Blog

Sometimes, while we’re seeking to know God’s will or direction for our lives, He may be leading us just to take a first step. It may be that we are thinking we need to have everything figured out before we do anything. But this can lead to what Pastor Joe calls “the paralysis of analysis.” Since we don’t know everything, we don’t do anything. Here’s some more helpful thoughts on this from Elisabeth Elliot’s book God’s Guidance:

Before a man begins building he must make sure of the foundation. Hearing and doing the word – this is the bedrock of faith. Jesus made this simple enough for children to understand in his story of the two men who built houses, one on rock, one on sand. We all know what happened in the storm. The stability of one house is the picture of the man who hears the word of God and does it. For me, it is wonderfully reassuring to know that this does not mean knowing all the word, at one time.

Hearing one thing, doing that one thing, is what is required.

This puts me in touch with God, which is precisely what we mean when we speak of an ‘act of faith.’ ‘It is only when we obey God’s laws that we can be quite sure that we really know him,’ John wrote.

When a child begins to walk, his first step is reason enough, in his parents’ eyes, for enthusiastic praise. The step is not a very successful one. It is wobbly and may take the child where he didn’t mean to go faster than he wanted. But it contains the elements of walking – putting one foot in front of the other. Doing this over and over will eventually get the child somewhere.

To believe one thing – this one promise that God will guide us, for example – is a baby step.

It is a beginning of a walk with God.

The steps which follow will be like the first one in that they contain the element of faith. If God means it this time, he means it the next time. I take him at his word now, and I will hear another word tomorrow. (p. 41-42)

Have you ever gotten tired trying to figure out God’s will for your life because you’re worried that there’s too much of your desires mixed in with all your feelings? If so, check out these thoughts from Elisabeth Elliot’s book God’s Guidance:

When I was young I had the idea (I am sure I must have heard sermons on this) that I would somehow have to annihilate my own will before I could properly pray to God for his. ‘You must have absolutely no will of your own in the matter,’ someone had said. This sounded all right to me and I spent a lot of time and energy trying to follow this advice.

Finally I saw that no such thing was required.

The struggle Jesus had in the Garden of Gethsemane showed me this. A conflict was taking place – not to annihilate his own will, but to accept the will of the Father which was other than his. It did not end with Jesus’ saying ‘My will is now thine’ but with ‘Not my will but thine be done.’ The act of praying, far from divesting us of human desires, enables us to lay them before God as very real and pressing, and say to him ‘Not these, Lord. Yours.’ (If we had got rid of them there would be nothing to lay down.)

There is something terribly down-to-earth about this. They are my own requests that I am supposed to ‘make known’ to God. They are things I feel strongly about. They may be sinful. If they are, making them known to God may make plain to me their true nature. But I start by making them known. I pray for what I want, as a child asks its father for whatever it wants. This is faith’s legitimate activity.

Later in the book she adds this interesting example about how our desires and God’s make mix:

‘If a pagan asks you to dinner,’ wrote that severely disciplined saint, Paul, ‘and you want to go, feel free to eat whatever is set before you.’

Imagine! ‘If you want to, if you feel like going, go.’ That shocked me at first.

An invitation to a pagan feast would be the sort of thing I would not have dreamed of accepting without praying long and earnestly. God might want me to go, all right, but not – heaven forbid – because it would be fun. He might want me to go for some exalted reason such as to ‘witness’ to those present (which – heaven help me – would not be fun). So I would have had to inquire very carefully in order to separate my own desires from his.

Paul took the whole thing very casually.

It could happen any day, and, like crossing the street, it might be dangerous. But Paul was writing to Christians, and he assumes that if they went, they went with God. It was nothing to pray and fast over.