God Calling: Spiritual Direction for People in the Real World

By Jeffrey J. Kilmartin

God Calling provides groundbreaking and provocative insights into how God works in the world through the gift of his Holy Spirit. In the NT we do not find the saints praying and constantly asking God what to do; instead, the Spirit continuously leads and guides, giving Spiritual Direction for People in the Real World--people just like you! Looking at the biblical record as a whole, God Calling delivers a paradigm shift for our understanding the indwelling Spirit's impact on Christians' decision-making, prayer life, spiritual practices, and knowing God's will. Bringing spiritual warfare down to the real world, God Calling helps us correct some of our hyper-spiritual practices, while giving clear spiritual direction to enable followers of Jesus living in the real world to be wise, mature, and Christ-like, and for his church to be robust, proactive, and confident.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Jul 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781725266971

Jeffrey J. Kilmartin

Jeffrey J. Kilmartin, a rural church pastor for over twenty years, is now serving as a seminary lecturer and missionary in Central and West Africa, ministering among an unreached people group. He and his wife, Sonya, have four grown children and presently live in Banyo, Republic of Cameroon.

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God Calling

Spiritual Direction for People in the Real World

Jeffrey J. Kilmartin

God Calling

Spiritual Direction for People in the Real World

Copyright © 2020 Jeffrey J. Kilmartin. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Resource Publications

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Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version® NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.TM Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scriptures marked KJV are taken from the KING JAMES VERSION (KJV): KING JAMES VERSION, public domain.

Scriptures marked TM are taken from the THE MESSAGE: THE BIBLE IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH (TM): Scripture taken from THE MESSAGE: THE BIBLE IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH, copyright©1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.

Scripture taken from the Holy Bible, NEW INTERNATIONAL READER’S VERSION®. Copyright © 1996, 1998 Biblica. All rights reserved throughout the world. Used by permission of Biblica.

for

JHK

Table of Contents

Title Page

Preface

Chapter 1: Theology from the Margins

Chapter 2: God’s Will for Your Life

Chapter 3: Post-Pentecost Decision-Making

Chapter 4: The Spirit in You

Chapter 5: God Calling

Chapter 6: A Providential Question

Chapter 7: Whither the Disciplines?

Chapter 8: Hyper-Spirituality

Chapter 9: Evangelistic Prayer

Chapter 10: Spiritual Warfare

Appendix A: God Calling

Appendix B: God Calling

Appendix C: Reflections on a Death-Dealing God (?!)

Bibliography

Preface

This book had its genesis in the summer of 2016, after a series of conversations with a colleague over the phenomenon of conversational prayer. From there it grew to include topics like the will of God, decision making, the place of prayer, and spiritual warfare in the life of the Christian. The theme of how the Holy Spirit works in the lives of Christians gave the most surprise, as well as the deepest joy.

Most of the writing has been done in the wee hours of the morning, between 3:30 and 7 a.m., before the regular workday began. During the course of writing my station and geographic location in life changed several times, as I transitioned from being a pastor of a small, rural church and became a missionary ministering in West and Central Africa.

The focus of the work never wavered, however, as I had in my mind the individual follower of Jesus and the larger evangelical church in North America. My desire has been to help them become more mature, robust, and confident as Christians, and to produce a more proactive, agile church, through a better understanding of God’s work in us through his Spirit. If that has been accomplished to any small degree, the glory will have to go to God, who has been my help throughout.

Thanks to those who read portions of the manuscript and provided helpful commentary: Sonya Kilmartin, Garry Stewart, Sammy Weber, and Kerry Bender. To my sister, Kerry Kilmartin, I must also give thanks for the timely encouragement she gave to a tired writer.

While all these readers helped to correct errors in the text, any that remain are my own.

