Taking the Mystery Out of Knowing God's Will (Selected Scriptures) John MacArthur

It is always a joy to be able to turn to the word of the living God, in fact, the living word of the living God, to be instructed from the mind of God for our own blessing and for his glory.

One of the subjects that is at the very center of Christian experience is the matter of the will of God, the will of God. Throughout all of my life, I have heard people tell me they were looking for the will of God, searching for the will of God, trying to find the will of God. In fact, many, many years ago, I wrote a little book called, The Will of God is not Lost.Because it seemed to me that so many people were acting as if it was lost, as if God had placed his will in some obscure place, as if God were some sort of a divine Easter Bunny who had stashed the golden egg in some bush and all he did was sit in heaven saying, "You're getting warmer," or, "You're getting colder," as we meandered through the shrubbery of life trying to find the egg.

There are people who think that the will of God is the most undesirable thing, that it's like a diet. If it doesn't taste good, you can eat it. But the will of God is everything that you don't want to do, that God is sort of a cosmic killjoy who says, "There's one having fun, get him." As if God wants to make life painful and somber and sorrowful and hard. There are those who think that the will of God is sort of like, I guess you could say a serendipitous traumatic experience, like you're running down the street, trying to catch a bus, your foot slips on a banana peel and you land on a map of Argentina in the gutter. And, "Ah, I'll go to Argentina as a missionary, this is a divine calling." ]

There are people who approach the will of God in those ways. Some people think the will of God is like a lottery ticket. Not but a few are every gonna get one and if you get one, you become really, really blessed and most of us just throw away old tickets and never know what it is to win the will of God....