Changes are coming to my church, which is only three years old and thus far has about 50 members. In that light, Sunday morning sermons this month have focused on the church’s core beliefs, such as the preeminence of Christ. (That was last week’s sermon; my notes are here.)

So yesterday’s message was about God’s Word, as in His written Word. But unlike some usual admonitions about making God’s Word supreme in our lives, my pastor talked about the need to base all this on delighting in the Word of God. We avoid error, receive life direction, grow to be like Christ and all that stuff mainly because we love the very words God has inspired.

Also — this has application for the current “God’s will hunting” series. After all, as noted below, one can’t find in the Bible specific instructions for many life choices. If we could, that would make the Word about us and mere behavior modification, not seeking delight in God Himself!

01.17.2010 — 2 Timothy 3:14 – 4:5 (Paul)

• Though typically we interact about other things, we must talk more about the Word of God, our growth and our spiritual struggles. Let’s encourage this, including on the church blog, ProvPress.org — living out our theology.
• During the Reformation, the defining battle cry was SOLA SCRIPTURA and four other solas: sola Christos, sola gratia, sola fide, and SOLI DEO GLORIA. Reformers, such as John Huss and Martin Luther, began recovering these: the defining issues, contrasted with the Roman Catholic Church’s emphases on traditions and human teachings above the truth of God’s Word — though they believed it was inerrant.
• Church authorities tried to prevent these truths from spreading by burning the Reformers’ books, and sometimes the Reformers themselves.
• If the Bible is not central and valued in our hearts, it will become to us just another book wit good advice on how we should live. Do the predictions of Paul to Timothy resonate today? Absolutely they do!
• “Everything in our faith rises and falls” on what we learn about God, Christ and the Gospel from the prophets’ and apostles’ words in Scripture.
• Thus, to disobey or disbelieve any word in Scripture is to disobey or disbelieve God too. Example: Romans 13, which says to obey human governmental authorities unless they contradict the clear word of God. Failing to treat others in a Godly manner, also, is to disobey Him.
• Paul does not say reading the Bible brings salvation — it is not itself the saving agent. But the Word of God reveals the Gospel, which a person hears, and which the Spirit uses to bring saving faith. Through the preaching of the Word, the Spirit opens people’s eyes to receive it.
• This is why we keep the Word central: because we want to spread the Gospel of Christ — justification — and this is how; and to grow to be like Him — sanctification.
• The Bible equips us for every good work by equipping us for God’s unique callings on our lives. Too often we want specific answers for what we should do in life, and what decisions to make in specific circumstances, but this is not how God’s Word works. Rather, as we read the Scripture, the Spirit reveals to us how to have wisdom.
• As we learn His Word, we have our hearts changed to find more and more satisfaction in Him, not in our sin, and not just reading lists of rules.
• Example: the Bible doesn’t tell husbands how to address every specific situation with their wives. But it does say to build our marriages on the relationship between Christ and His Church — the way He loves her.
• We all face choices like this. As we become more familiar with the Word’s teaching, we are more familiar with how the Spirit would have us act.
• Psalm 1: the writer delights in and meditates on God’s Word constantly. The man who does this, who loves God’s Law and studies it, will be blessed. Never reduce God’s will to rules of behavior! Rather, we should be Christians because we love and delight in God and His Word. We should taste such sweetness and crave more, and grow to be like Jesus!
• We bring forth fruit this way, in all seasons of life, good or bad. That is why we must hold to God’s Word. “That is our sustenance, and that’s our joy.”

How do Christians determine God’s will? Should we listen for Him to speak to us, even directly, before making choices about where to move, whom to marry, what Kingdom work to do?

My friend Isaac and I are having an email discussion about these topics, to adapt into this series called “God’s will hunting.” We began Jan. 1 with part 1: Christian assumptions, and last week’s column was part 2: Watch your language. All of the series will be available here.

