Living In The Will of God, Part 5: Visions from Heaven
By Charles Price
Acts 26:19-20
Now let me ask you, if you have got your Bible, to turn to the book of Acts in the New Testament, Acts Chapter 26; I am going to read there in just a moment. If you have been with us in recent days you will know we are talking about living in the will of God.
And for several weeks I have been talking about the big picture issues related to that. The fact that God has a general will and plan for this world and for people and that the personal will of God for our lives is always found in the context of the general will of God, which we need to live in obedience to. 95%, I would say, 95% of the will of God is in this book and that is where we need to live and that is where we need to discern and find out and receive God's general will for His world.
And we talked about other issues, the fact that the whole world is in the hands of the evil one, as Scripture says, and yet in the midst of that, as Job says, "No purpose of Yours can be thwarted," he says to God. That God is working out purpose in a fallen, broken, sinful environment.
But I want to talk this morning and for several weeks now, about the issue of personal guidance. How do I discern and follow the will of God that He has for me personally?
And I want to read to you from Acts 26. The context of what I am going to read is that Paul is in prison in Caesarea. He is on there on the basis of some false charges. The Roman governor Felix recognizes the falsehood of those charges and he says to Paul that "if you pay a bribe, you can walk free." But Paul didn't pay bribes and so he was kept in jail for two years, which is the length of the remaining years of Felix' term as Roman governor of Judea.
And then he was recalled to Rome, replaced by a man called Festus. When Festus came he wanted to clear up the backlog of cases and he brought Paul out and listened to his case.
And then King Agrippa - now you all know about King Herod; King Agrippa was in the line of the Herodian kings. He came to Caesarea to pay tribute to the new Roman governor because the Herodian kings were of course under the authority of Rome.
And when he came, Festus said, "I have an interesting man in my prison. His name is Paul. Maybe you would like to meet him and listen to him." And Paul was brought out to explain his case to Festus and also to King Agrippa.
And we are going to read when Paul comes to a point in this explanation where he has described how that he met with Jesus Christ on the Damascus Road, how that his life was revolutionized, how that he was told he would preach the Gospel to the Gentiles, how he was told he would suffer, that he would enter into persecution. And this was many years earlier this had happened.
And having described that, in Verse 19 he says,
"So then, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the vision from heaven. First to those in Damascus, then to those in Jerusalem and in all Judea, and to the Gentiles also, I preached that they should repent and turn to God and prove their repentance by their deeds.
"That is why the Jews seized me in the temple courts and tried to kill me. But I have had God's help to this very day, and so I stand here and testify to small and great alike. I am saying nothing beyond what the prophets and Moses said would happen - that the Christ would suffer and, as the first to rise from the dead, would proclaim light to his own people and to the Gentiles."
That is as far as I am going to read. And I want to talk this morning about the phrase that Paul uses there in Verse 19 when he says,
"I was not disobedient to the vision from heaven."
I want to talk about a vision from heaven. Now I am going to address myself mainly to younger people here this morning. You can decide whether you are younger or not. But older people, don't go to sleep; I am going to speak to you at the end because I have something important to say in the light of what I am going to say in the first part of this message.
But I want to talk about what is a vision from heaven. The fact that God does guide us is very clear to us in Scripture. There are many Scriptures that address this. David wrote in Psalm 37,
"The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord."
He said in Psalm 48,
"God will be our guide even to the end."
Asaph, who was the song leader in Solomon's temple, wrote in Psalm 73,
"You guide me with your counsel."
Solomon wrote,
"In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will direct your paths."
Isaiah wrote,
"The Lord will guide you always."
Paul wrote to the Colossians,
"We have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will."
And there are many other verses that talk about the fact that God guides us, God leads us, God has a will for us and we are to be aware of that and living in that.
Now when you ask the question how does God guide us? There are a multiplicity of ways in which God guides people in the Scripture and there is no simple formula that you can simply take the formula and say, "If you meet this, this, this and this, then God will guide you and you will know what it is to be in the centre of His will.
And I think there is good reason why there is no simple formula. If there was, we would probably want to just superimpose the formula on every situation we face and not have to do business with God Himself.
