God’s Will vs. Your Will

If in your heart you’re not truly sold out to God’s will, you are going to misinterpret your will as if it’s God’s will. If we are going to truly discern God’s will, we must say as Christ did to the Father, “Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.”

Determining what God’s will for us is not just a matter of figuring out what I want or what my parents want. Because sometimes what God wants is contrary to both. Now sometimes it’s not going to be that way too. But that means I have to look beyond just what I want and what they want to figure out what God wants. 

Now brethren, this might all seem real basic, but I’ll tell you, one of the biggest problems that we have is that we basically reflect onto God what we want. We basically walk through life saying, “Well, I believe God’s will for my life is ‘this’.” I’ll go to something that doesn’t involve anybody here, other than my wife. But my wife said before I met her that she had numerous guys come along and say, “It’s God’s will for me to marry you.” Well, that wasn’t true. Unless I die and somehow Ruby goes through all sorts of husbands after that. But the fact is, these guys were just dead wrong. 

And so, you see what they were doing. They wanted to marry her, and so the next conclusion is, it’s God’s will. Brethren, that isn’t how you figure out God’s will. God’s will doesn’t equate to what you will. I mean, brethren, if we’re going to be followers of Christ, there was a day when Christ said, “Not My will, but Thine be done.” And the fact is Jesus did want to escape that cup if He could. Yet nevertheless He was constrained to following His Father’s will. 

Brethren, the crowning issue is always God’s will. The two wills that seem easiest to discern, mine and my parents, are the two wills that are of least importance. And the will that is most important, namely God’s, that is often the most difficult. And the truth is, what often makes God’s will most difficult to discern, is precisely at the point I was just hitting on. My own will gets in the way. My own will gets in the way. 

This can be a rather complex situation when you have three wills at work. You can get the child and the parents into butting heads, and the child is a Christian, and maybe the parents are not. And yet that doesn’t automatically mean that it’s God’s will that the Christian child do what he wants to do. It may be that the parents, no matter how much they may be in a different church or of a different doctrinal persuasion or of nominal Christianity, or maybe not churchgoers at all. It may not be God’s will for you to do your will when your will is at confrontation with those parents. Just because you’re saved, and maybe they’re less spiritual, less mature, or maybe not even saved at all. It still may be God’s will many times for you to follow the instruction of the parents. 

Well, how do we sort all this out? Brethren, I’m going to say this, this is the first thing: We’ve got a young church, young people, you need to nail this down. You can’t even start discerning this; you can’t even start on the right page until and unless you are surrendered to God. You see, one of the problems is we come into trying to discern this thing with our mind already made up. And the confrontation with our parents… We don’t typically fight with God, at least, admittingly so. All we do is assume that we know what God’s will is and that it’s consistent with ours. You see, we’ll change things, twist Scripture, do this… so the confrontation comes with parents. The thing that I’m really wanting to hit on is how can we know what God’s will really is. When should we obey the parents and when should we not obey the parents? 

And by the way, this has just as much application to you that have bosses, to you that have to submit to government, to you ladies that are married, and how you deal with your husbands, especially if they might be lost husbands. This applies anywhere where we have authority situations. 

Brethren, the first thing… like I say, you can’t even start this thing unless and until there is a real surrender. Look, I can’t even talk to you about this if you are not first surrendered. My words aren’t even to you. What I would say to somebody who is just determined to have their own way regardless of what God has to say, regardless of what your parents think. Basically, you’re living life to have your own way. To do your own thing. Really, my only words for you is Jesus says that not everybody who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” He says those that do the will of My Father in heaven, they’re the ones that are going to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. 

Folks, if there isn’t a brokenness and a surrender… You’ve got to deny self to be a disciple of Christ. This is the starting place: surrender. If you’re not even there, then I really don’t have much to say to you, because you’re never going to figure out God’s will. Those who don’t really want to know God’s will, those who already have their agenda figured out, and they just come along and they want God’s blessing on what they already know they want. That’s not going to receive God’s blessing. 

I have really been struck as I have been reading through Hudson Taylor. Just in the vicinity of where I’ve been reading, listen to some of the quotes that I pulled out. Here’s Hudson Taylor: “Let us see that we keep God before our eyes, that we walk in His ways.” And listen to this: “and seek to please and glorify Him in everything great and small. Depend upon it. God’s work done God’s way will never lack God’s supplies.” That’s where he says that. “But to seek to please God in everything great and small.” This is the starting point. This is really the starting point where my will is surrendered to His will. Where I can honestly come and say, “Lord, if You require me to give up the most valuable things; if You require me to lay aside my most hopeful agendas, then I am Yours. I am Your servant. You are Master. You are Lord. Thy will be done.” That’s the starting point. And Taylor knew that. 

He said this in another place, “Hope in God Who will never leave nor forsake those who seek to please Him.” And that’s true. When God finds one who seeks to please Him, He is going to show them the right way to go in order to please Him. The person whose greatest desire is their own pleasure, they want what they want. Folks, God isn’t going to be a help. God isn’t going to show them. God isn’t going to be with them. God isn’t going to help them. God isn’t going to bless them. God honors those that honor Him. And that is not to honor Him, to basically say I’m going to do what I want to do and I’ve got my mind made up. 

