“Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.” – Eph. 5:17
How do you and I find the will of God? Is God’s will something hard to find? Has God left us in the dark? Has He left us hints – clues that He expects us to find if we are spiritually mature enough to work out? Or is finding the will of God a much more simple process than that?
What the Bible teaches about this SETS US FREE to live a life of God-glorifying obedience. And that is the point of the teaching.
Its been a blessing to read Pastor Jim Osman’s new book “God Doesn’t Whisper”. Its an outstanding book dealing with a problem prevalent in the church of our day. Pastor Jim was recently interviewed about his book on a podcast (found here: https://podcasts.strivingforeternity.org/programs/rapp-report/god-doesnt-whisper-with-jim-osman/) and I made a transcript of a brief segment of the interchange. Once the illegitimate and dangerous decision making models have been thrown out (from Scripture) the question then becomes, so how are we as Christians to make God-honoring decisions. Here’s the relevant discussion:
Interviewer: How then do we make decisions?
Jim Osman: Well, I would say we make decisions in the same way that the Apostles made decisions. That is if we have an opportunity to choose between two options, A and B, we need to ask two questions.
What does the moral will of God reveal concerning this decision? And that is His will in Scripture. The thing that He has said. That I need to flee from immorality, and that I need to do all things for the glory of God. The scripture lays out the moral parameters in which we are to live as believers. It is a big circle, but it leaves a lot of options when we are choosing between A and B.
It still leaves probably most options open to us.
Then the second question we need to ask is what does wisdom say? What does God’s word reveal that would be the wise thing to do? Are there warnings of foolishness that I need to avoid here?
And once we have answered those two questions, and we found that there is nothing about this decision for these options that violates God’s clearly revealed moral will or the wisdom that is given to us in Scripture, then we are free to make, and this is going to sound shocking to some people, we are free to make either decision with God’s blessing. We are free to decide to do anything we want, so long as it does not violate scripture, and it does not violate God’s sound wisdom.
That leaves the option open to us. We are free to marry any woman we want, if it does not violate God’s moral will or violate God’s wisdom. We are free to take any job we want or to buy any house we want, as long as it does not violate God’s moral will revealed in Scripture or sound wisdom. It is not that God does not care which choice we make, as if he is apathetic. It is that God is not intent on revealing to us which choice to make. We are free to make that choice with the firm conviction that in doing so, we are not violating God’s will, and we can make that decision with the conviction that he will bless or use whatever decision it is that we end up making.
… If you read Paul in the book of Romans, he talks about wanting to go to the city of Rome and eventually to visit them. He talks about his strong desire to do so, and then he said, “Maybe, perhaps, at last in the will of God, I will be able to make this trip to come and see you.”
He does not say, “The Lord is revealing to me that this is what my travel plans should be,” or “The Lord gave me a vision of Rome.” or “The Lord laid Rome on my heart,” or “The Lord has whispered to my heart ‘Rome’ over and over again.”
He did not use any of that language. He just says, “I have a desire to come see you. There is a spiritual benefit to this. I am called to be the apostle to the Gentiles. So, it makes sense that this is within God’s moral will. There is nothing non-wise about it, and maybe the Lord will open up the door to do so, and then I will be able to come and do it.”
Basically, the apostle Paul was not waiting to hear a word from God. He was just making a decision that was in keeping with what God had revealed in scripture and in keeping with what he desired ultimately to do. I start the book by talking about that crisis at college on whether I should go back to the second year or not. The end of the book tells you exactly how it is that I made that decision. I ended up doing exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to go study Scripture.
That was what I wanted to do. So, I decided to do that. I did not hear the voice of God in deciding to do that. God did not speak to me and tell me which woman to marry or which city to live in or which church to pastor or which house to buy or what to name my kids. None of that. I do not need anything from God. He has given to me everything in Scripture to make God-glorifying decisions. And so, if I am making it within the parameters of what God has revealed in Scripture in terms of his moral will and his wisdom, then I am free to make any of those decisions with the promise, or the full confidence, that I am not violating God’s will in doing so.
I was delighted to see that this resource has been made where Pastor Jim Osman (of Kootenai Community Church) is interviewed regarding his new book “God doesn’t whisper.” The interview focuses on the common thought that Christians are hearing the voice of God as a regular occurrence or at least, it should be common. Along the way, the following themes are addressed:
1) Do we need to hear from God outside Scripture.
2) Should we expect to hear from God outside of Scripture.