Jeff Kilmartin

Banyo, Republic of Cameroon, Central Africa

February 8, 2020

1

Theology from the Margins

An Introduction

Theology is biography. Our lives are shaped by hundreds of factors outside us, beyond our control. Those factors form the circumference of our lives, inform our inner space, and, to a certain degree, cause us to conform to our world. This is true even in so personal a matter as what we think about God, even if we barely think of him at all. We best do theology in community, but where we live, how we grew up, what we do—nay, even what our mothers and grandmothers did or didn’t do—will all serve to ensure that our theology remains a profoundly personal enterprise. While it is the Spirit’s task to transform us once we submit our will to his, the flotsam and jetsam of our background will continue to impress itself upon our thinking.

When we move from one world to another we discover our theology challenged by those from the other world. Even so simple an exercise as reading a book written by someone else is a small way of moving between places and worlds, and when we read, we discover—sometimes to our consternation—that we are being confronted by viewpoints/worldviews different from our own. For that reason, it is good to know from whence a book comes.

Recently, when chatting with a colleague about some of the contents of this book, I was asked if I believed my understanding of theological truth (on some specific non-essential issues) was in line with mainstream evangelical thinking, or whether I thought I was on the outer fringe. I replied that I am definitely on the fringe, writing from the theological margins towards the center.

I am not on the fringe because of my ethnicity, or gender, or because of the church I belong to. I am a white Canadian male, having an ecumenical sympathy for the broader church, both mainstream and evangelical. I grew up in a nominally Roman Catholic home, but learned what it was to truly follow Jesus through the ministry of a Mennonite Brethren Church. After fellowshipping in various mainline churches, and ministering in several Pentecostal denominations, I discovered that, by theological conviction, I am actually a Baptist (go figure), of the conservative variety. My church affiliation does not put me in the margins.

Still, the places from which God Calling has been written are places on the margins in a couple of different ways.¹ As I wrote the first part of this work, the church building in which I pastored sat between several cow pastures, with canola and wheat fields surrounding it. Every once in a while, I would have to call the neighbors to fix the hole in their fence and come get their cows off the grass under my kitchen window. This was my station (in two different churches) for about twenty years of ministry, and it is fair to say that I have imbibed a good bit of the farming ethos over that time (though I am still far from being smart enough to be a farmer myself). I did not go out there to write in a quiet setting—it was my home; I got my bearings there and must admit to still feeling uncomfortable if I have to spend too much time in the city. Naturally, I am not composing On Walden Pond, but I want the reader to know from which geographical margin this comes. As a rule, farmers are not trend-setters, nor do they normally mix with those segments of the population that are, so we might say that socially this work has been written on the periphery. As Kathleen Norris wrote of her own rural setting, It is difficult to feel, in the western Dakotas, that one is on the cutting edge of any cultural phenomenon. The stiff breeze of the zeitgeist usually passes us by.²

Through all of my years of ministry (close to thirty now) it has been made very clear that this setting is de facto marginal with respect to the mainline evangelical church in North America (NA). I was happy and proud to be a rural, small church pastor—but only an alien right off the mothership would mistake a small-town pastor’s position as being anything but marginal in our contemporary religious culture (not to mention the surrounding secular culture). While small churches might collectively minister to more people than the larger ones, and while rural ministry is an important and dignified service, these churches and those who serve in them do not normally gain any kind of voice in the larger Christian community.

The view from the sticks is unique. This is not a bad thing in itself; it allows for a certain objective distance, an opportunity for a different perspective to be shared with the broader Christian community. It is like travelling to a far country in order to better understand the peccadillos of your native home.³

In fact, during the writing of this work that is exactly what we have done. My wife and I transitioned from a rural pastorate in Canada to become missionaries in Central and West Africa (in Cameroon and Nigeria, where we don’t talk about the sticks so much as being out in the bush). These days, in addition to the occasional cow, I am chasing goats, chickens, and snakes out of the garden, so that may give you an idea of our present, marginal, station in life. Still, it does provide another unique perspective from which to view life in NA, and I believe that some of my theological instincts have been sharpened as I have learned from my African brothers and sisters.⁴

The title of the book is God Calling—and, no, the reason is not because anything more pretentious failed to be found. I hesitated to give it that title for obvious reasons, but it has been kept because the work is simply trying to allow God’s written word to be heard. Many books seem to cherry-pick from what Scripture says, taking proof texts from here and there which support their position. I have tried to be as comprehensive as possible, bringing as much of the text to light as can be. At the end of the day, my aim has been to hear and apply what God has given to us through the written word. Since I believe this constitutes a call from him, that is the title.

