And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.
Romans 8:28

With graduation fast approaching, the question gets asked very often: What is God’s will for my life? It plays out in any number of specifics: What college do I go to? What job do I take? Whom do I marry? Where do I move? The circumstances are endless, but the question remains the same.

The first thing to notice about this question is that it makes at least one assumption. The question is at its core asking, what is the best option for my life? The assumption that leads this question to be asked in terms of the will of God is that God has my best interests in mind. This is a good assumption as per Romans 8:28 (above), if I love God and am called according to his purpose. Therefore, the first thing to do when asking this question is to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12); “test yourselves to see if you are in the faith” (2 Corinthians 13:5). If “indeed you fail the test”, God’s will may not indeed be for your good. In that case, the importance of the question of foundational faith automatically trumps the question of life choices.

The second thing to notice is that it’s not (usually) a moral question, and it can’t be approached that way. Moral questions we can generally look to the Bible for clear prescriptive answers. What’s right, what’s wrong, and what makes it so? If we come to a choice of going in on embezzlement with a friend or staying out, the answer is pretty clear: “Thou shall not steal” (Exodus 20:15). If we get the notion that grace means license, we are rebuked in no uncertain terms “May it never be!” (Romans 6:1-2).

With a question like this however, one can only look to the Bible for general principles. After one is secure in one’s own faith, these are the first go-to in uncertain life situations. Principles like “do not be bound together with unbelievers” (2 Corinthians 6:14) and “bad company corrupts good morals” (1 Corinthians 15:33) automatically eliminate most of the marriage pool and friend stock from the running, for example. “Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31) should serve to make us critically examine our intentions in making any decision, which may shed light on the most appropriate choice.

Internalizing these principles also assures that our definition of “good” does not differ from God’s: what we might call material blessing is not necessarily a blessing, and God may bless us by means that may otherwise look like curses. If we seriously want the will of God; if we seriously strive for our own good, then we cannot be weighed down by fleshly notions of the good. Material ambition will only distort one’s perceptions of one’s own interests, making the question of God’s will in reality no concern to the self.

But even Biblical principles do not always lead to a clear choice. Even the most spirit-filled Christian may be overcome by doubts and second-guessing. A job in Oklahoma and a job in Georgia will obviously present radically different ministry opportunities, but the Christian has no way of knowing which one he will be more fruitful in. Short of a vision from God, how is he to decide?

With the original question thus factored down to “what is good for my life?”, we can answer emphatically with Romans 8:28: “God causes all things to work for the good of those who love him”. The nagging worry that one has not fulfilled the will of God is most certainly not the will of God for the Christian. We can rest assured that if we are pursuing God and resting in him, that the decisions of life will not work to our detriment, whatever they may be. This is what Peter means when he says to “cast all your anxiety on him”: to rest in the faith that our path is not unclear, nor contingent on our own ingenuity in working for our own good.

This is where real faith departs from the standard “Christian” answer to this question. God does indeed work through circumstances. God does indeed “open and close doors”. But it is fruitless to look around at every situation as a sign from God regarding the decision in question. The standard “look for a sign” or “wait until you have a peace about it” line leads to passive Christians who are blown about by the winds of circumstance: signs will not necessarily come, and you will not necessarily get peace one way or another. The question of the will of God, beyond issues of Biblical principle, is so easy to use as a mask for indecision. Waiting on a sign allows us to abdicate the responsibility placed upon us to make a good decision.

Often the question cast in terms of discernment – discerning the will of God in one’s own or another’s life. Often this plays out in Christians asking what circumstances are signs from God for the decision, and what has nothing to do with the decision. What constitutes spiritual peace about a decision, and what is one’s own mind working? These are exactly the wrong questions to be asking. Our responsibility is to internalize the principles of Scripture and to deal with life on its own terms through that framework, not to imagine we can disavow responsibility for our own life decisions by looking outward at our circumstances.

This is where the doctrine of the sovereignty of God stops being an arcane theological point and becomes a matter of faith or lack thereof. Faith not only in the final resurrection, but faith that God is in control of even one’s own decisions. Faith that God works all things to the good of those who love him.

There are also, on the other hand, those who would like to relieve such stress by asserting that God works to our good as we make our decisions; that God does not have one single set-out plan for our life – as if God “makes do” with our decisions ad hoc. They are right in refuting the fancy that God would be disappointed in a decision made completely in line with the principles of scripture, but they sacrifice the sovereignty of God in service of that, and in doing so commit an even graver error. God does have a single plan laid out for everyone’s life, but unlike the standard Christian line, the burden is not upon us to find it. God’s will will be done, not as long as we make good decisions, not after our decisions, but through our decisions and including our decisions.