You see everything in the Christian life grows out of our relationship with Jesus Christ. Now most Christians will say they have a relationship with Jesus Christ.
I find myself quite often in conversation with people about issues they come to talk to me about and it's evident they don't have a relationship with Jesus Christ. They are Christians, yes. But they don't spend time with God. They don't spend time in the Word of God. They don't read it and meditate upon it. They don't spend time in prayer. They are not able to discern the still small voice of the Holy Spirit because they do not live in an active, daily relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.
You see what we would like and prefer is some kind of spiritual GPS that just kind of leads us and guides us but which is detached from a relationship with Him. And you cannot have that.
Proverbs 3:6 says,
"In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will direct your paths."
Now directing our paths is God's responsibility but the context in which He directs our paths is "in all your ways acknowledge Him."
Now involved in acknowledging Him is our love for Him, our obedience to Him, our dependence on Him, our intimacy with Him. And you cannot shelve that because life is too busy to spend time with God, too busy to spend time in His Word, too busy to spend time in prayer. You cannot shelve that and then just somehow assume "God please guide me" and hope that He will.
The key to being in the will of God is not becoming skilled in discerning guidance; the key is in walking humbly with God, and we cannot bypass that.
However, having said that, and that is important to say, there are things that we discover in Scripture that are ways in which God directs and guides His people. And I want to talk over several weeks about some of those things. We will take each one, as I will this morning, and detach it from any wider context, but then at the end we will have to put all these things back into relationship with each other.
And I want to talk this morning about this statement that Paul makes to King Agrippa, when looking back over his life he can say, "I was not disobedient to the vision from heaven."
Paul had a vision from heaven that right at the start of his Christian life he was told that now that he had surrendered to Jesus Christ as Lord, that he would preach the Gospel amongst his own people, amongst the Gentiles, that he would suffer for it, that he would be persecuted for it. And he says, "I was not disobedient to the vision that was given to me from heaven."
It didn't begin straightaway. It is hard to reconstruct the chronology of Paul's life but it was at least 12 years between his meeting Christ on the Damascus Road and the beginning of his first missionary journey when he did go out into the Gentile world and became the great apostle to the Gentiles - at least 12 years; more likely closer to 15. But as I say, it is hard to reconstruct it well.
Now this is not unique to Paul. There are many instances in Scripture.
Abraham, when he was 75 years of age, God took him outside one night, pointed him up to the sky and said, "How many stars can you see? I will give you as many descendants as the stars in the sky. You wife will give birth to a son and from that son will come a nation and from that nation will come a Seed and from that Seed, the whole world will be blessed."
Now he was already 75 years of age; his wife was already 65 years of age. And God gave him that vision, that vision from heaven, but nothing happened for 25 years. It was 25 years later that Isaac was born. It was the beginning of the fulfillment of that vision, but God gave him vision.
We will talk about the fact in a moment there is often a big gap between when God gives vision and the implementing of it.
When Joseph was a young man of 17, just a teenager, he had dreams, a couple of dreams in succession, both of which involved his brothers bowing down in front of him. He told his brothers about the dream. They didn't like it. They decided to get rid of him.
We talked about Joseph a few weeks ago. He was sold off as a slave to Egypt, eventually worked his way up through the prison system to become into Pharaoh's palace and eventually became second in command over the whole nation, as during 7 years of plenty, they prepared for 7 years of famine.
And two years into the famine when Joseph was 39 years of age, his brothers came to buy food. They were sent to Joseph. They came in and they bowed down in front of him, 22 years after his dream. And he probably thought to himself, "Deja vu, I saw this 22 years ago. Something is going on here. God is behind this." And so He was.
Moses, at the age of 40, did not understand why his fellow Israelites did not recognize that God was using him to deliver them from their bondage in Egypt because clearly, by that stage in his life, Moses had this sense from God, "You are the man who is going to lead the Israelites out of their bondage." But it didn't happen for another 40 years. But he had vision.
He went into the desert. His vision died during the next 40 years looking after sheep. At the age of 80 God began to implement it.
And there are many others in Scripture, which we are not going to talk about.