The subtitle of the work is Spiritual Direction for People in the Real World. Though I hope it will benefit many kinds of people, it is primarily addressed to evangelical Christians in the NA church, who, much of the time anyway, live in the real world. This is the church I belong to (still) and the one with which I am most familiar. It is that part of the church which seems at the present time to have more use of open rebuke than hidden love (Prov 27.5) than any other. I love and care deeply about this church and believe that a perspective from the margins will be helpful to us.

What I have to say to and about the church is marginal because it will go against the grain of much of what I read in books, hear taught from our pulpits, and find expounded around the latte cafes. Although it is not biblically unorthodox, it comes from the outer fringes of our theological imagination. Seeking to be grounded in Scripture, its reading of the text is at times profoundly different from how some of the central thinkers within evangelical circles are reading the same passages. Now and then they seem to be writing to people who live in some kind of spiritual cloud-cuckoo land; I am writing to those who live in the same, real world that I live in.⁵ The work will not be particularly technical; I am not writing to academics, but to fellow pastors, and the man and woman in the pew.

Naturally I am writing because I believe there are some things that need to be said to this church. Instead of a confident, robust, spiritually mature church I see nervous, weak, spiritually immature believers. Overall, the church is not healthy, and while some of the reasons may be obvious to a few, I think the aspects of theological thinking outlined here, and the point of view given, will cause surprise to many. Lord willing, I might be able to speak to this situation and help effect some positive changes. That, at any rate, is my aim—God helping me.

How will I try to do this?

Let me tell you a short story. I remember sitting as a student in a Bible school chapel one morning, and the guest speaker was really revving things up. He finally asked us all whether we wanted to be part of a New Testament (NT) church or not. I knew, just like everyone else knew, that the obvious, rhetorically induced, answer to the question should be a resounding, Yes! But just then (from a class being taught by a great teacher in that school) my head was full of the problems of Paul and the church he had founded in Corinth, so I neither put up my hand nor shouted along with the rest. It is a generally known fact that most of the epistles in the NT are situational, and the situations that gave them birth were rarely positive. I had no wish to wind up in a church filled with false teaching, carnality, or people who are full of themselves. I have enough of those kinds of problems just walking around in my own skin.

But the speaker did have a valid point after all, and that is, the closer we get to the NT—to the Bible, let us say—the closer we get to Jesus and the life he intends for us to live. Thus, my basic premise is that the best interpreters of Scripture are those living within its pages—patriarchs, matriarchs, apostles, prophets, disciples. The apostles who breathed the same air as Jesus understood better than anyone else what he meant when he taught us, for instance, to "ask, seek, and knock," so listening to them describe their experience of this prayer will be our own best guide. For that reason, in this book we are going to do a lot of Bible study together, from the Pentateuch to John’s Revelation, and everything in between.

We will be attentive to the Bible, hearing what it says even when we may not like or agree with what we learn (because, for me at least, sometimes the Bible does not conform to my preconceived notions, and I have to change my mind about it!). We will come with specific questions in mind, and see how those questions are answered in what should prove to be a quite thorough manner.

To that end I invite the reader not just to read along with me, but to wrestle with what we might find and what I have to say; to argue with what might be disagreed with; to fact-check the Scripture used; to be a Berean, rereading the biblical record; to be open to new insights. I hope to change some minds and, ultimately, some of the spiritual practices, I see and hear and read about in our society.

With respect to spiritual direction, the most important element is our practice of prayer. Prayer is recognized as the engine that drives not only the individual Christian life, but also the life of the corporate church. It is a truism to say that how we pray matters a great deal, but it bears saying today because Christians in general seem to pray so poorly. Prayer expresses a theology or it is only the outlet of a blind and shallow emotion,⁶ and the sad fact is that some of our theological teaching has impoverished our practice of prayer.