Hey back, Isaac,

From the start in your last message, you zoomed right in on how our views of the Bible affects our views of God’s will. Is the Bible a book whose meanings can be plain to any reader? Or do we go to it with our Dan-Brown-style magnifying glasses, trying to find the Special Personal Meaning, a “Bible code” that is all so much more spiritual and high-falutin’ than the plain meaning of a text? ¹

Do you think a lot of this is rooted in how people view the audience of the Bible? Along with the evangelical “life decision” jargon you mentioned, there’s an idea about (I often fight it in myself) that Scripture is “life’s little instruction manual.” Or people say it’s “God’s love letter.” While surely both instructions for right living and truths of God’s love are in the Bible, saying these things without a bigger picture can lead to unhelpful misunderstandings. Scripture is primarily the story of God and what He has done. It is not mainly about us.

We’ve talked before about The Chronicles of Narnia and how people try to identify Lucy as Mary Magdalene or the Tisroc as King Herod, and things like that. Have you seen, perhaps, that Christians who do that with Narnia do the same thing with the Bible, and themselves?

I’m guessing this is another main source for the assumptions that lead to the “burning bush” notion of how to find God’s will. In addition to the confusion of God’s revealed will (in the Scriptures) and His hidden will (which none knows save Himself), it is the “violent flattening” (as blogger Dan Phillips called it) of Biblical descriptions into behavior prescriptions.

In this kind of view, the stories about King David are not just about how God used him, from a shepherd boy to a warrior to a king, to fulfill a role in the history of Israel, God’s chosen old-covenant people — and especially as a type of the real Christ to come. No, in the wrong way of seeing it, you, gentle reader, are like David, and you need to figure out how exactly God worked with him so you can follow the same guidelines. Do you think God may want you to be a “king” (wink wink) too? What are the “giants” in your life? Etc. …

And instead of seeing, say, Moses’ revelation from God in a burning bush (Exodus 3) as an example of how God was working with him at that point in the Story, people react as though God ought to work the same way with us too and give us a “burning bush.”

Instead of seeing Peter’s visions of a sheet filled with creatures as God’s unique word to the apostle that His Spirit would be bringing Gentiles into the faith (Acts 10), some people see having a vision as normative. It happened to Peter; why shouldn’t it happen to us? ² Thus something really vital in God’s Story, the blockbuster news that Gentiles and not just Jews would be brought into Christianity, is flattened right alongside whether you should get the more-durable Ford or the cheaper Volvo.

But the people in God’s Story (consisting of stories, poetry, history, records, etc.) are not stand-ins for us. He doesn’t say He will give everyone a burning bush, or a vision, or a “peace about it” as you said before.

I think the alternate view comes from the sense of un-Biblical pride that you also talked about. How often we find this in our own lives! Yet figuring out that the Bible, while written for us to be sure, is not about us personally, helps kill that pride. We see ourselves as players in God’s Story, not the stars of a story God writes about us. The self-centered view is subtle, and part of our sin nature. Yet God can change that.

And more and more, as God is helping us grow, we discover we like it that way! He is glorified. We give Him glory, not vice-versa. Slowly we begin to see that the Word is not merely a mirror to reflect our lives, or a collection of various Book of Proverbs-style slogans we can pick out and make refrigerator magnets out of and apply for better choices in daily living. Instead, we learn further to get under His Word, humbly, and let it teach us about Himself. That includes how He has directed people in the past, and how He directs us now.

… Which may lead us to the Holy Spirit. This past Sunday my church study group did a survey on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. He gets ignored a lot in some circles, and overly promoted in others — either side of which oddly falls into the quasi-Biblical God’s-will-hunting views. I wonder how that is?

But anyway, the Holy Spirit — we’ll have to tackle that One soon. How has He worked in the past to direct people? How does He work now in the lives of believers to direct them?

