How can I know God’s will? It may be the question Christians ask more than any other. Whom should I marry? Which job should I take? Which church should I join? How should I educate my children? We long to choose rightly, and we fear choosing wrongly. I have wrestled with this subject for a long time. As I once admitted, “I find one of the trickiest areas of very practical theology to be knowing the will of God.”
This page gathers the best of what I’ve written on knowing God’s will and making decisions into one place. My conviction throughout is a happy one: God guides his people not through impressions, signs, and fleeces, but through his Word, through wisdom, and through the freedom he delights to give his children. Whether you are facing a weighty decision right now or simply want to think biblically about guidance, I hope it will serve you well.
What Is the Will of God?
Any discussion of God’s will has to begin with a crucial distinction. In How to Know the Will of God, the first article in a four-part series that forms the backbone of this page, I begin with the sheer, absolute sovereignty of God, which is to say, with what theologians call his secret or hidden will:
Theologians call this God’s secret will or his hidden will, and that’s a good term for it. These are the things that God has decreed will happen and they will happen without our input or assent. If you step outside your front door today and are hit with a meteorite, that will be part of God’s will for you—probably the last part of God’s will for you—and you will have had no say in it. This is God’s secret will to bring about his purposes from behind the scenes, from beyond what we can see and control. You are not meant to know this until after it happens and you do not consciously participate in it.
God’s hidden will is his business, not ours. Alongside it stands his revealed will—all that he has told us in the Bible about how to live. The trouble comes when we confuse the two and start treating the hidden will as something we can decode. When authors claim that God orchestrated all of history so you would be holding their book at this very moment, I get uncomfortable, and in Bludgeoning with Providence I explain why: “They are peering into the unknowable providence of God and are interpreting it for me.” We do not find God’s will by reading providence in advance. We find it where he has actually revealed it.
How God Speaks Today
If God guides us through his revealed will, where do we go to hear it? In How God Speaks To Us Today, I trace the Bible’s own answer through four statements: God can speak to people in many different ways; today God speaks to us by his Son; God speaks to us by his Son, through his Spirit in the Bible; and apart from this, God does not promise that he will speak in any other way. The conclusion is full of confidence:
So Christian, if you want to know God’s will for you, you need to look to the Bible. God has given us his perfect will in his perfect Word. Do you want to know how to serve God? Do you want to know how to please him? Do you want to know what he wants from you? Do you want to make good and wise and God-honoring decisions? Do you want to be encouraged by God? Then look to your Bible. God can speak and has spoken however he wishes. But today the one way he absolutely promises you can always hear his voice is in his Word.
This is no cold or distant doctrine. In When I Heard God’s Voice I tell of a Sunday morning when I was weary and discouraged and desperate for help from the Lord: “God spoke to me on Sunday morning. It was clear. It was undeniable.” He spoke through an open Bible and the words of Psalm 130, which is exactly where he promises to speak.
God’s Will for Your Life
So what does the Bible actually reveal about God’s will for you? In God’s Will For Your Life, I point to passages like 1 Thessalonians 4:3—“This is the will of God, your sanctification.” God’s will for you is that you would be holy, prayerful, thankful, and increasingly like Christ. That is what you will find. Here is what you won’t:
You won’t find the Bible saying, “You should marry this fine, Christian girl instead of that fine, Christian girl.” You won’t find the Bible telling you, “Go ahead and buy the Honda and I will bless you” or “Don’t buy that Toyota or I’ll remove my hand of blessing.” You will find lots of principles and lots of wisdom and lots of clear guidance on how you can honor God. But you will see that God does not reveal his secret will to you and he does not reveal his complete will for you.
Some people are disappointed by this. They shouldn’t be—it is a gift:
He won’t speak from the sky. Instead, he’ll do something far better. He will let you make a choice and promise to be with you regardless of what you choose. Not only that, but he will love and support you and bless you, because what you do is in accordance with his revealed will as he has given it in the Bible.
Three Questions for Any Decision
The capstone of that series, How Do I Make Decisions That Please God?, gets right down to the practical. When you face a decision, ask three questions in order: What does the Bible say about it? What is the wisest choice? What do you want to do? Where the Bible speaks a clear yes or no, obey right away. But beyond that line lies a whole world of freedom:
If you are not disobeying God’s revealed will, if you are not directly disobeying the Bible, you are in God’s will. God has given you a brain for a reason and he’s given you desires for a reason. He’s given you freedom to choose what you should do. He is a loving father who will support you either way.
And when a decision passes both the test of Scripture and the test of wisdom, the final question is a joy to ask:
What do you want to do? Isn’t it amazing that we get to ask this question? What do you want to do? What desires has God given you? What makes you happy? What brings you joy? What excites you? Find that thing and go do it.
Two companions belong alongside those questions. The first is prayer, because as I wrote in 3 Reasons We Need to Pray, “Praying declares that we do not have the wisdom we need”—wisdom comes from outside ourselves. The second is discernment, the discipline of distinguishing right from wrong and best from better, which is a subject big enough that I have given it a guide of its own. And since so many of our weightiest choices are vocational—this career or that one, this calling or that—it is worth remembering from Pursue Your Vocation that work itself is God’s good design: “You were created to carry out the important task of working in God’s world as God’s representative.”
Stop Thinking “Should,” Start Thinking “Wise”
More than a decade after writing that series, I can tell you it has stood the test of pastoral ministry. In My Most Common Pastoral Counsel I share the advice I find myself giving more often than any other: stop thinking in terms of “should” and “ought” and start thinking in terms of “wise” and “want”:
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.
