Across the Great Decide, Part 2

Written by Brian D. McLaren

This article is courtesy of Christian Single magazine.

Editor's Note: This article is the second part of the article Across the Great Decide, which focuses on the decision-making process of following God's will in life. There is a link to part one at the end of this article.

How can you know if you're following God's will or your own? Just how does the decision-making process work?

The Purpose Driven Life

 God is God, not a genie. God has a bigger frame of reference than we do. So, how do we retain some idea of God’s guidance in our lives without turning God into an insurance policy to protect us from interesting, useful, and adventurous things like failure, delay, disappointment, surprise, challenge, insufficiency, bewilderment, and risk?

Here I think the Bible helps us – especially the teachings of Jesus – in a way that is so obvious that we are prone to miss it. In Scripture, God doesn’t speak to us much in the language of blueprints or recipes or treasure maps, but rather in the metaphors of kingdom, fatherhood, and discipleship.

Kingdom

Kingdom is one of the profound metaphors we are given through which to see our place in the world and our relationship to God. The gospel challenges us to rethink our lives in light of the nearness of God’s kingdom and God’s reign, which surround us and invite us in. In that context, think of a king. Does he have a will regarding his subjects? Of course. He doesn’t want them killing each other, stealing one another’s cattle, building faulty bridges or buildings, or cooperating with the enemies of the kingdom. Positively, he wants them productive, happy, peaceful, and healthy.

OK, you say, but these areas apply to everyone equally. Are there any ways that a king has a will for an individual? Of course. If you are the best lute player in the land, and the king has a special feast coming up, I’m sure it’s his will for you to come and play the lute. And if you’re the best boat-builder in the land, he’d like you to build some great boats for the kingdom. He’d rather the lute-player not build boats, and vice versa.

But beyond that, the will of the king doesn’t extend to whether you eat a mouthful of carrots before a mouthful of peas for dinner tonight. He is a king, not a puppet-master. You are his citizen, not his chess piece. So he would be thrilled for you to go fishing if you like to fish on your day off. And if you hate fishing, he would much prefer you work in your garden. Because if you are happy and productive in your garden or at the riverside, the king is happy.

The metaphor of the kingdom shows that the king has a general desire for all of his subjects, and he will gladly give us that guidance through the laws that he gives us. And he has a specific will for us too — a will that involves our employing our special abilities and exerting our best efforts for the good of the kingdom. And regarding the most specific details of our lives, yes, he has a will for them, too, and that will is for us to live, to choose, to learn, and to be free! It has been said that the glory of God is a person fully alive, and similarly, the glory of a king is to have a kingdom full of happy, productive, and free people — people fully alive!

Fatherhood

I have four kids, including a son in college. He is a good young man. Imagine he calls me on the phone and says, “Dad, what is your will for my major in college?”
I would say, “Son, I have raised you to this point in your life so that you can make that decision.”

“Yes, Dad,” he replies, “but I want to do your will, not my own will. So, please tell me what major to choose.”

“Son,” I’ll say, “I’d be glad to help you think this through. For example, we can talk about how much you hate history and calculus, and how much you love writing and business. I think I can help you eliminate some options, but I really want you to decide this.”

“Dad, don’t you love me? What if I make a mistake? I just want to do your will!” he says.

“But, Son,” I’ll reply, “it is my will for you to make this decision. Again, I’m glad to talk with you and help you think it through. But my will is for you to grow up, be a man, and make a life for yourself by making decisions, hard decisions, like this one. And believe me, whatever happens, whether you major in business or art or physics, whether it goes well or not, I will be with you. You can count on that, no matter what.”

The point is that he lives with my guidance, but not my domination, because he’s my son, not my lawn mower. Can you see how this metaphor of fatherhood, along with the metaphor of kingdom, frames the issue of finding God’s will in a new light?

Discipleship

Another of the primal metaphors for our relationship to the Lord is shown through Jesus’ relationship with His disciples. One thing is clear: He did not want to make their lives easy. He sends them out in a boat, right into a violent storm. He sends them out to preach and heal the sick and cast out evil spirits without adequate money or extra clothes or other securities. Before His crucifixion, He tells them that they aren’t ready to hear all He wants to tell them, so He sends them out without detailed instructions about a lot of important things (such as the fact that they will soon be required to let Gentiles in on the Jewish identity as people of God).

In each case, He doesn’t tell them in advance what they’re going to have to deal with. He doesn’t give them detailed previews or treasure maps. No, Jesus sends His disciples on an exciting adventure, not a walk around the block. But instead of guarantees of an easy go, He gives His disciples something far more precious and profound: the promise of His presence through it all, and the promise that we’ll become something eternally wonderful through the journey.
Bottom line: He doesn’t always protect us from broken engagements, but He guarantees He will be with us through them, faithful through good times and bad, always working for our good.

Are We Looking for Guidance or Insurance?

Maybe a major source of our confusion about God’s will, then, springs from this problem: What we really want is some insider trading information that will save us from making bad or even mediocre investments. Maybe we want God to help us design an easy, safe, risk-free, failure-free, pain-free life (that would, of necessity, also be character-free, sacrifice-free, adventure-free, and faith-free). Maybe we want to rewrite Romans 8:28, leaving out the part about “His purpose,” so it reads, “In all things, God works things together for our agenda.”
And maybe we are handicapped from the start because we’re thinking with the wrong metaphors — treasure maps, recipes, and blueprints; instead of kingdom, fatherhood, and discipleship.

There’s no question: God wants to guide us out of some bad adventures — like the bad adventure of lying and covering up, or of sabotaging one’s health and future through promiscuity, or tearing apart a community through gossip. So He gives us clear guidance in the form of commands and teachings to spare us that pain. But we can’t presume that being spared all of life’s challenges is His will for us.

In the end, I recovered from that broken engagement. In fact, I nearly forgot about the girl until the next year, when we had coffee one afternoon just to catch up with each other, nothing serious. And now we have four kids. It hasn’t always been neat, easy, or predictable. But what an adventure!