How Clear is God’s Will to You?

Written by Joel Davis 

I love DIY projects, but so often I make those DIY projects much harder than they have to be. My wife loves and dreads my projects. She knows by the end of it, something in the house or the yard is going to be dramatically improved from its initial state. But she dreads the number of trips to the hardware store, and the number of frustrated speed bumps along the way, and the anxiety in the process of how long and how costly will this journey be. A lot of us have these same fears around the will of God. It feels more complicated and confusing than it should be, and it’s never over when we wish it would be. 

But what if we’ve made our Father’s will much more complicated than it actually is? What If He has already made His will clear? I want to suggest to you that following God’s will is a much simpler, more freeing process than many of us are willing to admit or believe. 

We have reached a hinge point in 1 Thessalonians. All of Paul’s letters to the churches follow a very predictable pattern. Part 1 is filled with sound doctrine: Who is God, revealed to His people as Father, Son, and Spirit, and what has He done in the person and work of Jesus? Part 2 follows: if this is who God is and who we are in light of who He is, then what should we do about it? So, notice that clarity about who God is has a direct impact for the Apostle Paul on how we can respond to Him in love. We call that getting the sequence of love right! The Apostle Paul is in the Overflow! 

So, we have seen how the Thessalonians have been saved, how they are running the race set before them well, and commendation for how they have endured suffering… Now, Paul turns to how they should live in light of the will of their Father for them. 

1 Additionally then, brothers and sisters, we ask and encourage you in the Lord Jesus, that as you have received instruction from us on how you should live and please God—as you are doing—do this even more. 2 For you know what commands we gave you through the Lord Jesus.  

Have you ever felt like God’s will was totally confusing or unclear to you? Maybe you’re looking for a job and you’ve applied to 50 different positions and gotten nothing but robo-call responses to show for it. Maybe you’re trying to find that special someone, and you just wish the Lord would write their name in the sky and save you the headaches. Maybe you’re looking for a new church family and the pain you’ve experienced at the hands of people who claimed to follow Jesus makes you never want to darken the door of a sanctuary again. 

An incredible percentage of my pastoral work involves helping people sift through the details of their lives and determining where the Spirit might be leading them in a painful or confusing situation. But many folks have what I call a Labyrinth View of God’s will. That is, they believe that following our Father’s will for their lives is like holding up a dim lantern in a cavernous maze, at every fork in the path hoping they choose wisely. For them, choosing a “wrong” turn means the will of God is no longer accessible to them and they spend years of their lives afraid they will never get back to anything like Jesus’s abundant life. 

Can you relate to that fear? Paul doesn’t diminish the seriousness of any of these concerns. Instead, he reminds us that there is one dimension of His will that our Father has made perfectly clear through the commands of His Son Jesus. 

3 For this is God’s will, your sanctification: that you keep away from sexual immorality, 4 that each of you knows how to control his own body in holiness and honor, 5 not with lustful passions, like the Gentiles, who don’t know God. 6 This means one must not transgress against and take advantage of a brother or sister in this manner, because the Lord is an avenger of all these offenses, as we also previously told and warned you. 

I don’t want you to get hung up on the wording of that sentence. What Paul is saying is that our sanctification, the process by which the Holy Spirit shapes and matures you and me more and more into the likeness of Jesus Christ, IS the Father’s intention for our lives. What the Father wants for His children is that we would look more and more like Jesus, who came to show us how to live in the family!  

I spent many years of my life confused and apathetic about God’s will for my life, and the real reason was not that Jesus wasn’t clear to me on how I should be living. It was that I was refusing to follow Jesus in the way I lived my life and the way I allowed sin to maintain a stronghold in my heart. Looking back, I can see clearly that every time I shook my fist at the heavens and got indignant with God for not making His will clear, He was looking back at me with grief, even pity. “Joel, how can you complain about being lost when you willfully refuse to see?”  

So, we can worry about all kinds of future events and circumstances we can’t control, while refusing to take control of the very thing Jesus commands us to — our own sinful desires. This is not to say that all your problems will be solved, or all your questions will be answered. It is to say, however, that if you are harboring persistent, ongoing sin in your life, you at least know where to begin when it comes to discerning God’s will for your life. Start by asking the Spirit to give you the courage and power to clear out all the crud so you can hear His voice more clearly. 

But the good news about our Father’s will goes beyond even the eradication of our sin. It includes the freedom we have in Christ to take the next step forward. If you’re stuck today wondering about school choice, or a vocational path, or your next church home, I have one question for you: Where can you live a life of ongoing sanctification? Are there schools or jobs that prevent you from growing in godliness? Are there houses or cities that prevent you from receiving the love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? If the answer to those questions is no, then you are free in Jesus to choose whatever path is in front of you and know that His love will only continue to extend to you and go before you. Be a teacher or go into commercial real estate, you can become more like Jesus in either setting. Choose public, private, charter, magnet, or homeschool. You will find the love of the Father overflowing to you no matter what. 

Having established that, Paul does want to address 3 key areas where the will of God carries very significant and practical implications. In verses 1-8, he discusses the will of God with respect to our sexual ethics. In the next two passages, he’ll look at how we work and how we think about death. It’s comforting to me to know that death, work, and sexual ethics have been challenges for men and women following Jesus as long as men and women have been following Jesus! We are not alone or crazy!  

Why is this so important to Paul and, more importantly, to God? When Paul calls us to keep away from sexual immorality in verse 3, the word for sexual immorality covers anything and everything that happens outside of the marriage bed. It includes pornography, extramarital affairs, abuse, neglect, and a whole host of other sexual deviances I won’t even mention. The point is that we are to be radically and counterculturally focused on our one-flesh partner because our heavenly Father was radically committed to His people first. 1 John 4:19 emphatically states, “We love because He first loved us.” Paul makes the analogy crystal clear when he tells us that when he is talking about how a husband and wife honor and love one another, he is really “talking about Christ and the church” (Eph 5:32). 

But our Father has not just given us a simple, clear pathway to following His will. He’s also given us a simple, clear promise that we don’t have to do it alone. He has given us His Spirit.  

7 For God has not called us to impurity but to live in holiness. 8 Consequently, anyone who rejects this does not reject man, but God, who gives you his Holy Spirit. 

We absolutely cannot miss the power that’s contained in those last words. If God left us up to our own devices to follow His will in any area of our lives, we would be up a creek without a paddle. But He has not. He has promised us His Holy Spirit, who fills us with the power to live according to the will of the Father for Us, His children. That totally changes the way I think about holiness in verse 7. Holiness is not merely a standard of moral perfection that I can’t uphold on my own. So much more than that, holiness is the radiant testimony of those who are living by the power of the Spirit. 

Haven’t you been around someone who was so obviously living in the power and presence of the Spirit that it was like they were glowing, like they were on fire? That’s what it looks like when someone is living in the will of the Father. It’s not choosing all the right forks in the labyrinth. It’s not perfect adherence to a moral code. It’s someone responding to the love of the Father, following the example of Jesus, in the power of the Spirit. That is growing in sanctification, and that is walking in the Overflow.