Now don't think, by the way, this is something which applies to those who are going to be missionaries or they are in Christian service. We sometimes subconsciously, if not consciously, have the idea that there is a kind of certain things about guidance that happen if you are going to be a missionary - you need a call for that. But if you are going to be a carpenter or you are going to go into business or industry or into politics and governments or you are going to go into the professions, you kind of don't need that.
This is not about something special for certain people in Christian ministry, because as I have pointed out to you before, that most of the leading characters in the Bible were not preachers. They were in all kinds of business and leadership and governance.
Abraham was not a preacher. Moses did some preaching; that wasn't his main function in life. David was not a preacher; he was a singer; he wrote some beautiful psalms, but he was a king.
So please don't think, well this doesn't apply to me because I am not in some kind of "Christian ministry".
This is not guidance for missionaries; this is regular Joe and regular Jane guidance. And I want to ask two questions this morning: number one: what is vision?
Well it is not something we make up; it is something which has to be received. Paul talks about his vision from heaven. Now it may seem to be very subjective and to some extent it is. But it must have its origin in God.
Jeremiah criticized prophets in his day in Jeremiah 23:16 when he said,
"They speak visions from their own minds, not from the mouth of the LORD."
In other words, they had visions, but their visions came from their own minds. They sat around and said to one another, "What is our preferred future? What would we like to see over the next few years?" And they thought things up and they sounded reasonable.
But Jeremiah says these visions were intrinsically corrupted because they did not come from God; they came from their own minds.
Now if vision sounds too strong a word for some of us, and even a word we might be very nervous about. ("What do you mean visions? I am not sure about this at all.")
The same thing is said in Psalm 37:4 but much more perhaps accessibly to many of us than the word vision because in Psalm 37:4 David says,
"Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart."
Delight yourself in God and He will give you the desires of your heart.
Now there are two ways to read that verse - there is a wrong way and there is a right way. The wrong way to read that verse is to say, "Delight yourself in God and He will give you whatever you want." So delight yourself in God and you would like a million bucks; well, God will give it to you.
Now there are those who do interpret this verse that way; I have heard it misinterpreted like that.
The right way to interpret this verse is this: you delight yourself in God and the desires of your heart will be God-given desires. Notice the condition: you delight yourself in God. That goes back to the verse I just quoted: "In all your ways acknowledge Him." It goes back to your dependence on Him, your obedience to Him, your love for Him, your intimacy with Him.
You delight yourself in God and the desires of your heart are God-given desires.
In the New Testament Paul wrote to the Philippians - Philippians 2:12:
"Work out your salvation with fear and trembling," (and then he tells you why) "for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose."
So he says God works in you to will, to put the right motivation, the right desires into your heart and then the enabling to fulfill them. But God works in you to will, that your desires are God-given.
I have often had a conversation about maybe a decision somebody has to make or something they want to do and they ask the question, "Is this my will or is this God's will? Because I am concerned it's my will, not God's will"
I have learned to answer that question by saying, "Have you ever thought about the fact that it could be both? It is your will and it is God's will. And the reason why it is your will is because it is God's will and if you delight yourself in the Lord, He will give you the desires of your heart, so it is your will because it is God's will and He has put that into your heart.
Let me just share how I learned this a little bit in my own experience. I studied for three years in Glasgow in Scotland at the Bible Training Institute there. At the end of those three years I didn't know what I should be doing. I knew generally that I felt God had called me to preach. I didn't know where or in what capacity.
When I came to the end of the course, the summer that lay ahead was full with invitations I had to do some camps and some youth missions and that kind of thing. And so I thought, well, I will see the summer through and see what happens after that. So I went through the summer. By the end of the summer, my fall calendar had filled up and the winter was filling up with invitations to churches and youth events and so on.
And I thought, well, maybe I would just continue doing this, I don't know. But by December of that year I had six invitations to work full-time in six different settings. Three of them were invitations from churches who had invited me to join their staff, or in some cases they had no staff so, "come and be our pastor" or whatever category they put that into - one of them was "come and be our full-time worker", which means do as much as you can that nobody else is doing.