For this reason, the largest part of the book will deal with prayer in one way or another. My goal here is to outline a mature, biblical spirituality which should lead to robust, confident, active Christians. Thus, aspects of the study of prayer will be quite proactive, going back to the Source and seeing how prayer was practiced by Jesus and those nearest the Lord.

On the other hand, some of what I have to say about prayer will be reactive, dealing with contemporary teaching I think is unbiblical and harmful. I make no apology for dealing in this way: the Christian church in NA is in trouble, and this is not a time to be nice, or PC, or to beat about the bush. Here I take comfort and courage in the precedent set by our Lord who, when occasion demanded, could be quite sharp and pointed.⁷ We have received some poor teaching from folks who ought to have known better.

I began work on this book shortly after reading a volume on what is called conversational prayer, or, alternately, hearing God. It was an interesting concept, and I looked forward to learning about it from a well-respected author.⁸ It turned out that hearing God was concerned not just with prayer, but also with spiritual guidance, and the whole gamut of issues surrounding the will of God: three matters of key importance in the Christian life. After I put the book down, however, I gave my head a shake, and wondered how such unbiblical material could be sold to so many seminary-graduated pastors (and from thence, passed on to the people in their pews). I tried to convince the colleague who had recommended the book to me of its shortcomings, but he could not hear me. Meanwhile, I saw some of the real-time damage the teaching (from various sources) about hearing God in prayer was doing; it is not well grounded in Scripture and tends to make us anxious, self-centered, inactive, and even to lose our faith.

Let me offer a short story to make this important point. Summer Bible Camp is a great place to fan faith into greater flame, or to see God create faith where none existed before. But as places which act as intense theological training schools, when their teaching is off (let us say), they may also cause a lot of damage to young spirits.

One young man told me the story of camp leaders sitting around the campfire late at night; he was one of them. They were receiving teaching on conversational prayer and how to hear God talk to them, and were being encouraged to listen and hear him speak to them right then and there. The young man did everything he was told; he settled his heart and mind, he listened with expectation, he waited upon the Lord. And waited, and then waited some more. But for some reason, while God had apparently spoken to several of his friends, he had not chosen to speak to this young man. Confused and hurt, he began to doubt his faith; eventually he wound up doubting the very existence of God, and he lost his faith, in part, over the teaching he had received. This is just one of many stories that might be told regarding this teaching and its ill effects.

Furthermore, if the two top scourges of the Christian church in NA (and NA society in general) are individualism and materialism, it can be argued that this brand of teaching contributes to each ill plague in one degree or other. Believing all of that to be true, I determined to do something about it.

The spiritual heart of the book, in many ways, comes in the second, third, and fourth chapters, dealing with God’s will, decision-making, and the Spirit’s work in the Christian, respectively: God’s Will for Your Life (in 5 minutes or less); Post-Pentecost Decision-Making; and The Spirit and You. It is saying nothing new to declare that these three themes are of great practical importance for Christians and the church (and the world around them), but for some reason these issues typically cause much confusion and doubt among the followers of Jesus. There has already been a definitive work written on all these things, however, and by sticking close to the NT text, we should find they are not at all as mysterious and complicated as they have sometimes been made out to be.

It was these sections I most enjoyed contemplating and writing about because in working through them I was constantly reminded of the goodness and grace of God, how much he loves and cares for us, and what he has done for us through the unfathomable gift of himself through his Son, the Lord Jesus, and his Spirit. As well, writing these chapters gave me cause for hope and joy that readers would find them helpful and truly life-changing. I trust that, because they adhere so closely to Scripture, they will be part of that process whereby we are "transformed by the renewing"⁹ of our minds (Rom 12.2).

The issue of prayer and hearing God is dealt with in the fifth chapter, the longest in the book, plus in two appendixes at the end of the book. The two appendixes, called, God Calling: A Bible Study—OT Findings, and God Calling: A Bible Study—NT Findings (with apologies for the lack of imagination) comprise the Bible study proper, going through the Old Testament (OT) and NT fairly thoroughly. They are seeking to discover exactly what the Bible has to say about God’s communication with his people. I have put these sections as appendixes at the back because at some points they make for fairly heavy reading, and I did not want to anesthetize my readers. At the same time, I have left them in the book because they are an important part of the whole, and I hope some serious students will take the time to read them after they have finished going through the rest.

