Proving God's Will

A Sermon Based Upon Romans 12: 1-5

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Sunday,   Nov. 2, 2014  (Homecoming at Flat Rock)

“Therefore I urge you, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.   And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.

 (Rom 12:1-2 NAU)

How can you know the will of God for your life?   That was a big question for teens and college students, when I was one myself.  I guess it should be, since when we are young we are still trying to figure out who we are and what we should do with our lives.   When we get older, the question is not so much who am I or what do I do, but why have things turned out the way they have, or why did God allow this to happen to me?   Interestingly, the whole question and concern about what is or isn’t the will of God always looks a lot like us.

In the year before the end of World War II, a lot of people, especially in Europe, where full of questions about “The Will of God”.   This prompted a great and gifted preacher of that time,  Leslie Weatherhead to preach about it which became the title of one of the most popular books ever written, which seeks to answer the question: What is The Will of God.   Pastor Weatherhead said that God’s will is so great, that we can’t understand in one way, but in several ways: God’s will includes God’s intentional Will (the things God’s wants to have happen),  God’s circumstantial will (the things God allows to happen) and God’s ultimate will (the things that God will accomplish, no matter what happens).   Those messages helped a lot of people to rise above the terrible things that were happening in England and in Europe, and the terminology still helps Christians today gain a greater perspective on what can’t be, what might be, and what must be, the will of God.  

The most important lesson I received from Weatherhead is that everything that happens in this world is not God’s will, nor is it what God wants to have happen.  God’s will is that which we must still pray for and what we must still partner with God to bring about, so that Christ’s prayer is finally answered and God’s will is “done on earth as it is in heaven”.    As things are right now, God’s will sometimes look much more like a wish or a dream, than a reality.  One day God’s dream will come true, but that day has not yet come.

When Paul wrote his great theological letter to the Romans, the first part of it was written to talk about the gospel and how it fit into the will and wish of God that all people be saved.  This is the wish of God and the will of God, but it is not yet the reality.   God wants it to be so, and Paul is preaching it as if it will be so, and he has been trying to lay out all the plans God has for the salvation of everyone, through the righteousness that has been revealed in Christ Jesus.  Paul has experienced this righteousness himself, through God’s love and grace and he wants to take that message to the world.   Paul knows that this is God’s will for him, but what about God’s will for us?   Where do we come in?

GOD’S WILL MUST BE PROVED RATHER THAN KNOWN

The first thing Paul says about God’s will for us and our own lives, is that this is ‘will’ that must be ‘proved’ rather than ‘known’.   In other words, you can’t know God’s will before you try it and are doing and proving it.  You don’t read, study, pray and discover God’s will like some magic truth that is hidden away in a hat like a rabbit to be revealed, but God’s truth has already been revealed and now we ‘prove’ the will of God by giving our lives to the truth God has revealed, so you can serve and become a ‘living sacrifice’ for what is good, acceptable, reasonable and perfect.

           

When I was praying about which college or university to attend, I did not wait around for some answer to be written in the sky, but I put my application into two schools where I felt I could study and learn.  I was trying to prove God’s will by doing, rather than knowing.  After I sent the applications in, I received an immediate answer from one school, but I did not receive any  letter of acceptance from the other.  So I acted upon the letter I received from Gardner-Webb and went to college there.  But how did I really prove this was God’s will for me?  It wasn’t until 6 months later, when I was already studying, already settled in, and already making new friends, that I received a letter from the other school, wondering why I did not show up.  It appears that somehow the acceptance letter got lost in the mail. 

But it wasn’t just the ‘lost letter’ that proved the will of God, but God’s will was finally proved by my willingness study at this school, stay in school and graduate.  Once, the Will of God was tested, as I was learning difficult truths to accept, and thought about transferring to the other school.   In talking to my Father, who wanted me to go to the other school, he advised me, against his wishes, believing it would be best for me to ‘finish what and where I started.”  This again was a moment when God’s will was proved, so that now my will was being joined with God’s will to do what needed to be done.  When I look back upon those days of formation and learning,  I now realize that I could have decided to go to either school and it could have turned out to be within the ‘will of God’.   

God’s will is not like picking up one of those ‘ducks’ at the County Fair and winning a prize, but it is more getting in the pond with the ducks and to start swimming toward the goal that is opening up for us, as we desire God’s dream.   The place where we begin to know God’s will is to will God’s will so much that we start doing the kinds of things that will prove God’s will to us.   In my situation, as well as in yours, finding God’s will is more than deciding or determining the specifics for our lives (where to study or what to do, who to marry, or what kind of work we should do), but it is more generally about the way we should live as we go toward the things we’ve decided and who we become, as we dive into our living and live our lives being led by the Spirit, not simply going our own way. 

GOD’S WILL IS ABOUT HOW YOU LIVE (and Die) 

“The problem with a living sacrifice” Chuck Swindoll once said, ‘is that a living sacrifice keeps trying to crawl off the altar.”  What’s makes God’s will difficult for most of us, is not that we don’t know what God wants or wishes of us, but it is that it is hard to follow and live the call and command God has on our lives.  Jesus calls us to a ‘cross’.  He said that when we ‘take up our cross, deny ourselves, and follow Him, this is when we are doing the will of God.  It is that kind of ‘hard’ decision making, which require deciding for good in a bad world, suffering for righteousness sake, and going and doing what we don’t necessary enjoy or want to do, this is what we know to be ‘hard’ about the Will of God. 

