“Please pray that I may know God’s will for my life,” she asked. A good prayer request, who would not want to know God’s will for their life.  I have prayed that prayer and struggled with that question myself.

A Word of Caution

We live in a world culture of performance where everybody wants to know what their purpose is and boldly question you about what you are doing with your time and your life.  Everyone is out achieving goals, striving for success and working towards great outcomes. Our world culture constantly compares success and measures worth on performance.   Somehow, this need to perform can creep into our spiritual life without realising it and we end up wanting to know what God wills for us to do.

Therefore, checking our motives behind that prayer to know God’s will, is important.  Scripture tells us not to conform to the world and its way of thinking and behaving, but to have our minds renewed by the Word to find out God’s will.

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will.” (Romans 12:2)

Here are a few checks we need to make in our hearts as we pray for God’s will to be revealed to us.

  • We can start to confuse performance for God with His love for us. God’s love for us is not based on performance, He is love. (1 John 4:8) How well you, or I perform in our spiritual walk, will not change the way we are loved by God.  Some of this need to perform comes from the influence of the world, or from our childhoods, where parental love and performance were often tied up together.  But God does not love like humans do, God loves His way.  He Loves, full stop.

1 John 4:19  “We love because he first loved us.”

  • When our lives are in a lull, when we once served in a ministry at church and now don’t anymore, or when we feel stuck or without purpose, this question comes up in our prayers. What we often forget in this time is that our lives go through seasons.  Autumn and winter seasons in our lives can feel like we have lost contact with God’s will for our lives.  We start to think that things once revealed to us are no longer relevant and fail to consider the season we are in.  Sometimes God’s will has already been revealed to us, we are just in a season of waiting, or preparation.
  • We hear other believers speak about how God revealed to them what they should be doing with their lives, and we start to question why God has not revealed it to us. We often think we should be doing something “big” like evangelizing in some remote country, becoming a pastor or even a pastors wife, starting a church – surely we also need to be doing something “big”.  It is a classic case of watching someone else’s race for God and not realising that we have our own individual race for God specifically designed for us by God’s hand and with God’s purpose.

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us…”(Hebrews 12:1)

 Walk your own walk and do not covet what God has set out for someone else.  That said, God is not a secret keeper and promises in scripture to reveal His heart to us with the help of the Holy spirit.

“‘What no eye has seen,  what no ear has heard,
and what no human mind has conceived’ –
the things God has prepared for those who love him –

 these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.” (1 Cor 2:9-10)

 

  • Finally, we are in danger of becoming so focused on the specific will of God for “my life” and less focused on the general will of God as set out in scripture.  His general will is taught in the ten commandments and in Jesus’ Great Commandment:

Jesus replied: ‘“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: “Love your neighbour as yourself.  All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.’ (Matt 22:37-40)

Gods will for our lives is to first seek a relationship with Him above all others, and then spend the rest of our lives getting to know Him better.  As we seek Him out in a love relationship, He reveals His heart to us.  The Holy Spirit guides us in our daily reading of scripture showing us what we need to know about Him.  As we know Him, we ourselves are healed and learn to love ourselves.  God sees us as new creations, the old person we were is gone. (2 Cor 5:17)

Then God’s will is that from this relationship with Him, we receive power to love others.  It does not come naturally to us in a world where offence, unforgiveness and guilt are dominant in relationships, but God makes His power available to us so that we can love as HE does.

“ I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being,  so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love,  may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ,  and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

 Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us,  to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever!” (Ephesians 3:16-21)

So, when it comes to praying about knowing God’s will for your life, the truth is that God has already revealed it to us.  If we spend our time on just focusing on the general will of God as revealed in scripture, we would be 100% in the will of God.  It is a good thing to seek out God’s specific will for our lives, but first we need to become focused on living out His general will for our lives.

As we work at living out God’s general will for our lives, God in relationship with us, will reveal his specific will for our lives.

Thank you, Lord, that you have a plan and purpose for each of our lives and that the work You have started in us will be completed by You.  Thank you for the Holy Spirit, who reveals Your heart and purpose to us in the Word and guides us in our prayers and in our walk with You.  Help me to be more attentive to what the Spirit reveals to me in scripture and focus my efforts on creatively obeying that which You have revealed to me as Your purpose and will for my life right now.  Help me Lord to trust that in relationship with You, obedient to Your general will, I am exactly where I am supposed to be and if You have a specific will for my life, You will reveal it to me, in the appropriate season of my life.  Thank you for loving me just as I am.