When we ask “Should I join this church or that one? Should I go to this college or that one?” the word “should” quietly implies that one option will please God and the other will forfeit his blessing, and then we agonize, waiting for guidance he never promised to give. The truth is far kinder:
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.
Why Decisions Are So Hard
If God gives us such freedom, why do decisions still keep us up at night? In Why Making Decisions Is So Hard I suggest the answer: what we really want when we make a decision is to see the future, and that is the one thing God will not give us. He gives us something better:
God doesn’t comfort us by showing us the future, but by showing us himself. He shows himself as the all-powerful, all-knowing God who is for us, not against us. He shows himself as being far more committed to us than we are to him. He promises that he will never leave us nor forsake us, that he will work all things for good, that he will hold us firm to the end. He guarantees that he has purposes in this world and that nothing can change or interrupt or thwart them. He assures us that he will be glorified. He says, “Don’t look at the future, look at me!”
“Decisions are difficult simply because we do not trust God with the results of our decisions.” In the end, “Your confidence in making decisions is directly related to your confidence in God himself.” I had to put all of this to the test in 2015, when I faced the choice of resigning my full-time pastoral position. This was a decision that would impact my life, my family, and my church. I wrote about it in The Major Life Decision That Put My Theology to the Test:
This situation represented the first time in quite a while when I had to make a major, life-altering decision. I found myself surprised by the difficulty. I know how to do it by the book: I followed the process and came to a decision—a good decision, I think. But I didn’t love it. I had to push myself to believe that this is all God requires of me–to seek his revealed will and to then live boldly, with confidence in him.
Making decisions God’s way does not always feel triumphant. But it leads to peace: “I don’t know exactly what the future holds, but as the saying goes, I do know the one who holds the future.”
Freedom in Life’s Big Decisions
Few decisions display all of this more clearly than the one Christian parents agonize over most: how to educate their children. In What If God Doesn’t Care a Whole Lot About How You Educate Your Children? I dared to ask whether we have made this choice weightier than God himself makes it:
And do you know what I’ve observed? I’ve observed that there’s little observable difference between the outcomes. Now, I need to offer a key caveat: I’m thinking particularly of families who had biblical convictions about education and followed those convictions to one of the options. They believed before the Lord that homeschooling would be best for their family so homeschooled, they believed before the Lord that Christian schooling would be best for their family so Christian schooled, or they believed before the Lord that public schooling would be best for their family so enrolled their children in public school.
Years later I returned to the subject to offer a full framework in A Process for Wisely Deciding How to Educate Your Children. The process is specific to education, but the principle beneath it applies to every big decision a Christian will ever make:
The best decisions flow from a biblically guided mind and a well-informed conscience. Not only that, but the best decisions rely upon the wisdom of other people, and especially the wisdom of other Christians—those who help us better understand Scripture and who help us shape our conscience according to it. We can have confidence in our decisions when we rely on Scripture, conscience, and the wisdom of others.
When God Unfolds His Will in Pieces
When Moses built the tabernacle, God first gave him a complete blueprint. We often wish God would deal with us the same way—that he would show us the finished whole before asking us to take the first step. As I wrote in When God Unfolds His Will in Pieces, that is not his way with us:
But when it comes to our lives, God chooses to unfold his will in bits, in steps, in phases. He chooses to unfold his will in real-time and not in advance. He chooses to unfold his will in such a way that we need to exercise faith—faith that all we experience is within his providence, faith that the way will become clear as we go, and faith that when we look back upon it all, we will praise him for his wisdom. We proceed through life with a page of directions that includes just the next step or two, not with a booklet of instructions that displays the completed whole.
And so we walk by faith, one step at a time, doing what God has actually asked of us. That, in the end, is what it means to live in the will of God. As I put it in What Do You Do With the Will of God?: “As Christians, we desire God’s will, we seek God’s will, we approve of it, we delight in it, and we do it.”
Start Here: Essays on the Will of God
- How to Know the Will of God. The four-part series at the heart of this page: God’s sovereignty, how God speaks, what God has revealed, and how to decide. (Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)
- How God Speaks To Us Today. Four statements on the voice of God, and why the Bible is where he promises to be heard.
- My Most Common Pastoral Counsel. Stop thinking “should” and “ought”; start thinking “wise” and “want.”
- Why Making Decisions Is So Hard. We want to see the future; God shows us himself instead.
- What Do You Do With the Will of God? Christians desire it, seek it, approve of it, delight in it, and do it.
- The Major Life Decision That Put My Theology to the Test. What happened when I had to practice everything I had preached.
- When I Heard God’s Voice. God spoke to me on a Sunday morning (through an open Bible).
- When God Unfolds His Will in Pieces. Moses got a blueprint; we get a page of directions with just the next step or two.
- What If God Doesn’t Care a Whole Lot About How You Educate Your Children? A case study in Christian freedom applied to a weighty decision.
- A Process for Wisely Deciding How to Educate Your Children. Five questions for deciding with wisdom and confidence.
- 3 Reasons We Need to Pray. Why prayer belongs at the start of every decision: we lack the wisdom, the time, and the motives we need.
- Pursue Your Vocation. God’s good design for work, and why your occupation is part of his will for you.
- Bludgeoning with Providence. On the misuse of God’s will, like when people claim to interpret his hidden providence for you.
You can browse more of what I’ve written on the subject in the guidance topic archive.
Explore More
Knowing God’s will is closely tied to the discipline of thinking and choosing biblically, so a natural next step is my guide to spiritual discernment. And because every decision ultimately rests in the hands of a sovereign God, you may also enjoy browsing the providence and wisdom topic archives.
This guide is one of a series. You can find them all on my guides page.
