey. He decided to sail
past Ephesus. Notice, he doesn’t say, “God told me to sail past Ephesus.” He
doesn’t say, “I sought the Lord in fasting and prayer, and He told me I didn’t
need to go to Ephesus.”
He made a decision that he’s
trying to get to Jerusalem before Passover. And in order to make the timetable,
he didn’t have time to go to Ephesus. The wise decision is to bypass Ephesus.
18. In every incident of a
specific will of God it’s only known through special revelation. God does have
specific things for us, but the way we learn them is to go through Scripture.
God has recorded it there for us.
One more point. In some Old
Testament cases God directly put thoughts in the mind of a leader. God put
certain thoughts or ideas into the heart, that is the mind, of Nehemiah.
You read Nehemiah and
constantly Nehemiah says, “God put this in my in my heart. God put this in my
mind.”
I think God does that today.
That’s not special revelation. That’s the Holy Spirit bringing things to our
mind. Now it’s covert, so I’m real hesitant.
I don’t have special
revelation (like Nehemiah did) to say, “Oh, God brought this thought into my mind and not that thought
into my mind.” You hear a lot of Christians who use this language today but
Nehemiah, as a writer of Scripture, had special revelation from God to know
which thoughts came from God and which thoughts did not.
I don’t have that. If you
talk to some unbeliever they’ll be doing some project or something, and all of
a sudden some thought pops into their head. That doesn’t mean that God put it
there.
How do I know today that God
put some thoughts in my mind and not others? I don’t, unless what is coming
into my head is doctrine through the Holy Spirit, reminding me of what the Word
of God says so that I can apply it.
So, the conclusion is: what
God wants us to know regarding His will, He has always revealed directly to
those responsible.
In the past if God wanted
something specific done, there was direct revelation. Today God’s will is
completely, sufficiently, and finally revealed in His Word. That’s where we go,
we don’t go to the priest and take a look at the urim and thumim and go to a
prophet.
God is no longer directly
revealing His will to us independently. We are responsible for knowing His will
from Scripture and then applying it.
It’s a mature approach. We
are not a little kid going to mommy and daddy asking them what we do every time
some situation arises.
We have grown up and left
home as it were. We have the rearing and the training that our parents have
given us. Now when we go out into the world we have to take what they taught us
and we have to apply it on our own. We can’t go running home to mommy and daddy
every time there’s a decision that has to be made.
That’s an analogy that is
roughly scriptural, because in Galatians Paul talks about the Old Testament was
like a child under a tutor, but now we have grown up and part of that maturity is the
Word of God.
I want to wrap up with a
couple of passages I think are very important for making wise decisions. First
of all, I want to look at broad passages here very quickly; you can go back and
read them later.
Let’s look at Ephesians 5.
These are all passages related to God’s will for our lives. Ephesians 5 is, I
think, the central chapter in Ephesians 4, 5, and 6.
Ephesians 4:1 starts off, “I, therefore, the
prisoner of the Lord, beseech you to walk worthy of the calling with which you
were called …”
What’s God’s will for your
life? “to walk
worthy of the calling with which you were called …” That is salvation.
Then we skip on down to a
series of commands starting in Ephesians 4:25 that all relate to putting away
sin, that sin should not characterize the believer.
Is Paul saying we can be
perfect? No. Is he saying that this is a legalistic way to achieve
spirituality? Well, no. But if we’re sinning, we’re not walking by the Spirit.
We have to remove that
sinful lifestyle and there are a number of prohibitions that are given in
Ephesians 4:25–31.
Ephesians 4:31 says, “Let all
bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you, with
all malice.” That ought to be the motto of every political party. I don’t
care what you are, that ought to be the motto of every political party today.
Ephesians 4:31, “And be kind to
one another ...” There’s the positive command.
“Be kind to one another, tenderhearted,
forgiving one another …”
The Greek there is CHARIZOMAI.
“being gracious to one another, even as God in
Christ forgave you.”