It is helpful here to distinguish as Calvin does between the will of God and the precepts of God (Institutes, 1.18.4). The precepts of God are our responsibility – the principles and commandments of scripture subsumed by “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:6-40). The will of God (by which he means the secret will of God), on the other hand, is not our responsibility, and will come to pass regardless of our decisions. It is this will that assures us that our final good is in store.

The purpose of Romans 8:28 is that we know our decisions will work to our good so long as we make them in accordance with the principles of scripture – so long as we are earnestly seeking after God. We cannot absolve ourselves of the responsibility of making decisions by seeking a sign of the secret will of God (Matthew 16:4), but we also rest assured in the knowledge that God is in control even of our internal state of mind. Knowing that God uses all means – even our own volition – to work for our good so long as we have faithfully “put on the whole armor of God” (Ephesians 6:11) frees us from the worry of future regret.

We often think of the Christian life as becoming progressively more like God – in character, if not in substance. Though this is true in some respects, it is not an appropriate description of the whole of sanctification. Indeed, through the process we are to become less like God in certain respects, for naturally we are afflicted with a multitude of inappropriately Godlike dispositions.

The crux of the problem is that we relativize our references when they should be absolute. Take the following examples:

-God values Himself as the highest good.
-We value ourselves as the highest good, as if we were gods ourselves. Our reference to Good must be absolutely like God’s, and not relatively so: we must value God as God values Himself, not value ourselves as God values Himself.

-God’s love desires for its object that which comes from Himself, which is their highest Good.
-Our love naturally desires for its object that which comes from ourselves, as if we had their highest good. C.S. Lewis wrote much about love corrupted in this way – explicitly in The Four Loves, and implicitly in The Great Divorce and Till We Have Faces. Our reference must point our objects absolutely to their highest good, not relatively to ourselves.

-God’s wrath is incited by a slight to His own glory.
-Our wrath is incited by a slight to our own dignity. Instead, proper anger on our part is to be directed at sin – intended slights to the glory of God – our own dignity being counted as nothing (c.f. John Piper’s post on anger without sin).

This is the difference between the intended Godliness of the saint and the intended Godlikeness of Lucifer. Where Lucifer desired, as our flesh often does, to lay claim to the object of these references, we must know that they can only be absolute and immutably pointed at God. Without that absolute reference, our values are idolatrous, our love is corrupt, our anger is unjust, and who knows what other categories I’ve neglected to include. I suspect there are many more. It is ultimately the difference between pride and humility, and the root of all sin.

With Thanksgiving fast approaching, I think it would be a good idea to take a look at thankfulness. What should we be thankful for? Are there things we should not be thankful for? In previous articles I’ve insinuated that material prosperity is not necessarily a blessing. Should we nevertheless be thankful for it?

Note that the first and last beatitudes are for those without any claim to prosperity. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 5:2), and “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:10). These are blessings which preclude the rich (one would assume that the persecuted generally forfeit their wealth). Obviously there is a special blessing for the poor, but is that a complement to a blessing of wealth, or is wealth not a blessing at all?

The first thing to realize here is that there is never a shortage of blessing for the elect. “We know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, who are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28). We have seen that this promise is not for material means at all, but a promise that any and all circumstances will cause the believer to be in the long run drawn closer to God. Likewise it is not a promise that one will lack material means. Neither richness nor poverty can come between God and His elect.

Essentially we are as Christians called to be completely agnostic to our material circumstances: our behavior and attitudes are constant regardless of our means. Paul makes this point in Phillipians 4:11-12: “I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am. I know how to get along with humble means, and I also know how to live in prosperity; in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need”.

There is an important difference between contentedness and thankfulness. There is a sense in which we are told not to be thankful, because it reveals in us a hypocritical heart:

Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, ‘God, I thank Thee that I am not like other men–extortionists, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I possess’. But the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.
-Luke 18.10-14

What is interesting here is that the Pharisee is thankful, and the tax collector, whom we can assume to be relatively wealthy (it was a rather lucrative job), makes no mention of thanks. Yet the Pharisee was condemned, while the tax collector was justified. Why?

