God's Will ... Your Will

Transcript S1E6

God’s Will … Your Will

Hi, I'm Tony Kostas, and welcome to Episode 6 of the Led Into Love podcast! 

Following on from my last episode, in which I was talking about how you were created to live fearlessly – and then I referred at one point to Jesus and how He never yielded to fear – I want to build on that a bit for a couple of reasons. 

Firstly, because I want to talk about Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane – which you may have thought of when you heard me say that, why wasn't He afraid in the Garden of Gethsemane? 

But I want to go further with that, too, because I want to talk about what Jesus said to His father in the garden of Gethsemane and how that applies to you. 

So, let's talk about Jesus in the Garden, because if there's ever a time when we have a picture of Jesus being afraid – maybe the only time we have a picture of Him being afraid if you read the gospel narratives – it's when He was in the garden of Gethsemane and sweating blood … when He was crying out to His father because He knew that the time had come, and a time when he felt most alone. He was going to feel even more alone not long after that, when He was hanging on the cross, but right there, he felt the most alone, the most vulnerable, the most isolated. 

Even His own disciples – who He was just longing to have them around Him when He was praying – kept falling asleep on Him. So, He would go and pray to His Father, He'd come back and He'd find them asleep, and He'd say, “Couldn't you even watch with me for a bit longer?”  

But what Jesus was facing at that time was very real. So, I want to say here, I'm sure that He was feeling fear, but I'm equally sure that He was not yielding to fear. 

And that's not splitting hairs, because you were made to live fearlessly … because you were made to live in relationship with God. And when you're living in relationship with God, you literally have nothing to fear. 

The only time in the biblical record … very early in the biblical record that we have … when fear first showed up, was when Adam and Eve sinned against God, and they were afraid, and they hid from Him. And that broke His heart when He went looking for them in the garden in the evening – when He was used to walking and talking with them – and He couldn't find them. And He called out to them, and they said, “Oh, like, we hid from you. We hid from you because we were afraid. And He immediately said, “Why were you afraid? Did you eat of the fruit of the tree that I told you not to eat of?” He thought that was the only thing that could have caused them to go from living fearlessly to living fearfully. 

So, fear, the feeling of fear, the ability to feel fear, is quite different to fearing.  One is the involuntary sense that you have in situations where you might feel danger, you might feel a threat. The other thing is what you do with that – and what you do with that depends so much on the reality of your relationship with God, not the things you know, not the Bible verses that you might snatch out and say, “There's no fear in love”. And “Perfect love casts out fear” – the things that you can grab hold of to try and psych yourself into not being afraid. I'm talking about genuinely not fearing, because you are in relationship with God and your life is in His hands. 

But Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane – and it's already recorded about Jesus that He'd already said to His Father: “I come to do your will, O God”. So as far as Jesus is concerned – and I've also quoted Him in a previous podcast episode, where He said that His only desire was to do His Father's works and to speak His Father's words – and that's all He did. So, He only did His Father's will. 

And now in the garden of Gethsemane, He's feeling the strongest temptation to become fearful that He's ever had. And in that situation, as He faces it, and as He feels very alone, very vulnerable, very isolated, very much under threat, and He knows that the cross is awaiting Him. He's facing what He now must do – and He goes as close as we have on record, and, I'm sure, as close as He ever did – to actually giving in to fear.  And how close does He get? He gets close enough to say to His Father: “Father, if it's possible, let this cup pass, pass from me. If it's at all possible, I'd rather not do this. But He quickly follows it up with, “…nevertheless” – and that nevertheless is such a key word – “nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done”.

That made all the difference.  I think … I can imagine … I was going to say,  I can't say it happened – but I really can imagine that at that moment when Jesus said, “if it's possible, let this cup pass from me,” to His Father … and how many angels – the Hosts of Heaven, listening – I can imagine them holding their breaths and thinking, “Oh no, oh no, not now!”  And when He said that “nevertheless” and went on to say, “not my will, but yours, be done,” I can imagine a collective sigh of relief.

He didn't yield to fear. He remained fearless.  And that made all the difference!

I wouldn't be here now talking about this. You wouldn't be here now listening to me. There would be no hope for any of us, had Jesus at that point switched from not fearing to fearing, from being fearless to being fearful.  Not because He became suddenly braver or more courageous.  Not because He somehow psyched himself into thinking, ‘I can do this’. But because He had said to his Father, “I come to do your will, O God,” and at that point, the last thing … not the last thing … I would say … the thing He just would not consider doing, regardless of how He felt, was to then at that point say, “I won't do it “. 

And that's why He said to His Father – these are not the words of a conscript, these are not the words of a guy who has no choice, these are the words of someone who has total choice – and at that point He says, “Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done.  I'm not going to do now what I haven't done for 33½ years, and blow the whole purpose of me coming.” 

I just can't imagine (and this is me talking, I'm not quoting Jesus anymore!) … I can't imagine what it would have been like … what would have happened to God's purpose for everything that God had been hoping for … for the reason why Jesus came … if at that point He abandoned His mission. 

Okay, I think I've made that point, but I want to go and talk about what it is to do God's will. And this is a great launching pad for talking about that, because ‘God's will’ and ‘doing God's will’ is another one of those things that Christians talk about a lot. They talk about it, they quote it, they talk, you know – they know scriptures about it. It's one of those talking points. And it can sound very noble for someone to say, ‘I just want to do the will of God’. But what does God's will really mean?  

‘God's will,’ you know – it almost becomes like a religious term – God's will is what God wants. My will is what I want. God's will is what God chooses. My will is what I choose. And if I want to do God's will, then my will and God's will come together. My will and God's will merge, and God's will is done – because my will is to do God's will.  

