The Will of God: A Seven Day Study with Devotional Prayer Guide

By Michael Phillips

The author of Make Me Like Jesus shares a personal and thought-provoking inquiry into the practical mechanics of knowing God’s will in our lives.

One of the greatest mysteries of the Christian faith is how we can understand the Will of God. The difficulty is underscored by Scripture’s repeated use of the word “unknowable” in connection with “the Almighty”. How can we possibly grasp that which is unknowable?

Yet God commands us to know him. He also commands us to search diligently to find wisdom. We are therefore called upon to make the attempt to understand something we will never be capable of knowing. In Will of God, Michael Phillips discusses how we can best approach this challenge with gusto as well as humility.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9780795350757

Michael Phillips

Professor Mike Phillips has a BSc in Civil Engineering, an MSc in Environmental Management and a PhD in Coastal Processes and Geomorphology, which he has used in an interdisciplinary way to assess current challenges of living and working on the coast. He is Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research, Innovation, Enterprise and Commercialisation) at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and also leads their Coastal and Marine Research Group. Professor Phillips' research expertise includes coastal processes, morphological change and adaptation to climate change and sea level rise, and this has informed his engagement in the policy arena. He has given many key note speeches, presented at many major international conferences and evaluated various international and national coastal research projects. Consultancy contracts include beach monitoring for the development of the Tidal Lagoon Swansea Bay, assessing beach processes and evolution at Fairbourne (one of the case studies in this book), beach replenishment issues, and techniques to monitor underwater sediment movement to inform beach management. Funded interdisciplinary research projects have included adaptation strategies in response to climate change and underwater sensor networks. He has published >100 academic articles and in 2010 organised a session on Coastal Tourism and Climate Change at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris in his role as a member of the Climate, Oceans and Security Working Group of the UNEP Global Forum on Oceans, Coasts, and Islands. He has successfully supervised many PhD students, and as well as research students in his own University, advises PhD students for overseas universities. These currently include the University of KwaZuluNatal, Durban, University of Technology, Mauritius and University of Aveiro, Portugal. Professor Phillips has been a Trustee/Director of the US Coastal Education and Research Foundation (CERF) since 2011 and he is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Coastal Research. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Victoria, British Columbia and Visiting Professor at the University Centre of the Westfjords. He was an expert advisor for the Portuguese FCT Adaptaria (coastal adaptation to climate change) and Smartparks (planning marine conservation areas) projects and his contributions to coastal and ocean policies included: the Rio +20 World Summit, Global Forum on Oceans, Coasts and Islands; UNESCO; EU Maritime Spatial Planning; and Welsh Government Policy on Marine Aggregate Dredging. Past contributions to research agendas include the German Cluster of Excellence in Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM) and the Portuguese Department of Science and Technology.

Book preview

The Will of God

Michael Phillips

The Will of God with Devotional Prayer and Study Guide

Copyright © 2017 by Michael Phillips

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Unless otherwise indicated, quotes from Scripture are from the New International Version.

Electronic edition published 2017 by Rosettabooks

ISBN (Kindle): 978-0-7953-5075-7

www.rosettabooks.com

Contents

Preface: God Loves You and Has a Wonderful Plan For Your Life

Introduction: Progressions

PART I—GOD’S ESSENTIAL BEING AND ETERNAL PLAN

Day 1—The Nature and Character of God

Day 2—God’s Eternal Plan and Purpose

For His Created Universe

PART II—GOD PLAN FOR MANKIND

Day 3—God’s Plan For Mankind: General Principles and Universal Commands

Day 4—God’s Plan For Mankind: Specific Commands

PART III—GOD PLAN FOR YOU

Day 5—God’s Revealed Will Through Scripture

Day 6— God’s Revealed Will Through the Holy Spirit

Day 7— God’s Revealed Will Through Wise Counselors

Afterword—Concluding Perspectives

Devotional Prayer and Study Guide

Preface

"GOD LOVES YOU AND HAS A WONDERFUL PLAN FOR YOUR LIFE"

Welcome to a week of study and prayer that may change your life!

Understanding the Will of God is one of the great mysteries of the Christian faith. This difficulty is apparent by the word unknowable, which is used throughout Scripture in connection with the Almighty. How can we possibly grasp that which is by nature unknowable?

Yet at the same time, God commands us to search diligently to find wisdom, and to know him. What we have before us, then, is the attempt to know and understand something that we never will fully be capable of knowing.