Also a huge issue in this is God’s sovereignty. Can we mess up His revealed commands, such as when we disobey His edicts about encouraging each other or staying holy? Yes, absolutely.³ Is that still part of His will? Yes, absolutely, in the sense that He is sovereign and has a “hidden” will, and no one can step outside of it.

I wonder — what would happen if, in some parallel world, God’s people did know about His hidden will in advance? We’d be too much like Him. He would lose glory. We would trust the knowledge, rather than learn to trust Him. And besides that, when we are finally beyond this old Earth and can review our lives from His perspective in Heaven (and later the New Earth), our stories would be much more boring, don’t you think?

His hidden will is a comfort: He is in charge. We can’t fail, because He can’t fail.

His revealed will is a caution: we’re still responsible. We can fail. But still, He never ever will.

Next Saturday: Isaac responds with further thoughts on how Christians, by saying “God told me this” specifically, actually risk taking His Name in vain, and how any of His direct commands to His people are never vague, in Part 4: Asking for wisdom.

(In this series, in the form of a personal email exchange, E. Stephen Burnett and Isaac M. are discussing the topic of God’s will — what it is, which parts of His will we’re expected to know, how to find out and more. The series began last week with part 1, Christian assumptions.)

Stephen,

Before I begin this series, let me first start by saying two things.

First, I approach this very cautiously. I think approaching the subject of God’s will requires an attitude of humility (also a difficult subject, because as Jerry Bridges puts it, “No one wants to write a book called ‘Humility and How I Achieved It’”). Yet it’s a very important subject, and I think that we need to discuss it, perhaps just to learn for ourselves.

I think the attitude of humility is essential not just because we don’t want to make overly strong claims about God’s will but also because I think our pride blinds and distorts our view of God’s workings in our lives.

Second, throughout this piece, I may knock around some Christian phrases we use. As one of my favorite profs says, “Sloppy language makes sloppy thought possible.” When we use non-Biblical terms to discuss spiritual concepts, we must proceed with caution. Examples could range from phrases like “God has a wonderful plan for your life”, “God called me to go…”, “God gave me a peace”, or they could be terms like “substitutionary atonement” and “trinity.” Just because a phrase isn’t in the scriptures doesn’t mean we can’t say it, but we must be sure that first, it’s an accurate representation of the Biblical concept, and second, that it doesn’t handicap and limit our thinking.

I would start by distinguishing between two “senses” of God’s will.

Like you mentioned, one is his revealed will. Mark Cahill wrote a brilliant piece on this once called “Don’t pray; just obey!” Far from diminishing the power of prayer, his point was that on issues such as sexual immorality, thievery and murder, we don’t have to pray to God for him to tell us what to do when the scriptures are very clear.

Then there is God’s sovereign will. This sort of will comes in with stories like Esther (a book where God is hardly mentioned), yet we can see how his sovereignty had it that he would preserve the Jews from annihilation. Another example is Joseph situation where he tells his brothers that what they meant for evil “God meant it for good” (Gen. 50:20). Paul also writes in 1 Peter 3:17 that for some they may suffer evil “if that should be God’s will,” so clearly this isn’t a command for everyone to deliberately suffer but states that some believers will suffer in God’s plan more than others.

Like you alluded, people often listen for some sort of “burning in the bosom” or pray for a clear answer to a decision. I think praying for an answer on discernment and knowledge is different, but for know I’m concentrating on people praying for a clear mandate on a decision.

We’ve created a sort of Bible code, and we didn’t need Dan Brown after all. We look at God’s sovereign will as something we have to figure out, as something we need to know or else we’re in trouble (or perhaps we worry that God will be in trouble because we didn’t figure out his sovereign plan).

I’m thinking right now of an example in my own life. During senior year in high school, I was wrestling between two very different college choices. One was my state university which was more local, less expensive but could still provide me with a good education if I worked hard. The other was a private Christian college in New York City that I’d heard nothing but great things about to which I’d been accepted.

