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Pointers along the way #515

What is God's will for us?
- Jacob Ninan

In a broad sense, God's will for us is that we should be saved from our sins (Jn.3:16;Mt.1:21;1Ti.2:4), and we should be transformed into the character of Jesus (Ro.8:29). But as we can see plainly, comparatively few are being saved and the majority are going into eternal judgment. In other words, God's will is not being carried out in this context! Now we can understand why Jesus asks us to pray that the Father's will should be done on earth as it is in heaven (Mt.6:10). A part of God's will is being done, but all of it needs to get done.

What is hindering God's entire will from being done is our free will which is able to oppose God. It is with a good purpose that God has created us with a free will, because only then can we choose to love Him (more than everyone and everything else). God has also taken a risk in doing this because He knew that we might disobey Him. It was because He knew that we might mess things up that He made a plan (before even the world was created) to take our punishment on Himself and make a way for us to get back to Him.

There are two sides to this. God's will does not get done automatically, and not everything that happens is the will of God. Sad to say, we can make a mistake in understanding both these sides, and then end up not doing the things He wants us to do, or blaming God for things He didn't do.

When we have a problem, say in our marriage, we may expect God to sort it out and the maximum we may do is to pray. Yes, we need to cast our burdens upon Him and depend on Him to help us, but we shouldn't neglect doing the things we ought to do, such as talking things over, going for counselling, apologising, trying to understand the spouse's point of view, learning where we would have gone wrong, etc. But instead, we get upset with God for not answering our prayers!

On the other hand, when some calamities happen to us we mistakenly assume that God has done them to us. We marry the wrong person and wonder why God gave us that spouse! Someone crashes into our car and we think God is punishing us for some past sins. A storm or flood comes our way and we are upset that God didn't protect us as His children.

If we married the wrong person it is we who made that mistake and not God. If someone crashes into our car it could be his fault and not ours or God's. If a natural calamity causes us to suffer it is because we are living on the earth that is suffering from the consequences of sin.

There are times when God protects us supernaturally and other times when He allows certain things to happen to us to test us or train us for greater things (1Pe.4:12). He causes even bad things that happen to us to work together to give us something good (Ro.8:28). So why don't we stop blaming God for things that happen and start asking Him about what we should do now in our present situation? Then He can give us some meaning for different situations and show us how we should respond.

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