3) Must we learn to hear from God outside of Scripture?
Then Jim addresses some of the most common arguments for hearing the voice of God and then explains how to make decisions as a Christian without hearing the voice of God.
Here is the link:
Ariticle by Dr. Michael Reeves (Source: https://tabletalkmagazine.com/posts/confessions-in-practice/)
Dr. Michael Reeves is president and professor of theology at Union School of Theology in Wales. He is author of several books, including Rejoicing in Christ. He is the featured teacher on the Ligonier teaching series The English Reformation and the Puritans.
As I wrote in my first post, the creeds and confessions of orthodox Christianity are the necessary, written responses of the church to the revelation of God in the Bible. Far from the cold and formulaic scribbles of dead orthodoxy, as critics sometimes call them, creeds and confessions are the lifeblood of healthy, humble, and historic Christianity. To further highlight why Christians should love creeds and confessions, we need to look at both their limitations and practical uses.
Confessions don’t pretend to be more than they are. In fact, they have two requisite limitations. First, a confession is not an extension of Scripture, as if it were God’s Word itself. It is a human response to God’s Word, an acknowledgment that He has spoken. As such, we value a confession only to the extent that it is faithful to Scripture. Thus, a confession is to be assented to whole-heartedly as a confession of God’s truth only when it accurately declares the truth of Scripture.
Second, confessions cannot contain the whole counsel of God or the full compass of everything those who subscribe to them believe. As a response to God’s Word, the confession points to and guides us toward the whole truth found in the Scriptures. A confession points beyond itself. Therefore, the view that confessions limit growth in the knowledge of God and His gospel is a view that misunderstands the intention of a confession. Confessions are not self-sufficient, doctrinal cages, but guides, witnesses, and safety nets.
In particular, confessions describe essential beliefs that command broad assent. They often remain silent on secondary matters or on doctrines that are not relevant to their confessional perspective. For example, it is appropriate and important for the London Baptist Confession of Faith to limit the mode and subjects of baptism according to Baptist principles. For other confessional perspectives, such details are not required. Functioning in this way, confessions promote “unity in essentials, liberty in non-essentials, charity in all things.”1
In acknowledging that God has spoken clearly and specifically, confessions also bind our allegiance to what God has said. A confession is more than an obedient response to God’s Word; it also calls Christians to an ongoing obedient response to God’s Word. Written confessions presuppose that we are fickle people. We naturally stray from what God has said to follow the siren voices of our imagination and our culture. If we want to remain loyal to the gospel, we must bind ourselves to it. This is what confessions do; they fasten confessional Christians to the gospel so that those Christians keep on confessing gospel truth. Confessional fidelity guards against confessing something else. Committing to a confession nails your colors to its mast. You define yourself publicly by that allegiance. Without this commitment, it is much easier to shift allegiance without even noticing. Confessional commitments make it difficult to change our minds on the fundamental matters of the confession. Confessions help define and protect our theological identity.If we want to remain loyal to the gospel, we must bind ourselves to it. This is what confessions do.SHARE
Confessions also protect us from theological drift by binding us not only to the gospel but to our fellow confessors as well. Subscribing to a confession is both public and corporate. The prefix con- in confess means “together.” Confessions bind us together in fellowship under the gospel. Through confession, the gospel becomes our common ground and shared vision. Confessions are fundamentally unifying.
Our confessions shape our perspective of the Bible and the gospel. Our confessions not only show us where we might be tempted to leave the gospel or compromise it, but they also show us where we need to act and what we need to proclaim. They order our values and priorities.
More strongly than that, however, confessions involve us in the conflict between the gospel and all that is opposed to it, both in our hearts and in the world. We’ve never needed confessions more, even as we witness the extraordinary doctrinal retreat of the church in the face of an increasingly aggressive culture. Specifically, for God’s people to remain loyal to what God has said, they will need confessions that dare to take a stand. A real confession acknowledges truth with authenticity only inasmuch as it acknowledges such a thing as falsehood. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote, “The concept of heresy belongs necessarily and irrevocably with the concept of a creedal confession.”2 When the notion of heresy seems anachronistic, so must the notion of truth.
Confessions of faith are never neutral or abstract. They are spoken in specific situations and address particular issues. Loyalty to them requires an active rejection of the heresies they condemn. It is not possible for Christians today to confess the Apostles’ or Nicene creeds alone. Even these two early creeds were responding to the theological issues of their day. That is not to say that the ancient creeds no longer have any validity. They maintain all their validity. But we cannot simply turn back the creedal clock. New theological issues and errors have always required new confessions to deal with them.