The fifth chapter itself, called God Calling: A Bible Study, contains the basic substance of the appendixes, along with some theological musings as to why God’s conversations with people are the way they are. The principles we find there are then compared to those offered by the advocates of the practice of conversational prayer, and we are able to see how the latter holds up in light of Scripture. In fact, the latter teaching does not hold up well at all, and so this chapter is a clearing of the decks, as it were, being a close inspection of the Bible while dealing with some poor teaching at the same time.

The next half-section on prayer comes in the sixth chapter, entitled A Providential Question. It deals with NT petition as it pertains to material things. I find it striking what we do and do not find being prayed for in the NT. Coupled with this, how material things are actually handled by the NT church is equally remarkable. I have deemed it a half-section because I have not yet added up all the implications of what we see there regarding prayer, possessions, and providence, but have merely outlined some of the more obvious and prominent possibilities. If my "seeing through a glass darkly" is only half right, however, then it will be seen that our NA churches are failing miserably in regard to how we treat material things and prayer. This may come as a surprise to very few people, but even so, this may be the most provocative and controversial section on prayer; surely it will be the one with the highest psychological walls built against it, and subsequently, I fear, the most neglected.

A different ill condition coming in for critique within the church is the current fascination with the spiritual disciplines, and this theme comprises the seventh chapter. To be sure, there are some good aspects to the teaching on the disciplines where it overlaps with Jesus’ charge to teach "them to obey everything I have commanded you (Matt 28.20). However, the claims made for them go far beyond Scripture, and this teaching ends up becoming a manifestation of spirituality gone overboard: what I call hyper-spirituality, and what Kathleen Norris characterizes as the narcissistic babble that masks itself as spirituality."¹⁰ Since the number of so-called disciplines differ with each proponent,¹¹ and since they seem to be proliferating like mystical rabbits,¹² we will concentrate on just one—fasting—which should effectively serve to deal with the whole. From Scripture, we will find that individual or personal fasting was not a spiritual discipline practiced by either Jesus or Paul (or any of the other apostles); in addition, we will discover that where the NT does comment on individual fasting,¹³ the practice (and the so-called spiritual disciplines in general) comes under severe censure.

A major ailment I am seeking to combat in the church is what I call hyper-spirituality, which may be quickly defined as a desire to be more spiritual than the Bible warrants. Like the idea of hearing God in prayer, this concept is intricately related to a host of practical concerns. Apparently, it is possible to be overly-spiritual about a great many things: thus, one can liken hyper-spirituality to a large tree, having many low-hanging branches with fruit looking like it is good to eat, pleasing to the eye, and seeming to promise spiritual blessing—but ultimately leading to a slow spiritual malaise. The branches of this Leviathan-like tree have spread to virtually every area of our lives, and its pervasive and unhealthy influence in our churches will require a wide broom to sweep it out. Some of the unhealthy consequences of taking this fruit will have already been seen by this point: in chapters five and seven, dealing with the notions of hearing God and the spiritual disciplines. In this eighth chapter I will lay out some of the lesser manifestations of hyper-spirituality.

It is a happy chance that I take my place in the rural farming community, for by being out, standing in the field (as the wits would say), among the agrarians, I find myself with folks who are not too apt to be hyper-spiritual themselves. They not only work the earth; they are by nature down to earth. Most farm folk I know have a fairly conservative view of Scripture, prayer, how God works in the world, and what our responsibilities are toward him and one another. With respect to farming they can be remarkably forward thinking and progressive,¹⁴ but with regard to the things of God they are not prone to novelty. While hyper-spiritualism has been around since forever (as we will see), much of its post-modern coloring is quite new, and farmers are just not inclined in that direction. Hence, the farming community is a good out-of-the-way place from which to comment.¹⁵ With respect to hyper-spirituality, then, let me hopefully call this book a small effort in the right direction.