It is an exciting challenge, but one in which humility regarding our efforts must always be clear in our thinking.

The most memorable words of the Four Spiritual Laws when they were introduced in the 1960s, and which probably contributed significantly to their impact in the following years, were, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.

It was a phrase pointing to God’s Will for every individual on the face of the earth in a more practical way than had been spoken so specifically before. It was a revolutionary thought for many who heard it for the first time. Suddenly it brought the high thing—God’s Will—down to the personal level of my life: God loves me and has a wonderful plan for my life!

Wow—what an incredible truth!

For years, of course, the term was common in evangelicalism of receiving God’s call to some form of ministry, usually the pastorate or missions. But not many experienced such divine impulsion. The Four Spiritual Laws suddenly universalized the experience by proclaiming that God had a call, a plan for everyone, not just those who had a special leading into what was called full time Christian service.

But along with this heightened personal awareness of the immediacy of God’s Will came a difficulty.

What is God’s plan for my life? How do I find it? How do I know what that plan—that will of God—is for me?

It was a question young Christians by the thousands began to ask. So many came to Christ along this path that promised a specific plan as Law 1 of spirituality, it was only natural that they would want more information. But the Four Laws didn’t offer much practical help in discovering that plan.

Give your life to Jesus . . . then what? How do you find that plan? How do you know what it is? How can you be sure it is exactly the right plan that God has selected just for you?

How vividly I recall the flood of such questions in my own mind following my baptism into the lingo of Campus Crusade For Christ during a week at Arrowhead Springs. And in subsequent years, I found myself in frequent discussions with young people, desperate to find God’s Will for their lives.

I remember one young man in particular who was so disturbed, distraught, and frustrated that it led to an almost paralysis of inaction. I’ve got to find God’s Will for my life, he said every time I spoke with him. I don’t know what to do. I need to know God’s Will for my life . . . I’ve got to find God’s Will for my life.

He couldn’t do anything—hold a job, participate in church, carry on a normal conversation. He was obsessed with the fact that he didn’t know God’s Will for his life.

The Four Spiritual Laws made it sound so simple. A wonderful plan for my life! Great . . . who wouldn’t want that!

But later the reality hit home. The next day at work or school . . . the next headache . . . the next problem relationship . . . the fading of the emotional high . . . and with them all came the subtle thought—this isn’t so wonderful. God’s plan for my life must be something different than where I find myself at present.

The result for many was that the phrase God’s plan for my life became a justification for a kind of grass is greener syndrome, as many idealized in their minds the Four Laws Nirvana which God surely had waiting for them if they could only get out of the rut of their present circumstances.

The quest to find God’s Will for their lives became for many more dreamy escapism than practical reality. It subtly contributed to a malaise of ungratefulness, which is clearly contrary to God’s will. The obsession with God’s will led many in the opposite direction of thankfulness in all circumstances, which is a cornerstone of God’s will for everyone. Thus, over a lifetime, I’m not sure the phrase God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life has helped too much toward an understanding of just what God’s Will actually is.

Others err on the opposite extreme, thinking, not that God’s Will is some far off unattainable mystery, but rather thinking that it is so clear that they possess personal insight into its every detail.

A dear friend of mine recently expressed his conviction that it was God’s Will for me to get together with a small group of Christians I did not know. This friend shares some new portion of what he is sure is God’s Will for me, for himself, for other acquaintances, and for the body of Christ at large every few weeks. I do not talk to him or receive a letter from him without some new revelation of God’s Will that he has been given. God’s Will is a constant topic of emphasis, and rarely with much doubt that he knows that Will with absolute clarity. If I heeded everything he felt I ought to do, I would never have to pray for divine guidance at all. He has God’s will for me all mapped out in detail.

Equally interesting is the related observation that those individuals to whom I look as particularly in tune with God’s nature and purposes are men and women who aren’t always talking about God’s Will. They don’t speak about every little impulse of divine guidance they receive, or about their daily leadings in various directions. God’s Will in their lives exists on a higher plane. It acts as a current or flow that is ongoing and that transcends the individual moments of every day. They are not looking for daily adjustments and modifications in that current, they are content to be carried in its flow. This is not to say that prayer does not undergird such lives, nor that when forks in the river come such individuals do not pray, Lord, which direction would you have me go? Yet such persons are at peace because they have fallen in with the flow of God’s Will in their lives. They are at peace because they are not looking for some pot of gold, Four-Laws-Nirvana to place them instantly into a life of happiness, purpose, ministry, and fulfillment, without any of their present frustrations. Such men and women are content to live life where they are. They are at peace as they pray to be in tune with God’s Will, recognizing that forks in the river don’t generally come every ten minutes.