Thankfulness is the valuation for something on its own merit. “Thank you that I am not like other men” is thankfulness, but it is also pride. Closer to home, “Thank you for the raise I just got” is thankfulness, but it is also materialism. Truly the pharisee was not like other men, and surely God has given the raise, but these are rather things we are to be content in: thankful for the true blessing that the circumstance provides (Romans 8:28), but with the realization that these things themselves are not the blessing – rather a means to a blessing – as a vehicle by which God works good for His elect. Contentedness is a disconnected thankfulness – being wealthy as if one were not wealthy – “dealing with the world as if you had no dealings with it” (1 Corinthians 7:29-31). This is the spirit of the tax collector: he knew his wealth meant nothing were he to forfeit his own soul as a result (Mark 8:36). God had given him the wealth, but was it a blessing in itself? Or was it a blessing in the sense that it at some point caused him to cry out to God “Be merciful to me, a sinner!”?

This is the sense in which we are to be thankful: not for the circumstance in itself, but for the circumstance in its God-crafted goal, whether or not we know how that goal plays out through the circumstance. We are thus not to pray “Thank you, God, for a good family and plenty to eat” (if these things are true), but “Thank you, God, for a family that has encouraged my faith, and sustenance with which I may devote my energies back to You”. Not “Thank you, God, for placing me in a country with political freedom and free of persecution”, but “Thank you, God, that You have made the Gospel available to me through the means of political freedom”. God works good to those whom He has called both in prosperity and poverty, and over all the things we possess, this is the blessing we are to be thankful for.

I was out driving the other day with the radio turned to a Christian radio station, when a song lyric jumped out at me: Because you would rather die / Than to ever live without me. Lines like this have never sat well with me, but I always attributed my discomfort to a question of perspective – a focus on God versus a focus on man, for example. It was only that day it dawned on me that there is a fundamental error in this song lyric – the same that thousands of Christian self-esteem messages spring from; the same that tickles our ears with popular notions of self-worth and esteem. The difference between a haughty spirit and a humble spirit before God ultimately lies in how you answer the question, why does God love us?

The explanation for why God created the human race that I always heard growing up hinges on choice. First the question is posed, would you want a spouse to love you because she had to – a robot, if you will – or because she wanted to? The argument then goes on to contrast our worship with that of the angels: the angels are simply programmed to worship God and can do no other, the reasoning goes, while we can choose to love God – therefore our praise is preferable to that of the angels because ours is voluntary.

So God loves us because we have choice? This runs into several problems (we’ll even ignore the fact that Lucifer and a third of the angels didn’t adhere to their “programming”). First, our choice is constrained by sin. In the flesh – in our own effort – we cannot choose God (Romans 8:7-8). We have no capability in ourselves to love God. He enables us to love Him by the Holy Spirit for the very reason that we cannot by ourselves do so.

Second, this reasoning would imply that God loves us because of some innate good within us, namely, choice. There is nothing good within us that would commend us to God (Isaiah 64:6, Jeremiah 17:9), and we are certainly not in an inherently better position before Him than the angels. The belief that God loves us because we are made in His image – because we have some “spark of the divine” – even so far as to say that God loves us because we (can) choose Him, is to say that at some level we deserve God’s love, and this is fundamentally no different from the pride of Lucifer.

But God obviously loves us, as we see throughout the Bible (John 3:16). Why then, if we have nothing to commend ourselves to God, does He still pursue us? The answer is not within us, but in God. God does not love us because of who we are, but because of who He is. One thing I am indebted to John Piper for is the proof and justification of a selfish God (Deuteronomy 6:15): If God, being at the same time omniscient and the highest good in the universe, had as His ultimate aim anything other than the highest good in the universe, He would no longer be a good or perfect God. Therefore God’s ultimate goal can only be His own glory. His duty is not to us, but to Himself.

So how does mankind factor into God’s glory? God’s love of and offer of salvation to mankind is not so He can enjoy the pleasure of our company, but in order to demonstrate His power to redeem that which had nothing good of its own to boast. Paul tells us that salvation is entirely the work of God for this very purpose: “Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:9). The glory is entirely God’s.

With this in mind, our focus shifts away from ourselves and towards God. Prayer becomes less of our will and more “Your will be done”, in faith that God makes all things to work together for the good of those that love Him (Romans 8:28). Father, forgive me, not because I’m coming to You, but because You have brought me to Yourself. This is a humble spirit before God: unpretentious gratitude that while we were yet sinners, while we were enemies of God with nothing worthy of love about us, Christ still died for us.