When I was a young Christian, I remember some people used to pray in prayer meetings: “Lord, make me willing to be willing,” … which sounded very good.  But when I stopped and thought about it, it just sounded like double talk!  What does it mean?  What does it mean to ask God to make me willing to be willing, when I could just simply say what Jesus said: ‘God, I only want to do your will’.

The point is, God is not going to force you to do His will. He's not going to corner you into it. You could look to Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane and think: ‘Oh, like He's really in a corner now, isn't He? He's gone along this way for his 3½ years of ministry. Now He's in the Garden of Gethsemane. You know, the momentum is building. He's about to be arrested. It's kind of going to be game over now! But it's not game over because it was game on – because God's purpose, God's great purpose, in Jesus coming was about to be fulfilled!  The point was what it was going to cost Jesus and His father for Jesus to go to the cross for you and for me.  

So, to do God's will, firstly, is to know what God wants.  And secondly it is not to just want to do what God wants, but to do what God wants. 

I've known, and I still do know, people who feel pretty good if they can say, “I just want to do God's will. Whatever God wants is what I want to do,” and leave it kind of hanging there, like … ‘over to you, God’. But when you say something like that, you're not actually saying it to God. And if you kid yourself that by praying those words, you're saying it to God, then you are kidding yourself.  Because wanting to do God's will, seriously wanting to do God's will … I'll go a step further and say, not just wanting to do God's will, like in this or that or the other, but committing to do God's will – as Jesus did when He came and He said, “I come to do your will, O God,” means that you've given God a blank cheque with your name on it. You've given God a blanket commitment. You've promised God with an unbreakable promise, because you've chosen to make it unbreakable.  “God, I will just do your will”.

Now, that is going to be played out in all kinds of situations, in all kinds of times, things that you won't know in ways that you don't expect.  But when that's where you are determined and resolved to live, and you know that God is leading you, because the person who wants to do God's will, will always know God's will. And the person that wants to do God’s will – and I mean not the wanting, like the words of wanting to do God's will – who is committed to do God's will.  And you do business with God.  Don't tell other people how committed you are to do God's will. Rather say it to God and mean it.  Because if you say it to God and mean it, God will make his will known to you.  He will know because he does know … because you've told him and you mean it. He will know when it's time to say something to you, something that He wants of you, something that He's calling you to, something regarding you. And you'll know that there's something now that requires your response. 

I've said in an earlier episode that we know what God wants us to do when it comes to living by faith, because God speaks to us in a voice we can hear and in a language that we can understand.  And God will always make His will known to you when you want to do His will. It doesn't let you off the hook in the meantime when there isn't a specific – like, “God hasn't given me any orders for today, so I can just do what I want.”  Because living in God's will is walking with God. As Paul once wrote beautifully:  “If we live by the Spirit, let us walk in step with the Spirit”. It's walking and living with God every day – every moment of every day of your life, because that's what you have resolved to do. That's what you have committed to God to do. And that's the only purpose that you have – by your choice – have taken for your life. 

So, as you go along like that, you don't have to – in panic and anxiety – worry about: ‘am I in the will of God or am I out of the will of God?’ Because you will be in God's will unless you know otherwise, because you have chosen to live in that environment.

A fish never swims around in the ocean worrying about whether it's in the water or out of the water, because the water is its environment – and if it happens to be out of the water, because it did something or someone fished it out of the water, it knows immediately it's out of its environment! 

Again, when I was a young Christian, it was a bit of a common thing for people to say, “I don't know. I just want to make sure I'm in the will of God. How do I know I'm in the will of God?”  Well, where, where do you live … you know, what's your normal environment?  Have you made God – your relationship with God – the place that you live … the only place you want to live?  Have you given yourself … have you given up your right to yourself so that you can just be God's – make your life about Him? If you have, then you don't have to be agonizing over whether you're in God's will or not. 

Often people will use that to give them some leeway – so I can be going along my merry way, not really being aware of keeping my life in God's hands. And I can be wandering in all kinds of directions, and then suddenly discover that something has changed. And that ‘something’ that's changed is that I am veering off on some kind of tangent. And because I have not made a point of walking with God – now, I don't mean some big mental effort, I just mean: you know, you know, you know, you know, if you've abandoned your life to God or not.  And when that happens, then if I've got to say, “Oh, gee, I don't know if I'm in God's will.”  Well, if you're not in God's will, guess what's happened?  You aren't in the environment that you entered into when you jumped into the ocean of God's love … when you put yourself in God's hands.  And that's because you have chosen to even entertain something that is not what God wants. 

But when you have put your life in God's hands, when you're walking with God … when you're living with God … when you're desiring God … only then that ocean of God's love or the ocean of God's will – that environment where you are living and walking and breathing in relationship with God all the time is not otherworldly. That's your natural environment. And if anything should interfere with that, you will know about it. There'll be no doubt about it. There'll be no two ways about it. And when that happens, then you know immediately what to do. To come back to the point where you are exactly where God wants you to be. It might not be something geographical; it might be environmental, it might not have any particular context. But, you know, because your relationship with God is a relationship on the inside. The expression outwardly, where I happen to be, what I happen to be doing is just … is related to that, but that's not what it's about. 

So, to walk with God, day by day, to do His will, is as simple as living in the relationship with God that you have by choosing to be His and His alone. 

You know, even words like Paul wrote about making yourself … in fact, presenting your body to God as a living sacrifice. Your body.  This physical body within … within which you live and which God has made the temple of his Holy Spirit, if you have come to him and say: “God, I'm a living sacrifice. Everything that I do in this world has its expression through my body. But my body is a living sacrifice to you. So that the life that I live in this body, in this world as a human, is a life that is lived and expressed by someone who has laid down their life just to be yours – just to live for you in this world.” 

That's a living sacrifice.  That's the person that God can and will be glorified in and through!