Confessions do not typically dictate Christian behavior. Confessions are, after all, testimonies to the faith, not testimonies to our response. To an age that sees doctrine as a cerebral nicety, this inevitably makes confessions look somewhat irrelevant to “real life.” But the very existence of confessions testifies that there is truth that demands a response. Confessions demand that we have the integrity to respond appropriately to the truth being confessed. In this way, doctrine becomes profoundly life shaping. For example, to confess with integrity that Jesus is Lord and that the Spirit works in us to make us Christlike necessarily means rejecting sin and altering every aspect of our lives. By demanding integrity, confessions forbid nominalism or empty, intellectual assent.
In sum, confessions draw us, body and soul, into obedience to God’s Word. Through confessions, we challenge our bent toward rejecting divine revelation. We are taught the gospel with ever-greater clarity. We join with the gospel and there find unity with others who have done the same. We defy and deny what our confessions oppose. We mold our lives, thoughts, ministries, and teaching to the unchanging standard of God’s Word. In the end, we stand with our confessions and proclaim that God has spoken.
Editor’s Note: This post was first published on September 29, 2017.
While there is much I would disagree with in this discussion, the conversation between the three gentlemen here (David Berlinski, David Gelernter, and Stephen Meyer) is certainly fascinating. Peter Robinson poses the questions.
My takeaway – Evolution is a theory in crisis. Actually, it is stone cold dead in the water.
“How cleanly and quickly can the (scientific) field get over Darwin, and move on? This is one of the most important questions facing science in the twenty-first century.” – David Galernter, Claremont Review of Books
Kevin DeYoung writes (original source – https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevin-deyoung/theological-primer-religion/):
The etymology of the word “religion” is unclear. Over the years, many have agreed with Cicero (106-43 BC) who derived religio from relegere, a Latin word meaning to gather together or to reread. On this account, religion is the diligent study of the things pertaining to God. Others have preferred the explanation given by the church father Lactantius (c. 250-325), which Augustine (354-430) adopted, that religio comes from religare meaning to fasten or to bind. With this etymology, religion is the binding or reattachment of man to God.
In contemporary parlance, “religion” is often construed in entirely derogatory terms. Even by Christians, religion is supposed to be the opposite of a relationship with God. Or religion is about trying to earn God’s favor. Or religion is about a stultifying system of rituals, dogmas, and structures. The problem with this disparaging understanding of “religion” is threefold.
(1) This is a relatively new way for Christians to speak. John Calvin wrote the Institutes of the Christian Religion. Jonathan Edwards wrote on Religious Affections. Pastors and theologians, especially in the age of awakenings, often wrote about “religion” or “true religion” or “real religion.” Our forefathers were well-aware of religious hypocrisy and false religious systems, but they did not equate “religion” with works-righteousness.
(2) The word “religion” occurs five times in the ESV and is, by itself, a neutral word, translating either deisidaimonia (reverence for the gods) or threskeia (religious worship). Religion can refer to Judaism (Act 26:5) or the Jewish-Christian faith (Acts 25:19). Religion can be bad when it is self-made (Col. 2:23) or fails to tame the tongue (James 1:26). But religion can also be good when it cares for widows and orphans and practices moral purity (James 1:27). There is no biblical ground for making the practice of religion a uniformly negative phenomenon.
(3) In castigating “religion,” we may be unloading more baggage than we realize. People tend to equate commands, doctrines, structures, and rituals with religion. That’s why people want to be “spiritual but not religious.” And yet, Christianity is a religion that believes in commands, doctrines, structures, and rituals. As a Jew, so did Jesus. Jesus did not hate religion. On the contrary, Jesus went to services at the synagogue and operated within the Jewish system of ritual purity (Mark 1:21, 40-45). He founded the church (Matt. 16:18) and established church discipline (Matt. 18:15-20). He instituted a ritual meal and called for its perpetual observance (Matt. 26:26-28). He told his disciples to baptize people and teach them to obey everything he commanded (Matt. 28:19-20). He insisted that people believe in him and believe certain things about him (John 3:16-18; 8:24).
In short, we give people the wrong impression about Jesus and affirm unbiblical instincts about true spirituality when we quickly dismiss “religion” as antithetical to the gospel and at odds with God-honoring piety.