Will of God As A Way of Life : How to Make Every Decision with Peace and Confidence

Maybe it's simpler than we make it. We all have important concerns -- whom to marry, what job to take, where to send our kids to school, which church to join. God's perspective on how such matters fit into his perfect will is practical. Liberating. Filled with hope, grace, and new possibilities. The Will of God as a Way of Life reassures us that God's will is not difficult to find, confusing to follow, or easy to miss. Even in the face of our sometimes foolish choices, God can lead us back into the center of his perfect will. Still, we have questions. How free are we if God has a perfect plan for our lives? Do suffering and trouble mean we're off track? How exactly does God speak? Jerry Sittser reveals what the Bible has to say about these and other vital questions. This updated and thoroughly revised edition cuts to the core of knowing and doing the will of God. Knowing it may be easy. Doing it can be difficult -- at least at times. But in every way, living God's will as a way of life is better than any of us can imagine. Book jacket.

Jerry Sittser is a professor of religion at Whitworth College. He holds a master of divinity degree from Fuller Theological Seminary and a doctorate in history from the University of Chicago

The Will of God as a Way of Life
Copyright © 2000, 2004 by Gerald L. Sittser
Formerly titled Discovering God’s Will
Requests for information should be addressed to:
Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sittser, Gerald Lawson, 1950–
The will of God as a way of life : how to make every decision with peace and
confidence / by Gerald L. Sittser.—Rev. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-310-25963-0
1. God—Will. 2. Discernment (Christian theology) 3. Christian life—
Presbyterian authors. I. Sittser, Gerald Lawson, 1950– Discovering God’s will.
II. Title.
BV4509.5.S58 2004
248.4—dc22
2004006068
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the New Revised
Standard Version of the Bible. Copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education
of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used
by permission. All rights reserved.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy,
recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior
permission of the publisher.
Published in association with the literary agency of Ann Spangler and Company, 1420
Pontiac Road S.E., Grand Rapids, MI 49506.
Interior design by Beth Shagene
Printed in the United States of America
04 05 06 07 08 09 10 /?DC/ 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
P a r t I
Knowing God’s Will
O Lord our God, grant us grace to desire you with a whole heart,
that so desiring you we may seek you and find you; and so finding
you, may love you; and loving you, may hate those sins from which
you have redeemed us, for Jesus Christ’s sake.
Anselm
We Never Know How
Things Will Turn Out
Ispent the first twenty years of my life feeling certain I knew the will
of God for my life. I was going to practice medicine. I was as sure
about the future as I was about the difficulty of getting there, for making
it to the end seemed a daunting task to me. While still in high
school, I talked seriously with a plastic surgeon about joining his practice
when I completed my education, and he invited me to his summer
home to show me slides of his work. By the time I entered college, I was
eager to enroll in science and math courses to prepare for medical
school. I had one goal in mind. Everything else was a distraction and
inconvenience to me, like having to do chores on a hot summer day.
But I made a fatal mistake in selecting a college. Hope College,
located in Holland, Michigan, was a liberal arts institution, which
meant that it required students to take a broad range of general studies
courses. If I ever wanted to earn a degree from Hope, therefore, I
would have to do more than study science. I would also have to read
Dostoyevsky, listen to Beethoven, study the causes of the Crimean
War, and write a persuasive essay.
I was about as eager to study the liberal arts as I was to read a dictionary
for weekend pleasure. But I had no choice. In my first semester
I signed up for a freshman writing class. For years I had read
literature only under duress and had avoided writing altogether, except
when my teachers forced me to put pen to paper. Fortunately, my writing
professor, Dr. Nancy Miller, knew my type. Savvy and sociable, she
was adept at handling people like me. When I griped one day about
the writing requirement, she ignored me as if I had just made a bland
comment about the Detroit Lions. When I told her that I simply did
not need the course because I was not planning to write for a career,
she replied, “You never know, Jerry, how things will turn out.”
She was right, of course. I ended up doing something far different
from what I had assumed was God’s will for my life. I did not attend
medical school; I enrolled in seminary. I did not become a medical
doctor; I became a minister instead. Later I returned to graduate
school to earn an advanced degree. Now I serve as a college professor,
and I write in my spare time. Words are therefore central to what I
do. The writing course I took my freshman year of college became
very useful to me, and my writing teacher proved to be a prophet. As
it turns out, both course and teacher helped to prepare me for a vocation
I never imagined at the time I would be doing.
Inability to Predict the Future
From this experience, I learned a valuable lesson I will never forget:
We never know how things will turn out. What appears in our minds
to be the pathway we should take might change as suddenly as
weather in the Midwest. So we would be wise to be attentive and
responsive to God along the way, even in matters that appear to have
little significance, such as crafting good papers in a freshman writing
class. Perhaps our attention to these little things is the will of God,
and our preoccupation with the future a foolish distraction.
As I look back on my forty-nine years, I see a pattern emerge. At
various points along the way I thought I knew the pathway I was supposed
to take, but I ended up doing something quite different. This
different “something” turned out to be the will of God. At twenty, I
was sure that God wanted me to pursue a career in medicine; I became
a minister instead. At thirty, I was planning to stay the course in pastoral
ministry; now I am a college professor. At forty, I didn’t aspire to
be an avid writer; now I am finishing this, my fifth book. At every
step along the way I thought I knew God’s will for my life. I thought
I had it all figured out. But it did not turn out as I had planned.
It occurred to me a few years ago that either I had developed the
bad habit of missing the will of God for my life, or I had a mistaken
notion of what God’s will was and is. The first alternative terrified
me, for I had lived far too long and had made too many irreversible
decisions—like getting married and having children—to wish I could
start over in a vain attempt to get back on track. Besides, I have had
too much evidence at my disposal—such as contentment of life and
joy in my work—to assume that I had missed the will of God. It struck
me as odd that I could wander that far off course without intending
to, and yet not know it.
So I concluded that I had misunderstood what God’s will really is.
Like a detective who had followed leads to one dead end after another,
I decided to pursue another course altogether. I began to explore a different
way of approaching the will of God. It proved to be one of the
most exciting decisions I ever made.
Suffering Loss
The inability to predict the future was the first clue that set me
searching in a different direction. But it was not the only clue I had.
A second clue came from suffering loss. My wife Lynda and I had four
wonderful children, two girls and two boys. We were deliriously happy.
But that happiness—what we assumed was the “will of God” for our
lives—

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Excerpted from Will of God As A Way of Life: How to Make Every Decision with Peace and Confidence by Gerald Lawson Sittser, Jerry L. Sittser, Jerry Sittser
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