“For our regulars at Church of the Nativity or on-line, you’ve probably noticed that I haven’t been speaking much this summer, and by “much” I mean, not at all. So maybe you’ve been wondering what I’ve been up to.
Well, I did take a couple of weekends off for vacation, of course. But mostly, I have been working on promoting our recently published book, rebuilt, and that has meant a lot of travel to different parts of the country. It’s been fun, but this weekend, and most all weekends moving forward through Christmas, I will be returning to the pulpit.
We are currently in the last of our summer series, which we are calling game plan. Last week, my associate Tom kicked off the series by saying that our premise is that God has a plan for your life, he wants to make it known to you and when you are disposed to it and obedient to it, life in general will go better for you. Tom encouraged everyone to pray a simple little prayer as part of their everyday life:
“Jesus, you are my life.” A compact reminder of the way things really are.
This weekend I am going to be discussing the will of God, and where we fit into it. When we talk about that will we can actually organize it into three categories
If you search the Bible for the phrases “will of God” or “God’s will” or “will of the Almighty,” if you found all the phrases in the Bible that had anything to do with any of that stuff—there are dozens and dozens of them, if you were to list them all out and read all the verses about the will of God or God’s will you would discover that they fall neatly into three categories.
- There’s the will of God that we could call providential: that’s about God’s Master Plan.
- Then, there’s the will of God that we could call moral:
That’s the plan applied in real time.
- And there is a kind of third category we could call personal: that’s the application of the plan to my life.
Bottom line: the more we come to know and grow in our understanding and obedience to God’s providential will and God’s moral will in our lives, the easier it is to appreciate and understand his personal will for us.
That’s the plan.”