Two of them were invitations to work with evangelistic organizations as an evangelist. One of them was to work with an organization that would involve part administration and part preaching.
So I had these six invitations and all of them had something about them that was attractive to me, but I didn't know which one was the right one that I should go with.
So I went to see a very wise man who I knew and I said to him, you know, "I've got these six invitations to these six possibilities; which one of these do you think is right?"
So I told him what they were and he said to me, "Probably none of them."
I said, "Why not?"
He said, "If on the one hand you are saying, 'Should I work with a local church in a pastoral capacity, should I be an evangelist, should I be involved in administration?'" He said, "Clearly, if you are asking those equally, you don't have a clear sense of vision as to what your life should consist of."
I said, "What do you mean?"
And I remember he explained to me about the need to get a vision from God for your life. Well, nobody had ever talked to me about that before. He said, "What I would do if I were you, is leave aside those six things and ask God for a vision."
Well I didn't know how to ask God for a vision, but I went away for two days on my own and I took with me my Bible and an empty notebook. And I spent those two days reading my Bible, praying. I walked many miles along some of the English country lanes where I was staying, where I was on my own. And I didn't know how to go about this so I thought, well, let me, let me begin to write down the things that I would really, really like to do and that I feel maybe I should do.
And I wrote a lot of things; I crossed out a lot of things; I thought with my pen and allowed the process - sometimes writing things down helps to clarify them. And at the end of those two days, I had a list of six things that I thought I really wanted to do; it was the only criteria by which I could measure them.
I went home and I looked at the six invitations that I had and none of them fitted the six things on my list. So I remember writing a letter to all six saying, "Well thank you very much for inviting me to be part of your church or organization but I don't feel that it's the right thing for me."
And I remember going down to the mailbox to mail those six letters - it was actually Christmas Day that I did this - that I at least went to mail them. And I remember standing outside the mailbox down the road from where I lived and I put three in straightaway; that was easy. And I thought, well, I'll hang on to these other three, you know, maybe, maybe, you know, I should keep these for a while just in case nothing else comes up. And then I put another one in and then I had two left.
By Charles Price
Acts 26:19-20
Now let me ask you, if you have got your Bible, to turn to the book of Acts in the New Testament, Acts Chapter 26; I am going to read there in just a moment. If you have been with us in recent days you will know we are talking about living in the will of God.
And for several weeks I have been talking about the big picture issues related to that. The fact that God has a general will and plan for this world and for people and that the personal will of God for our lives is always found in the context of the general will of God, which we need to live in obedience to. 95%, I would say, 95% of the will of God is in this book and that is where we need to live and that is where we need to discern and find out and receive God's general will for His world.
And we talked about other issues, the fact that the whole world is in the hands of the evil one, as Scripture says, and yet in the midst of that, as Job says, "No purpose of Yours can be thwarted," he says to God. That God is working out purpose in a fallen, broken, sinful environment.
But I want to talk this morning and for several weeks now, about the issue of personal guidance. How do I discern and follow the will of God that He has for me personally?
And I want to read to you from Acts 26. The context of what I am going to read is that Paul is in prison in Caesarea. He is on there on the basis of some false charges. The Roman governor Felix recognizes the falsehood of those charges and he says to Paul that "if you pay a bribe, you can walk free." But Paul didn't pay bribes and so he was kept in jail for two years, which is the length of the remaining years of Felix' term as Roman governor of Judea.
And then he was recalled to Rome, replaced by a man called Festus. When Festus came he wanted to clear up the backlog of cases and he brought Paul out and listened to his case.
And then King Agrippa - now you all know about King Herod; King Agrippa was in the line of the Herodian kings. He came to Caesarea to pay tribute to the new Roman governor because the Herodian kings were of course under the authority of Rome.
And when he came, Festus said, "I have an interesting man in my prison. His name is Paul. Maybe you would like to meet him and listen to him." And Paul was brought out to explain his case to Festus and also to King Agrippa.
And we are going to read when Paul comes to a point in this explanation where he has described how that he met with Jesus Christ on the Damascus Road, how that his life was revolutionized, how that he was told he would preach the Gospel to the Gentiles, how he was told he would suffer, that he would enter into persecution. And this was many years earlier this had happened.
