Among my responsibilities as an elder/pastor within a local church is meeting with people to offer counsel and guidance. I have never lost the wonder of being given so sobering a privilege—to listen to people as they share their deep sorrows or ask their big questions and to then attempt to bring the Word of God to bear in wisdom, comfort, and direction.
I recently spent some time pondering the situations that seem to arise on a regular basis. While some circumstances are entirely unique, many more have a number of similarities between them. And as I pondered these, I realized that the most common counsel I offer is this: Stop thinking in terms of “should” and “ought” and start thinking in terms of “wise” and “want.”
When Christians meet trials and difficulties or when they come to hard decisions or forks in the road, they naturally want to know “How do I please God in this situation?” This is a wonderful instinct and a very good question to ask. Christians should always be concerned to do what God commands and to avoid what God forbids. I love to hear, “I want to honor God in my decision. I want to bring glory to him in my situation.”
Yet in most of life, God does not give us clear commands. A parent may tell his child, “go and play in the yard.” The parent doesn’t care what game the child plays, as long as he stays inside the fence. And kind of like that, God sets the moral boundaries and then gives us great freedom within them. We like to ask “should” questions: Should I join this church or that one? Should I go to this college or that one? Should I pursue this potential spouse or that one? Should I have this number of children or that number? We use the word “should” very naturally when we ask such questions, yet that word can trip us up because it implies that there is some level of moral rightness and wrongness in our situation, that there is one way that will please God and other that will displease him—one way that will gain his blessing and another that will lead to some kind of negative consequence. We then look for clear guidance from God and hesitate when we fail to receive it.
Something I often say is “What if God doesn’t really care?” I am deliberately overstating the matter and need to explain myself, of course. But what I mean to convey is that God may not be too concerned about which decision you make—not concerned enough, that is, to reveal it to you. After all, God is our Father and a father supports his children. If a dad tells his child to go out in the yard and play, he doesn’t want his child to plead to tell him whether to play tag, hide-and-seek, or catch. He just wants his child to play—to play whatever game delights his heart in that moment.
God wants us to live. He wants us to make our own decisions.
And like that, God wants us to live. He wants us to make our own decisions. He provides the boundaries of his will in those matters the Bible makes clear, but then leaves it to us to operate according to wisdom and desire. He leaves it to us to evaluate the wisest course of action and then to consider our desires—wisdom and desires that have been shaped by the Word and molded by the Spirit.
And so my most common pastoral counsel is designed to help people stop thinking they need to make their decisions on the basis of what they should do or ought to do but to instead make decisions on the basis of what’s wise and what they want. Observing that they have inadvertently made the moral will of God much more expansive than it actually is, I help them see how they are already within the boundaries of what God has revealed and that he is now pleased to give them freedom—freedom to choose many different paths and be sure of his blessing no matter which one they take. In other words, they need to stop thinking in terms of “should” and “ought” and start thinking in terms of “wise” and “want.”