God wasn’t closing doors on either side (another fallacy I believed in at the time and will address later), and everything looked good both ways.

So I prayed for him to tell me what to do. I prayed for months for an answer (literally into June before the start of the semester). I listened and listened and eventually realized that I wasn’t going to get a voice. I never kidded myself that a little tug one way or another was God’s clear voice for me, as I couldn’t find examples like that in scriptures (more on that later). I realized I wasn’t going to get a clear “Yes” or “No” from God and that I had to make a decision.

So I prayed for wisdom, looked at the pros and cons of each choice, asked for thoughts from my parents and made a decision to stay with my state university.

I think that was the beginning of when I started to explore more examples in scripture and particularly which examples applied to me.

I think a great deal of what we desire when we ask for God’s will is really God’s forecast. We don’t want to trust in him; we’d rather know if this job will work out long term, if this person will say yes to going out with us, and if living in this state or that state will be worse off for us in the long run. But in addition to not trusting in him, we also limit God in this way. We act as if he will punish us for not figuring out his cosmic plan or that not figuring it out will prevent him from accomplishing his purpose. I can find examples of neither in scripture. Yet despite our foulups in trying to discern God’s will, he’s not limited by that either.

In the end, much of it comes down to trusting God and realizing his sovereignty.

(Coming next Saturday: “God’s Will Hunting, part 3: Living His-story.” And now that Christmas and New Year’s Day breaks are over, new YeHaveHeard blog items will resume this week on the formerly usual Wednesday-and-Saturday schedule.)

(Looking for God’s will in the new year? We hope this series of columns, first written for a personal email exchange, may help sort through the many ideas, un-Biblical and otherwise, that get about Christendom about how to seek the Lord’s will in life decisions. Please post your thoughts below!)

How disgusting. Just before I prepared to start this introduction to our email exchange on the topic of God’s will hunting, I read this from an Associated Press story (Nov. 4, 2009):

Rev. Brenda Lamothe says in a complaint filed Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court that Rev. John J. Hunter of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church repeatedly demanded sex as part of “God’s will.”¹

Haven’t we all heard of similar situations in which someone said “God’s will is that you do this” when obviously His will is nothing of the sort?

In this case, claiming God wants someone to sleep with the pastor is clearly against the Bible’s revealed words on the subject (unless of course you’re the pastor’s wife). But in other cases, it’s not so easy to find a Bible verse to confirm or oppose the notion of God supposedly telling you to do something — such as take this job, go here and do this, shop at that store, buy that car.

As we talked about last night, Isaac, until recently I didn’t know this was such a controversy. Then a few years ago, fortunately at a time of life when I was considering some very big decisions, someone sent me a little book by John MacArthur with the title Found: God’s Will.

This book was an alert for me, yet mostly a relief. At the time, I didn’t try to listen for some super-secret voice of God before making a decision. So I should be okay, right? No, because in the back of my mind the silent assumption was there: if I did seek the Lord’s will like this, it would be a Very Spiritual Thing to do.

What a joy it was to read MacArthur’s reminders that as long as we are in God’s revealed will — what He has given us in the Bible, sufficient for us (2 Timothy 3: 14-17) — we have much more freedom to make life decisions. When we do, we will find faith after the fact in Him and that His sovereignty is being worked out in our “free” decisions!

Also until recently, I thought the listen-for-God’s-voice assumptions were just Out There in evangelicalism, sort of like always having goldfish crackers and fruit juice for Sunday-school children.

Then in April 2009, Pyromaniacs blog contributor Dan Phillips isolated at least one source of the virus: none other than the Blackabys, authors of Experiencing God and its curricula, and a study Bible. Reading Phillips’ direct and desperate critique (part 1 and part 2) shocked me.