And having described that, in Verse 19 he says,
"So then, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the vision from heaven. First to those in Damascus, then to those in Jerusalem and in all Judea, and to the Gentiles also, I preached that they should repent and turn to God and prove their repentance by their deeds.
"That is why the Jews seized me in the temple courts and tried to kill me. But I have had God's help to this very day, and so I stand here and testify to small and great alike. I am saying nothing beyond what the prophets and Moses said would happen - that the Christ would suffer and, as the first to rise from the dead, would proclaim light to his own people and to the Gentiles."
That is as far as I am going to read. And I want to talk this morning about the phrase that Paul uses there in Verse 19 when he says,
"I was not disobedient to the vision from heaven."
I want to talk about a vision from heaven. Now I am going to address myself mainly to younger people here this morning. You can decide whether you are younger or not. But older people, don't go to sleep; I am going to speak to you at the end because I have something important to say in the light of what I am going to say in the first part of this message.
But I want to talk about what is a vision from heaven. The fact that God does guide us is very clear to us in Scripture. There are many Scriptures that address this. David wrote in Psalm 37,
"The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord."
He said in Psalm 48,
"God will be our guide even to the end."
Asaph, who was the song leader in Solomon's temple, wrote in Psalm 73,
"You guide me with your counsel."
Solomon wrote,
"In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will direct your paths."
Isaiah wrote,
"The Lord will guide you always."
Paul wrote to the Colossians,
"We have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will."
And there are many other verses that talk about the fact that God guides us, God leads us, God has a will for us and we are to be aware of that and living in that.
Now when you ask the question how does God guide us? There are a multiplicity of ways in which God guides people in the Scripture and there is no simple formula that you can simply take the formula and say, "If you meet this, this, this and this, then God will guide you and you will know what it is to be in the centre of His will.
And I think there is good reason why there is no simple formula. If there was, we would probably want to just superimpose the formula on every situation we face and not have to do business with God Himself.
You see everything in the Christian life grows out of our relationship with Jesus Christ. Now most Christians will say they have a relationship with Jesus Christ.
I find myself quite often in conversation with people about issues they come to talk to me about and it's evident they don't have a relationship with Jesus Christ. They are Christians, yes. But they don't spend time with God. They don't spend time in the Word of God. They don't read it and meditate upon it. They don't spend time in prayer. They are not able to discern the still small voice of the Holy Spirit because they do not live in an active, daily relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.
You see what we would like and prefer is some kind of spiritual GPS that just kind of leads us and guides us but which is detached from a relationship with Him. And you cannot have that.
Proverbs 3:6 says,
"In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will direct your paths."
Now directing our paths is God's responsibility but the context in which He directs our paths is "in all your ways acknowledge Him."
Now involved in acknowledging Him is our love for Him, our obedience to Him, our dependence on Him, our intimacy with Him. And you cannot shelve that because life is too busy to spend time with God, too busy to spend time in His Word, too busy to spend time in prayer. You cannot shelve that and then just somehow assume "God please guide me" and hope that He will.
The key to being in the will of God is not becoming skilled in discerning guidance; the key is in walking humbly with God, and we cannot bypass that.
However, having said that, and that is important to say, there are things that we discover in Scripture that are ways in which God directs and guides His people. And I want to talk over several weeks about some of those things. We will take each one, as I will this morning, and detach it from any wider context, but then at the end we will have to put all these things back into relationship with each other.
And I want to talk this morning about this statement that Paul makes to King Agrippa, when looking back over his life he can say, "I was not disobedient to the vision from heaven."
Paul had a vision from heaven that right at the start of his Christian life he was told that now that he had surrendered to Jesus Christ as Lord, that he would preach the Gospel amongst his own people, amongst the Gentiles, that he would suffer for it, that he would be persecuted for it. And he says, "I was not disobedient to the vision that was given to me from heaven."