But why do you think God’s will is ‘hard’ like that?  Why is it easier to keep ‘crawling’ off the altar, to think that Jesus paid it all, so that we don’t have to pay a dime, than it is to keep giving our lives to God as a ‘living sacrifice’?   The answer ‘why’ is much easier to understand, than it is to do, isn’t it?  It is hard to do God’s will because it is not ‘our will’.   It is hard to do God’s will because sometimes it hurts.   It is hard to do God’s will because the world does not go with us and most of the time, to follow Jesus means we have to go it alone, or we have to go against the grain, or we find ourselves swimming against the currents of this world.   Why would we ever want to do something like this, and why would God make ‘his will’ so hard, like a cross to bear? 

Haven’t you wondered the same thing about other things in life?  Why does cake taste so good, is hard to resist, and can hurt us, if we eat too much of it?  Why do the things we like to do come easy, and not the things we have to do?  In other words, why can’t we make a living having fun, rather than going to work?   Why is the world the way it is, which challenges, tests, dares or defiles us?  Why is it easier to go downhill than uphill?  Does that sound silly to ask?  We all know what physics tells us, but this does not tell us why physics are the way they are and why life demands something from us. 

Everything that means anything requires something of us that is hard.  Life will kill us one way or another, but if we don’t resist and work against the negatives of the world and life, it’s very hard to end up in the positive column; either being positive in spirit, or having more days to live and more meaning and joy in life.  Life always puts demands upon us before it will bless us.  Like Jacob we have to wrestle against God, before he will bless us.   We will always have some kind of limp, before we really learn how to live.   It is through the struggle and the limp that life shows us exactly why some kinds of living are good for us, but other ways of living are not, and to learn this kind of lesson and to life it can even be hard, as hard as it is rewarding.   

When you think about it, the reason Jesus calls us to a way of life that ‘bears a cross’  and calls us to be ‘disciples’ is not really so strange when you understand the reality of what life is, what life really means, and how life must be approached, so that we can live with purpose, meaning, and joy.  Life is not a picnic, but that does not mean we can’t go on one from time to time.  But if we are always living only to go on picnics, or we are always living to be entertained, or if we are only living for what we want, then life will run out of the positive energy we need to keep on living, to keep on loving, and to keep on pressing “toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God that in Jesus Christ” (Phil. 3.14, NRSV) which God has established for us.  We need to live for a purpose and for a dream beyond our own will and wishes.  If we don’t, we become shortsighted, narrow minded, thoughtless, and our living becomes short-lived and empty of hope.  But when we make our lives an ‘altar’ where God can teach, use and transform us, then are living toward the dream that remains forever in God.

One more thing to note is that it is not as much ‘what’ we do, but ‘how’ we do it and ‘why’ ( or who) we do it for, that matters.   As Brother Lawrence, the monk from the Middle Ages once learned, you can even make a life of washing dishes to be important, if you are doing it for the good of others and you are doing it for holy purpose of God.   It just doesn’t take doing big things for big reasons to prove God’s will, but even doing small things for the right reasons is the way to know God’s presence and to discover what God wants in our lives and in the world.  This is why Paul says, that we ‘prove’ the will of God by ‘presenting our bodies’ for serving and worship, rather than giving us any more specifics.  There may be no specifics, other than to have us live our lives toward that which is acceptable, good and perfect which will prove out in God’s future.  This does not mean we have to be perfect, but we should live to do things that aim us toward God’s perfection for good.  

GOD’S WILL IS ABOUT WHO YOU CAN BECOME (Not Who You Are)

This brings us to the final part of ‘proving’ God’s will, rather than ‘knowing it’.  We prove God’s will not by finding it out, discovering a secret, or seeing a sign, but we prove God’s will by becoming who we can be as we live for good and for God. 

What God will wants for us is much more than to show us a path to take, a decision to make, or judgment to conclude.  God’s will may include any of these, but it is always much, much more than finding out something; it is more like doing what we already know we should do, and becoming who we never dreamed we could be.

Fleming Rutledge tells the story about walking in the cemetery when she visits her hometown of Franklin, Virginia, which at that time was a segregated as any other.  One of the burial plots contained the grave of a young man, and beside him his mother and father.   That young man was tragically killed when he was struck by a another car, which happened to be full of intoxicated black youths.  When she walks there she remembers the mother, who revealed to her as much as anyone else in her young, impressionable years, what it means to ‘be’ as well as what it means to ‘will’ and want to do God’s will.   Rutledge says she never has forgotten “how the dead young man’s mother, some weeks after the accident, sat in my parent’s living room having tea with my mother.  This woman was like most women in her town, churchgoing, deeply devout, Bible-reading and brought up from infancy to be a segregationalist…..”   Amazingly, she said this: “I don’t know why I don’t hate those drunken colored people.  I don’t know why.  I just don’t.” 

Do you understand what God wants the most?  It is already made clear what God wills.  God does not want us to be ‘conformed to this world’ but to be ‘transformed’ by the ‘renewing of our minds’ so that we become more Christ-like, more trusting, more loving, more servant oriented, working and doing the good we all know we should do, until we become what we know we should and can become.   

There is no real hidden mystery to God’s will.  Everything has been revealed already, except the great ‘mystery’ of the life and people we can be.  When we, as God's people give our lives to the dream of God, we discover and become the will of God.  The only great mystery left, Paul told young Timothy, is the ‘mystery of godliness’ (1 Tim. 3.16).   This is the Will of God we have to prove.  When we let God’s dream shape us, change us, and renew our thinking and our living, we are right on course, headed in the right direction God wills for us.  Are you going that way?   To go that way, you must first live that way.  This is what God wills and reveals.   Amen .