The final full unit on prayer is the ninth chapter on Evangelistic Prayer. My pastor’s heart thinks we can do much better here; I fear many of our prayers in this regard are hitting the ceiling fan and fluttering in pieces to the ground. We have fooled ourselves into thinking our prayers here are more effective than they are. Meanwhile, the lost need salvation and our righteous prayers are surely needed. What is said here goes against the contemporary evangelical stream in a big way, but if I am right about what the NT saints taught and practiced (and this is the question, of course), then what is said there should help the church and serve the kingdom in a substantial way.

The tenth chapter in the book deals with Spiritual Warfare: Living in the Real World, in a way I think people living in the real world will get and be able to appropriate. The usual, lurid notion of spiritual warfare seems designed to appeal to wanna-be Christian ghost-busters. Living in Africa does not allow one the luxury of thinking the darker spiritual realm does not exist, but even Africans live in the real world. Looking at spiritual warfare through the lens of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, seeing how spiritual warfare there fits into the whole of our lives, should give us a more realistic and useful understanding of the normal Christian’s spiritual life. I hope this final chapter will serve both as a corrective and a fitting capstone to the whole book.

I am optimistic that you, good reader, will find all of this to be good, practical theology; a study of God and the things of God as they pertain to real life in our homes and on our streets. None of the work seeks to be particularly original or novel—though some of what I found came as a surprise to me!—it is just trying to hear what the word of God is saying, to allow us to once again hear God Calling. The goal is for change in the church: for it to be more robust, confident, and agile. That is to say, for the church to be more mature in its faith; to be more confident of its God, and the power and authority he has bestowed upon it; and to be able to act and react in the world much more quickly than it seems able to at present. For a renewal like this to happen in the current popular theological climate, we must be willing to question long-taken-for-granted teaching, change (i.e., to cease and desist) some of our present spiritual practices, and be prepared for a divine wind from the margins to come and blow some of the smog from the scene.

1

. I thought of calling this introduction, Marginal Theology, but, even with tongue squarely in cheek, I thought that might send the wrong kind of signal.

2

. Norris, Amazing Grace,

122

. When she was writing this my family was living across the border from her, just north of the Dakotas, in Manitoba.

3

. In another context, Bryan Stone writes, Ironically, it may be that it is precisely from a position of marginality that the church is best able to announce peace and to bear witness to God’s peaceable reign in such a way as to invite others to take seriously the subversive implications of that reign (Evangelism After Christendom,

11

).

4

. Commenting on another kind of margin, Kwame Bediako, a Ghanaian theologian writes, Clearly, the sharper vision was the one from ‘the underside,’ from the periphery, not from the centre of empire (Christianity in Africa,

136

).

5

. Except they live mostly on the NA continent, while I am presently in Africa.

6

. Dix, Shape of the Liturgy, xviii.

7

. See, for example, Matt

23

in its entirety.

8

. To be dealt with below.

9

. All scripture references, unless otherwise noted, are from the

2011

NIV.

10

. Norris, Amazing Grace,

7–8

.

11

. I counted seventy-five (

75

!) disciplines listed by Calhoun. She notes that since the first edition of her book came out, she discovered

13–14

more disciplines (Spiritual Disciplines Handbook,

7–8

,

11

).

12

. For instance, it has been decided that celebration is a discipline. To celebrate is good in and of itself, of course, and the notion is not quite an oxymoron . . . but really! It reminds me of the time a young university woman told a crowded room to break out into spontaneous applause when her favorite politician walked in. My dorm mates and I just looked at one another and grimaced. More in chapter

7

.

13

. This is important because those who teach about this claim the NT has nothing to say about it, either negative or positive. Again, more on this in chapter

7

.

14

. Just ask any farm wife about the latest, most up-to-date, modern, computer-equipped air seeder, tractor, or combine, her farming husband has managed to purchase!

15

. I do not wish to idealize or romanticize our notion of farmers. They are pretty much like any other category of persons when it comes to having faults and being in error. In this particular matter, however, they have the happy circumstance of not living in the mainstream where all the (what I am calling) poor teaching can easily reach them. Nor have they much time for it.

