I’m beginning a book on God’s will.  Here are a few ideas I am thinking about today, and maybe they will be helpful to all those students who are taking the next step in their life journey.

1. God’s will is not a mystery.
2. We do not have to beg and plead with God to “reveal his will for our lives.”
3. God is not withholding his will, waiting for us to pray fervently enough.
4. We typically want God’s will more than we want a relationship with God.
5. What people call the “individual will of God” may be non-existent.
6. We ask God to reveal his will to avoid the pain of difficult decisions.
7. We ask God to reveal his will instead of planning our lives.
8. We seek a sign from God because that is easier than making a decision.
9. We sometimes make decisions based on hunches or impressions that we attribute to God.
10. Seeking a sign from God is the contemporary equivalent of ancient divination practices.
11. We substitute divination for developing wisdom.
12. We substitute divination for the leadership of the Holy Spirit.
13. We fail to take into account spiritual gifts as clues to our life’s purpose.
14. We fail to take into account our own desires as clues to our life’s purpose.
15. In all these ways, we’ve allowed contemporary Christian culture to trump sound biblical thinking on an important subject.