This shock was not because of Phillips’ sternness, but because of the fact that anyone would directly propagate this notion: that we, like the Biblical saints and prophets, must be sure that an extra-Biblical choice, especially a big one, is God’s will before we make it. Otherwise, we’re guilty of disobeying direct words from God, we won’t be walking with Him, and there will be consequences (!).

Phillips says he isn’t caricaturing the Blackabys’ view. I believe him. I’ve seen this kind of reliance on “revelation” outside the Bible among “charismatic” Christians. But it’s also among the Baptist-friendly Blackabys who say things like (direct quote, click here for context): “The Holy Spirit is to function in us in the same way that Jesus led his disciples.”

Red alert! Where does the Bible say that? (Might this even be limiting the Holy Spirit?)

Here is the main issue with such ideas, writes Phillips — it’s “Bible in 2D”:

In order to get here, a fundamental, grave and pervasive hermeneutical error is essential to the Blackabys’ position. There must be a great and violent flattening of revealed, redemptive history. Pivotal moments in the Bible are pounded down, mashed and flattened into illustrations of daily Christian living. Direct, binding, inerrant prophetic revelations are radically down-sized into illustrations of God nudging us today towards a particular spouse or church ministry or university course major. Prophets who speak for God are shriveled into everyday Christians listening for that still, small murmur the the [sic] Bible never calls us to seek.

After learning more about the Bible’s main message of redemptive history (i.e., it’s not just a bunch of stories for moral examples) this strikes me as such a travesty to how we are meant to read the Scripture.

Equally bad, it will wreck people’s lives as they’re sitting around, waiting for God to show them the outcome of a big decision or spiritually confirm it in advance. That spins off all kinds of Biblical true-meaning mutations: you have to “put out a fleece” a la Gideon; you have to listen for a “still, small voice” to confirm a certain choice is what God wants; or you have to have a kind of “inner peace” from God (not unlike the Mormons’ “burning in the bosom” experience) about a decision before you make it.

I’m sure these beliefs have affected my life in the past. At least I can think of several occasions where I just didn’t make a decision because I subconsciously expected someone or something else to make it for me².

I now see how such behavior is immature and doesn’t glorify God, Who “gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control” (2 Timothy 1:7).

Where I’m still confused is where these assumptions come from among Christians, especially among less-“charismatic” believers. I had thought they tried to base everything in the revealed Word rather than subjective leadings! We can’t blame only the Blackabys either. I understand you hadn’t heard of them before, and yet you’ve previously had those assumptions too. I’d love to hear your story, compare notes, and discuss why this approach to God’s Will Hunting is un-Biblical and doesn’t work. Over to you …

— E. Stephen Burnett

(Next week — God’s Will Hunting, part 2: Watch your language.)

(Continued from Christian myths, part 1: Cautions before busting and Christian myths, part 2: To bust or not to bust.)

What do you do if someone says music with a beat is evil? Or that anything except music with a beat is evil? What if you hear someone quote a verse and interpret it in a way that you know isn’t what the verse means at all? Or maybe a Christian friend keeps telling you (I hope gently) that you’re views are against the Bible. Is it always wrong to bring this up? Divisive? Unloving?¹

What I’ve found is that sometimes it can be, if love is not the main motive. Yet love doesn’t automatically mean you look past lies. Scripture presents both sides: love, and uphold truth.

As promised, to end this little series: three reasons, Biblically based, to bust Christian myths.

1. Much of Scripture specifically refutes wrong beliefs with the truth.

This is especially true in the epistles. With few exceptions (Romans, Philippians), most of them were written in direct response to falsities. They didn’t just write the truth and ignore the lies.

Paul penned Galatians because they were dealing with Jewish legalistic leaders, the Judaizers, who sought to add to the Gospel with new rules and regulations.

The Corinthian church got Paul’s scorchers (especially 1 Corinthians) because they were compromising with culture and buying into false beliefs about the body.

Jude’s short book would have been written only about what Christians had in common — salvation (verse 3) — but he switched and wrote about lies.