Ephesians 5:1, “Therefore be
imitators of God as dear children.”
Ephesians 5:1 flows out of
Ephesians 4:32. It’s unfortunate the chapter break occurs there.
And he continues this
metaphor of walking, Ephesians 5:2, “And walk in love.” That’s what God wants us to do, walk in
love.
Then there are two or three
verses about the negatives,
Ephesians 5:3–4, ”Setting aside
fornication and all uncleanness or covetousness, let it not even be named among
you, as is fitting for saints. Neither filthiness, not foolish talking, nor
coarse jesting, which are not fitting, but rather giving thanks.”
Being grateful and gracious
towards others.
And when we get down to
Ephesians 5:8 he says, “For you were once in darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk
as children of light.”
So, we are to walk as
children of light and then we are to walk in wisdom.
Ephesians 5:15, “See then that you
walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise.”
What does a wise person do?
Ephesians 5:16: a wise person redeems the time.
Ephesians 5:17, “Therefore do not
be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is.”
How do we do that? Ephesians
5:18, “And do
not be drunk with wine, in which is dissipation; but be filled by means of the
Spirit.”
You’re filled with what?
You’re filled with the Word of God. And then we go on with a lot of specific
application.
That’s a great passage to
think about in terms of the will of God. Are we walking in love? Are we walking
as children in light? Are we walking as wise? Are we walking by the Spirit?
Galatians 5:16, “I say then: Walk
by means of the Spirit and you will not fulfill the lust of the flesh.”
Galatians 5, which I talked about a lot last time. That’s another key passage
Another key passage is John
15. These are broad passages that every believer should think through because
they relate to your spiritual life and the commands of Scripture.
In John 15, Jesus commanded
His disciples that we are to abide in Him. And abiding in Him is another way of
talking about fellowship.
In John 15:4 He says, “Abide in Me and I
in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the
vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me.”
So, the precondition to
bearing fruit in John 15:4 is abiding in Him. The precondition for bearing
fruit in Galatians is what? Walking by the Spirit.
In Ephesians 5:8–9 the
precondition for bearing fruit is to walk as children of light. So, abiding in
Christ, walking as a child of light, walking as wise, being filled by means of
the Spirit, walking by the Spirit, are all roughly identical because they all
are the necessary condition for producing fruit.
John 15:7, “If you abide in
Me and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it will be done
for you.”
The big condition is abiding
in Him and His Word abiding in you, and then you’re not going to desire
something that is inconsistent or contradictory to the Word of God.
Those are just some of the
key passages that we have in Scripture defining the will of God. Other places
to look would be 1 Thessalonians 5:16–22, a bullet list of commands:
Again, gratitude is
emphasized.
These are key passages.
Again, we see this emphasis
on rejoice as in 1 Thessalonians 5:16.
God’s will for you is not to
be a worrywart, not to wake up having a panic attack every night and
manufacture things to worry about.
That’s the result of prayer.
It’s not the result of finding God’s special will for your life.
Then Philippians 4:8, “Finally,
brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things
are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things
are of good report, if there is any virtue or anything praiseworthy, meditate, [or
think] on
these things.”
That is the focal point for
the will of God: are you doing those things? If you’re doing those things then
you are walking by the Spirit, you are in the will of God. But when we sin we
are out of the will of God. And it doesn’t matter [where you are].
For example, what eventually
happened to Jonah was he got out of the will of God, even in Nineveh. He got
out of the will of God because after he got there, and everybody responded to
the gospel and God graciously withheld the judgment on Nineveh for another 200
years, Jonah had a pity party and went out and decided that “I’m mad, I’m going
to sit out here and eat dirt. God is being too kind to the Ninevites.”
He immediately went into
bitterness and mental attitude sins, so God had to teach him another lesson.
How do we know God’s will?
Very simple, study, learn the Word of God, and do what it says.
If we are walking by the
Spirit, walking in the Word, walking in the light, then God is going to direct
our paths.