Will Of God 12 – Testing whether this is God’s will

Do not believe every spirit, but test to see whether they are of God (1 John 4:1).

So I’m about to do what I think is God’s will – but is it really God’s will? Or, I just did what I thought was God’s will – but was it really God’s will?

In a way, we are freed from fretting too much about this: the very desire to please God pleases God, and we know that doing God’s will is like a toddler getting his legs under him: you wobble and bang your head a lot.

Sometimes we latch onto bogus indicators. We think “If it was God’s will, then it should have succeeded marvelously.” But sometimes God’s will yields no obvious results. We follow God in hope – hope being “the ability to do something because it is right and good, whether it stands a chance of succeeding or not” (Vaclav Havel).

Extremely dubious is what I call the “open door fallacy.” Someone says “The door opened, so it must be God’s will.” But there are many open doors through which you most certainly should not walk; and sometimes to do God’s will you bang on a closed door repeatedly until you crash through.
If I am doing God’s will, then will I find myself busier than ever? – and tireder than ever? God’s will isn’t necessarily a whopping increase in doing, for the devil “often tries to make us attempt and start many projects so that we will be overwhelmed with too many tasks, and therefore achieve nothing” (St. Francis de Sales).

Some say doing God’s will brings peace to your soul. Sort of… But doing God’s will isn’t the end to all your problems; in fact, if we do God’s will we introduce a whole new set of problems, challenges, and difficulties into our lives! Serving God is hard – which is precisely why it is meaningful.

Beyond any question, God’s will isn’t measured by good feelings and sunny results. Doing God’s will may bring suffering in its wake. No: doing God’s will absolutely will bring suffering. Jesus did God’s will, and suffered, as did all his disciples, and countless Christians through history. Mother Teresa speaks of “love in action: God wants us to give, not something we can do without, but something we can’t do without, something we really want” – and only when we feel that ache of yielding something precious do we embrace God’s will for us. In a world that is ridiculously out of sync with God, why would it even be conceivable to do God’s will and not clash with the world and wind up taking a drubbing or two?
What about when I look back with regret? I tried to do God’s will but I failed miserably. The inability to do God’s will isn’t evil. God’s will forever exceeds our reach, so we keep striving, we never get puffed up with pride, and we glorify God who can be glorified even in our infirmities: God’s grace “is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).