I could even suggest that God allowed humans to sin so that His perfection would be magnified even more. Though Scripture doesn’t say this exactly, I’m guessing that in the New Earth we’ll find the truth (if we ever do) is close to that, anyway. At the very least I can say this: for me, learning to debunk the lies makes the truth, and the God of truth, seem even more glorious.

2. We must know more about how to pick out Christian lies in our own lives.

Any Christian’s growth to be more like God comes from God. Yet we don’t just sit there like fatalists and wait for this to happen. The Bible still encourages us to try, though we know it is actually God working in us (Philippians 2: 12-13). God works His will through what we do.

Understanding about spiritual truth also comes from the Spirit (1 Corinthians 2: 14-15). Yet we’re still encouraged to fight for it. Paul’s encouragement to Timothy does say not to argue about mere words, and avoid “irreverent babble.” But the apostle also says to him, rightly handle the word of truth (1 Timothy 2: 14-16)! ² The apostle’s advice to him surely applies not just to young Christian pastors, for we find similar admonitions to all believers. Avoiding “irreverent babble,” including false doctrines, and seeking the truth takes action — action God enables.

Have you seen what I’ve come to see — that many Christians are very capable of knowing, receiving and loving God’s truth, even while carrying on in beliefs that are contradictory? Might it be God’s grace that enables them not to see the contradiction and be mostly okay anyway?

But it might also be God’s grace that brings a caring friend, a firm correction from a pastor, a well-placed book, or a web-article that happens by, to show what Scripture really says.

Sometimes it takes a direct word about a specific belief to show how it doesn’t match the Bible.

Figure A:

When I was younger, I had the default view many Christians have about following God’s will. I thought that very likely the most “spiritual” thing to do in seeking God’s will was to get a Still Small Voice in my head that would say so. Or there would be a sign to confirm that a decision was the right one. Or it would somehow be so spiritually obvious what school major to choose, which job was the right one, whom God wanted me to marry, that sort of thing.

The difference was, I actually never followed that method exactly! I just thought something like this: well, if I did live that way, that would be so much more Spiritual, wouldn’t it?

I was not a false Christian. I believed the Gospel. I loved Jesus. But still I had the wrong ideas, buried deep down in my head. I don’t even remember anyone teaching them to me. And I had not read some book about it. They were just floating around, in church culture, unchallenged.

It took specific debunking of those ideas — including a bold little book by John MacArthur called Found: God’s Will — to show me how these subtle notions didn’t match the Gospel at all.³

3. We are better able to help Christian friends who still believe the lies.

Surely this isn’t just me whose afternoon can be ruined by hearing that someone I know — or a friend or acquaintance of someone I know — is getting deeper into some anti-Biblical belief.

• Based on what she has said, a young woman is very likely sure, based on church teachings or lack thereof, that suffering and trouble are almost always from the Devil.
• A young man without a father figure in his life is drawn to “patriocentrist” circles. By that I mean a false system of safety, family structure, culture influence and personal holiness at least as long as you follow the rules and become a “man” in the patriocentrist leaders’ way.
• Another teenage boy, raised in a strongly Christian homeschooled environment, brilliant and gifted, is kept from attending any college because he is convinced it might corrupt him.
• A woman on an internet forum is convinced there can be something called “Christian Deism” that denies the whole point of Jesus’ mission.

This site was partly started as a resource to reach out to such people. Whether it’s seemingly little lies like looking for God’s will in wrong ways, or bigger errors like Jesus-taught-a-“social-Gospel,” believing myths doesn’t just make as wrong academically. False belief hurts people. It ruins lives. In the worst cases, it leads to someone not having been a Christian at all.

So go myth-bust. Let’s labor to locate, target, and systematically destroy the lies, mostly in ourselves — errors and myths that don’t honor God and can hurt either us or others. It’s not just good for goodness’ sake. It’s to grow in God’s truth and glorify Him above all else.