2

God’s Will for Your Life

(in 5 minutes or less)

A Nigerian Parable

On one of my first forays into the backcountry of Nigeria, I was invited to be the guest speaker at a church where a baptismal service was to take place. I went with my oldest son, Robert (who was about seventeen at the time), and two Nigerian friends. We got to the small church around 7:30 in the morning, when I was to give the baptismal candidates a bit of a devotional talk before the rest of the congregation came in. That done, we settled into worship while wondering how they would actually baptize them, since there was no way to have sufficient water in the building.

We didn’t wonder long, as about 9 a.m. the whole church processed outside and began singing, walking, and dancing its way down the road. We went for about a half hour, to a place where a creek flowed under the highway through a culvert and formed a bit of a pond on the other side, deep enough to immerse our new Christians. There were twelve men and women being baptized that day, and the pastor took them out into the water one by one, while someone on the dry ground gave some kind of talk from the side—a short homily, reading, or reminiscence of the person. Each of those little talks took about five to ten minutes, so—if you are doing the math you will see how this goes—the baptism itself took a good bit of time. We eventually sang, walked, and danced back to the church, and reached there a bit before the noon hour. Only then did the regular church service begin.

The service was filled with more singing, announcements, greetings, introductions, and the normal business of the church. It was a hot, humid day, and I remember trying not to lean my back over the top of my chair against the red cement blocks that formed the front wall of the church; to do so was to invite the red dust to become one with my sweat-stained white shirt.

Being new to an African church service, at about 1 p.m. I assumed I was no longer on the docket, and would not be speaking because the service had taken such a long time. I asked my friends about that and they just shrugged their shoulders. Finally, around 1:30 the pastor announced that after such and so had happened, the main speaker—me—would be giving the message for the day.

I was truly shocked. I looked at the front row of the congregation. While I had a decent wooden chair, these folks were sitting on benches made of skinny, rough-hewn lumber, with zero back support and precious little rear support. In my mind’s eye I can still see one poor bedraggled woman, sitting slumped over with her head cupped in the palm of her hand, an exhausted blank look on her face. It had been a good service, with a lot of good things happening—plus a lot of needless rubbish (according to my western notions)—but how could she, and all those along with her, possibly sit through much more of this in the heat?

I turned to my companions and said, I am going to preach this sermon in five minutes. Five minutes!? My friends were incredulous. Can’t be done, they said—never heard of such a thing. I told my son Robert to get out his watch and time me. When it came time for me to get up and speak I opened my Bible to 1 John 1.1, and ruthlessly proceeded to mentally chew through my written manuscript. Three minutes and twenty-eight seconds later we were all done—to the deep relief of virtually everyone there, and the great surprise of my friends. (I still think it was a good message, delivered—by the grace of God—as one speaking the very words of God; 1 Pet 4.11).

This story serves as an analogy for the church’s teaching on the will of God today. So much has been said, written, taught, and anguished over, that the poor people in the pews are sitting exhausted, wondering if the end will ever be in sight. These things ought to have been settled by now; good books have been written about it,¹⁶ but somehow the message is not getting through. Will we ever really get a good grip on what the will of God is for our lives?

When I was a rookie pastor in rural Manitoba, I noticed many of our young, and some not so young, parishioners seemed paralyzed in their lives over the question of God’s will. They did not have a clear sense of what it was, and they were looking for signs that might give them some clues to grasp onto. I determined to find out for myself what the Bible has to say about the topic and discovered—much to my amazement, given everything I had heard taught—that the will of God for one’s life was really not that enigmatically cryptic after all. In fact, it can pretty much be sketched out in five minutes or less.

God’s Will for Your Life (In 5 Minutes or Less)

Are you ready? Here is the really, really short version, from Ps 37.3a:

Trust in the LORD and do good.

Maybe that was like blazing through some small town on a summer outing—blink and you’ve missed it.¹⁷

Okay, if that is not quite enough, we can include the next full verse of the psalm:

Take delight in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of