It didn't begin straightaway. It is hard to reconstruct the chronology of Paul's life but it was at least 12 years between his meeting Christ on the Damascus Road and the beginning of his first missionary journey when he did go out into the Gentile world and became the great apostle to the Gentiles - at least 12 years; more likely closer to 15. But as I say, it is hard to reconstruct it well.
Now this is not unique to Paul. There are many instances in Scripture.
Abraham, when he was 75 years of age, God took him outside one night, pointed him up to the sky and said, "How many stars can you see? I will give you as many descendants as the stars in the sky. You wife will give birth to a son and from that son will come a nation and from that nation will come a Seed and from that Seed, the whole world will be blessed."
Now he was already 75 years of age; his wife was already 65 years of age. And God gave him that vision, that vision from heaven, but nothing happened for 25 years. It was 25 years later that Isaac was born. It was the beginning of the fulfillment of that vision, but God gave him vision.
We will talk about the fact in a moment there is often a big gap between when God gives vision and the implementing of it.
When Joseph was a young man of 17, just a teenager, he had dreams, a couple of dreams in succession, both of which involved his brothers bowing down in front of him. He told his brothers about the dream. They didn't like it. They decided to get rid of him.
We talked about Joseph a few weeks ago. He was sold off as a slave to Egypt, eventually worked his way up through the prison system to become into Pharaoh's palace and eventually became second in command over the whole nation, as during 7 years of plenty, they prepared for 7 years of famine.
And two years into the famine when Joseph was 39 years of age, his brothers came to buy food. They were sent to Joseph. They came in and they bowed down in front of him, 22 years after his dream. And he probably thought to himself, "Deja vu, I saw this 22 years ago. Something is going on here. God is behind this." And so He was.
Moses, at the age of 40, did not understand why his fellow Israelites did not recognize that God was using him to deliver them from their bondage in Egypt because clearly, by that stage in his life, Moses had this sense from God, "You are the man who is going to lead the Israelites out of their bondage." But it didn't happen for another 40 years. But he had vision.
He went into the desert. His vision died during the next 40 years looking after sheep. At the age of 80 God began to implement it.
And there are many others in Scripture, which we are not going to talk about.
Now don't think, by the way, this is something which applies to those who are going to be missionaries or they are in Christian service. We sometimes subconsciously, if not consciously, have the idea that there is a kind of certain things about guidance that happen if you are going to be a missionary - you need a call for that. But if you are going to be a carpenter or you are going to go into business or industry or into politics and governments or you are going to go into the professions, you kind of don't need that.
This is not about something special for certain people in Christian ministry, because as I have pointed out to you before, that most of the leading characters in the Bible were not preachers. They were in all kinds of business and leadership and governance.
Abraham was not a preacher. Moses did some preaching; that wasn't his main function in life. David was not a preacher; he was a singer; he wrote some beautiful psalms, but he was a king.
So please don't think, well this doesn't apply to me because I am not in some kind of "Christian ministry".
This is not guidance for missionaries; this is regular Joe and regular Jane guidance. And I want to ask two questions this morning: number one: what is vision?
Well it is not something we make up; it is something which has to be received. Paul talks about his vision from heaven. Now it may seem to be very subjective and to some extent it is. But it must have its origin in God.
Jeremiah criticized prophets in his day in Jeremiah 23:16 when he said,
"They speak visions from their own minds, not from the mouth of the LORD."
In other words, they had visions, but their visions came from their own minds. They sat around and said to one another, "What is our preferred future? What would we like to see over the next few years?" And they thought things up and they sounded reasonable.
But Jeremiah says these visions were intrinsically corrupted because they did not come from God; they came from their own minds.
Now if vision sounds too strong a word for some of us, and even a word we might be very nervous about. ("What do you mean visions? I am not sure about this at all.")
The same thing is said in Psalm 37:4 but much more perhaps accessibly to many of us than the word vision because in Psalm 37:4 David says,
"Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart."
Delight yourself in God and He will give you the desires of your heart.
Now there are two ways to read that verse - there is a wrong way and there is a right way. The wrong way to read that verse is to say, "Delight yourself in God and He will give you whatever you want." So delight yourself in God and you would like a million bucks; well, God will give it to you.