Many of the mistaken notions of God’s Will stem from the almost universal tendency among Christians to overlay what we call God’s Will with what are actually our own desires, biases, and doctrinal leanings. Because God’s Will is so nebulous and indistinct, and because we are so full of our own goals, wishes, preferences, beliefs, and ideas, we very naturally infuse all these into what we call God’s Will for our lives.

But though I can see the fallacy in my friend’s numerous weekly proclamations about God’s Will as spiritualizations of what he himself wants, it is not always so easy to detect the same fallacy in myself. I am prone to exactly the same thing—to overlay God’s Will with my own. It is something I have to guard against constantly. I try to go into new situations and circumstances (bends in the river of my life) by differentiating between my will and God’s Will, by trying to isolate those factors that might seem to confirm God’s Will but which are really only indicators of my own fleshly will trying to spiritualize itself by masquerading as God’s Will.

Both these tendencies are constantly at work: The frustration of not knowing God’s Will, and the tendency to infuse my own will into circumstances and assume that God’s Will is at work when perhaps it isn’t. Though they are opposite tendencies, I find myself regularly susceptible to both extremes.

It seems, then, that God’s Will and how it affects our practical daily walk as Christians, is a topic we will do well to explore together.

As we progress in this exciting journey to know God more intimately, we will begin with certain lofty and eternal considerations, and move steadily toward those more practical elements of God’s Will that impact our daily lives. Our inquiry into God’s Will must of necessity follow such a progression. How can I know what God would have me do today if I do not have a clear understanding of who God is, how he works, and what are his eternal objectives in the universe? His will for me flows out of his Will for the universe. His will for today flows out of his Will for eternity.

And of course everything to which we apply the words God’s Will flow out of the nature of God himself.

Therefore, the opening chapters concerning our high theological inquiry into the nature of God are just as practical as the guidelines we will look at later for discovering God’s Will in the daily decisions you and I face.

We will progress through seven days as follows:

PART I: GOD’S ESSENTIAL BEING AND ETERNAL PLAN

Day 1—The Nature and Character of God

Day 2—God’s Eternal Plan and Purpose for His Created Universe

PART II: GOD’S WILL FOR MANKIND

Day 3—God’s Will For Mankind: General Principles & and Universal Commands

Day 4—God’s Will For Mankind: Specific Commands

PART III: GOD’S WILL FOR YOU

Day 5—God’s Will Revealed Through Guidance from Scripture

Day 6—God’s Will Revealed Through Guidance by the Holy Spirit

Day 7—God’s Will Revealed Through Guidance from Wise Counselors.

Now let us embark on this exciting and practical journey of thought and prayer to see what God has for us!

Introduction

PROGRESSIONS

The Will of God is surely among the most ambitious subjects man is confronted with. Can we ever realistically hope to understand it?

Some approach God’s Will with awe and timidity, others with boldness and over-confidence. Some live their lives independent of any higher scheme, or Will, in the universe. Others, of many faiths, try to order their lives by an understanding of God’s Will. Yet their practical conception of what God’s Will actually is leads some to blow up airplanes and others in thousands of equally self-motivated directions in the name of following what they think God wants them to do.

Obviously there is much confusion.

There is only one who lived and taught the real thing—who actually said that he knew God’s Will for all humankind—a man who lived in it, and taught his followers to do likewise. Unless one is a daily, dedicated disciple of Jesus Christ, obeying his teachings and seeking to follow his example, there is no God’s Will to be found. Jesus is the only door into the discovery of God’s practical, daily, live-able Will. When it comes to translating high truth about God into our daily workplaces and choices and decisions and attitudes—what we are actually supposed to do and not do, Jesus himself is the only guide into the practical realities of what comprise God’s Will.

A fundamentalist Jesus-is-the-only-way-to-salvation theology should not be read into that statement. This is not an inquiry about salvation, or trying to understand who is saved and who isn’t and why. We are only establishing the clear fact that Jesus is the only individual in history whose bold claim—I know God’s will and you can know it too if you follow my teaching—is reliable and worthy to be heeded. Many crackpots through the years have claimed to know God’s will. But Jesus is obviously on a different plane altogether. For anyone in earnest about