Listen to what Taylor said, Taylor, time and time and time again had to leave his wife and his children for extended seasons, and he said this, in writing to his wife back in England, “It is joy to leave all, you my precious one included, to please Him.” What a heart. He says this again in another place, “My increasing desire is to please God. So far as I know my own heart, this is my only wish in the matter. I thirst for Thee, O God, for Thee. Oh, draw me nearer, nearer still forevermore, Thine own to be, my will all lost in Thy sweet will.” You see the heart? My will lost in Yours. His increasing desire… And in those pages as I’ve read, the conversion of C.T. Studd, many of you know him, he went back to his school, one last address to those men and those women he went to school with – he was a cricket player. And he was one of the best, if not the best, in England at the time. He says, “‘I want to recommend you to My Master.’ Said Studd in his last address to the men of his own university. ‘I’ve had many ways of pleasure in my life, and have tasted most of the delights this world can give. But I can tell you these pleasures are as nothing compared to my present joy. I had formerly as much love for cricket as any man could have, but when the Lord Jesus came into my heart, I found that I had something infinitely better. My heart was no longer set on the game. I wanted to win souls to serve and please Him.'” 

Sold out. That’s Taylor. That’s Studd. Sold out to please Him. I was telling the Haney’s on Saturday about something that I had been reading, or Friday night rather, had been reading on John Wycliffe. Listen to this – he speaks about love for Jesus. “Oh, good Jesus!” John Wycliffe – 1300’s, translated the Scriptures from Latin into English, and was put to death by the Roman Catholic church, ground his bones up and threw it into the waters. “Oh, good Jesus!” he writes. “Who else could give to me what I feel from Thee? Thou must now be felt and not seen. Enter into the inmost recesses of my soul. Come into my heart. Fulfill it with Thy clear sweetness. Make my mind to drink deeply of the strong wine of Thy sweet love. That I forgetting all evils and all trivial thoughts and disbelieving imaginations, may embrace Thee only, joyfully rejoicing in my Lord Jesus.” 

And then Wycliffe looks at what this sort of love for Christ does in a person, and he says this, “It cannot be overcome with any other affection or love, nor trial nor temptation. It gladly casts down all other hindrances, all temptations, and quenches fleshly desires. Man suffers gladly and submissively, all anguish for Christ, and is not overcome with any delight or flattering, so that whether thou art in ease or in anguish, in sickness or in health, you would not for all the world anger God at any time.” That is the opposite. That is the negative way of saying his desire, when you have this kind of love is to please God, to please Christ at all times. 

Brethren, young people, this whole issue when to marry, if my parents are for it or against it; when to move for the sake of the church, if my parents are against it; when to go to the foreign mission field if my parents are against it; when to do these things, or not do them, live in the women’s grace house or the men’s grace house, if my parents are against it. How to sort through these, brethren, the starting point is this: I am sold out for Christ. And even if Christ should take away my dearest, my wife, my children; even if I’m called to endure that, for Christ’s sake I’m going to go. Even if I’m madly in love and I want to get married and Christ calls away the one who is so precious to me, or splits up the relationship, whether it’s according to or not according to my parent’s will. But I’m ready to surrender myself to His will. And my desire is first and foremost to please Him. 

Brethren, that has to be the attitude and the spirit that permeates this church and permeates the thinking of our young people. First and foremost, sold out to Christ. Because then determining whether to obey parents or not; whether to hate them or honor them as the different portions of Scripture portray. And you understand, Jesus is talking about a hatred that is in comparison to the love that is had for Christ. It is loving Christ more, it is honoring Christ more. It is holding Him up above all. To the place where parents and other authority are going to see you rejecting them to do so. It’s going to have that look to it, because that’s actually what’s happening. You are rejecting their counsel. You are rejecting their will in order to have Christ. 

But you see, if you’re not sold out to God’s will, you are going to misinterpret all the time your will for God’s will. And so you’re going to pit yourself against your parents every time they disagree with you, because you can’t see beyond your own will to really wanting God’s will, and to be pleasing to Him. Let me tell you one thing that is a dead giveaway, when you are doing what you want, not what God wants – is when you’re hasty. People who act fast. A young man who will come and tell me in a split moment that he knows it’s God’s will that he should marry one of my daughters or something like that, some kind of hasty decision like that; that is a very dead giveaway of somebody who wants their own will and not really content to know God’s. 

Because one thing you will find, if you have tried to discern God’s will for any amount of time is the Lord is, a lot of times, not pleased to give us the answer we’re looking for the first moment we begin to pray about it. In fact, you have in Scripture, the idea comes out like in Lamentations 3:25, “The Lord is good to those who wait for Him. To the soul who seeks Him…” Finding the Lord’s will oftentimes is going to take waiting. We pray. We wait. We seek counsel. We wait. And we’re looking for the Lord to make clear. Brethren, you’ve got to be able to sort through your own feelings, your own passions, your own desire in all this. You’ve got to learn how to look for God’s will beyond your own wants and wishes and agendas. That’s key. That’s critical. Otherwise, you are going to miss it. You’re going to end up where you ought not to be. You’re going to end up in bad places.

_{Watch the full sermon, “When Is It God’s Will to Disobey My Parents?”}