Now there are those who do interpret this verse that way; I have heard it misinterpreted like that.
The right way to interpret this verse is this: you delight yourself in God and the desires of your heart will be God-given desires. Notice the condition: you delight yourself in God. That goes back to the verse I just quoted: "In all your ways acknowledge Him." It goes back to your dependence on Him, your obedience to Him, your love for Him, your intimacy with Him.
You delight yourself in God and the desires of your heart are God-given desires.
In the New Testament Paul wrote to the Philippians - Philippians 2:12:
"Work out your salvation with fear and trembling," (and then he tells you why) "for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose."
So he says God works in you to will, to put the right motivation, the right desires into your heart and then the enabling to fulfill them. But God works in you to will, that your desires are God-given.
I have often had a conversation about maybe a decision somebody has to make or something they want to do and they ask the question, "Is this my will or is this God's will? Because I am concerned it's my will, not God's will"
I have learned to answer that question by saying, "Have you ever thought about the fact that it could be both? It is your will and it is God's will. And the reason why it is your will is because it is God's will and if you delight yourself in the Lord, He will give you the desires of your heart, so it is your will because it is God's will and He has put that into your heart.
Let me just share how I learned this a little bit in my own experience. I studied for three years in Glasgow in Scotland at the Bible Training Institute there. At the end of those three years I didn't know what I should be doing. I knew generally that I felt God had called me to preach. I didn't know where or in what capacity.
When I came to the end of the course, the summer that lay ahead was full with invitations I had to do some camps and some youth missions and that kind of thing. And so I thought, well, I will see the summer through and see what happens after that. So I went through the summer. By the end of the summer, my fall calendar had filled up and the winter was filling up with invitations to churches and youth events and so on.
And I thought, well, maybe I would just continue doing this, I don't know. But by December of that year I had six invitations to work full-time in six different settings. Three of them were invitations from churches who had invited me to join their staff, or in some cases they had no staff so, "come and be our pastor" or whatever category they put that into - one of them was "come and be our full-time worker", which means do as much as you can that nobody else is doing.
Two of them were invitations to work with evangelistic organizations as an evangelist. One of them was to work with an organization that would involve part administration and part preaching.
So I had these six invitations and all of them had something about them that was attractive to me, but I didn't know which one was the right one that I should go with.
So I went to see a very wise man who I knew and I said to him, you know, "I've got these six invitations to these six possibilities; which one of these do you think is right?"
So I told him what they were and he said to me, "Probably none of them."
I said, "Why not?"
He said, "If on the one hand you are saying, 'Should I work with a local church in a pastoral capacity, should I be an evangelist, should I be involved in administration?'" He said, "Clearly, if you are asking those equally, you don't have a clear sense of vision as to what your life should consist of."
I said, "What do you mean?"
And I remember he explained to me about the need to get a vision from God for your life. Well, nobody had ever talked to me about that before. He said, "What I would do if I were you, is leave aside those six things and ask God for a vision."
Well I didn't know how to ask God for a vision, but I went away for two days on my own and I took with me my Bible and an empty notebook. And I spent those two days reading my Bible, praying. I walked many miles along some of the English country lanes where I was staying, where I was on my own. And I didn't know how to go about this so I thought, well, let me, let me begin to write down the things that I would really, really like to do and that I feel maybe I should do.
And I wrote a lot of things; I crossed out a lot of things; I thought with my pen and allowed the process - sometimes writing things down helps to clarify them. And at the end of those two days, I had a list of six things that I thought I really wanted to do; it was the only criteria by which I could measure them.
I went home and I looked at the six invitations that I had and none of them fitted the six things on my list. So I remember writing a letter to all six saying, "Well thank you very much for inviting me to be part of your church or organization but I don't feel that it's the right thing for me."
And I remember going down to the mailbox to mail those six letters - it was actually Christmas Day that I did this - that I at least went to mail them. And I remember standing outside the mailbox down the road from where I lived and I put three in straightaway; that was easy. And I thought, well, I'll hang on to these other three, you know, maybe, maybe, you know, I should keep these for a while just in case nothing else comes up. And then I put another one in and then I had two left.
