God's Will Is...
“Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is.”
Most people truly want to understand what the will of the Lord is. Knowing God’s will is a worthwhile goal – and a biblical one – and so people spend much of their lives in pursuit of it, searching for the will of God as if it were a buried treasure. Sadly, many people struggle to find it. It seems impossible to them because it appears to be shrouded in mystery. Because they have such a hard time in understanding God’s will, some people simply decide that everything in life – including murder, racism, and every other kind of evil – must be God's will. They conclude that if your dog gets run over by a delivery truck and dies, then that must be the will of God for your life. However, if their conclusion is accurate, and God’s will is always happening in our lives, then why does Jesus pray for God’s will to “be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10)? If God’s will is already happening on earth, then there would be no reason for Jesus to teach us to pray this way. Clearly, not everything happening in your life is God’s will.
So what is God’s will? I don’t profess to know everything there is to know about God’s will, but I’ll tell you what I do know. When we talk about the will of God, we must understand that there are at least 3 (possibly more) different wills at work in the world. There is the sovereign will of God, the perfect will of God, and the permissive will of God. They are intricately related to one another and it is helpful to think of them as three different dimensions of the will of God. Understanding these concepts is important because you may be really confused about what the will of God is.
The sovereign will of God is the will of God that only He can accomplish and people have no power or control over. Sovereignty simply means that God has supreme power and authority. In other words, God is in control of the things that are out of your control. Creating the universe is something that only God can do. On a smaller scale, who your parents are is part of God’s sovereign will. You had no control over who your parents were, and while they may have decided to have a child, they had no control over it being you. The parent-child relationship is part of the sovereign will of God. God’s sovereign will is being manifested in your life, because He is in control of the things that are out of your control. There are a variety of opportunities for you to trust in the sovereign will of God especially when something may be beyond your sphere of influence.
While God’s sovereign will is in operation in those areas beyond your control, there are things that God has placed within your control. God has given you dominion on this earth and has delegated His authority over unto you (Genesis 1:26-28). There are things that He wants you to do – things that only you can do – and He is never going to do what He expects you to do. The perfect will of God consists of those things God wants you to do – it’s his desired plan for you. God’s perfect will is revealed to us through His Word. We find the perfect will of God in Scripture. Whatever you find in the Bible is God’s perfect plan for your life. You can stand on God's perfect will which is His word and get results by faith. Anything contrary to that perfect plan is not the will of God. John 10:10 is an example of the perfect will of God: Jesus came that they may have and enjoy life, and have it in abundance (to the full, ‘til it overflows). So according to scripture, God's perfect will is for you to enjoy life!
The permissive will, also known as free will, is anything within your control that is outside God’s perfect will. This includes both those times when you choose to go against God’s perfect will – like sexual sin or lying – and those decisions about which God has no expressed preference – like choosing which side dishes you want with your meal. God has given you the ability to make your own decisions and you will reap the benefits or consequences of whatever you decide to do. That’s the permissive will of God.
“People ruin their lives with the foolish things they do, and then they blame the Lord for it”
In short, God alone fulfills His sovereign will – those things which are beyond your control – and He gave humanity the permissive will – those things within your control. Heaven operates according to God’s sovereign will and this world operates according to the permissive will. But in between these two, we have God’s perfect will, revealed to us in His Word. This is where Christians should operate! We can submit our permissive wills to His perfect will and petition His will to be done on earth as it is in Heaven. You may recall Jesus submitting his permissive will to the Father’s perfect will when He was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane before the crucifixion. He said in Luke 22:42, “not My [permissive] will, but Yours [perfect], be done.” In God’s perfect will, you have access to everything that God wants you to have by faith. By faith, we use our permissive will to reach from this world, through God’s perfect will, into the Kingdom of Heaven. By submitting our permissive will to God’s perfect will, we can live the kind of life God created us to live – true life, life in abundance, to the full and overflowing - right here and right now!