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Whose Will is it Anyway?

The Lord’s Day
Evening
July 4, 2004


Psalm 23
“Whose Will is it Anyway?”

Dr. Derek Thomas

I do begin a new series this evening, a topical series of
sermons on the subject of “Guidance.” We’re all, in one form or another,
troubled, perplexed, by the issue of guidance. I think young people,
especially, are troubled especially over one aspect of guidance as to their
vocation, who they will marry, whether they should get married at all. Some are
wrestling with the issue especially of missions, and perhaps full-time Christian
work–all of those sort of issues. And over the next few weeks, then, we’ll try
and cover a variety of themes relating to the whole issue of guidance.

Tonight I want us to look in part at Psalm 23. The
nature of these expositions, especially this evening, is a topical one. We’re
not going to be looking at Psalm 23 in any great detail this evening. We will
towards the end of the sermon pick up Psalm 23 and see what it has to say, and
hopefully to confirm some of the things that we’ve already said. But before we
read the Psalm together, let’s look to God in prayer.

Our Father in heaven, in Your wisdom You have
caused us to seek Your will and Your ways through not only creation and
providence, and through wisdom and counsel of others, but especially in Your
written, enscripturated word. We thank You for the Bible. We thank you for these
sixty-six books written over a period of 1500 years: over two million words and
forty different authors, and three different languages, and yet, with one
message, and one voice. And we thank You that You are the author of the whole of
the Bible, and every jot and tittle of it. We thank You that it is profitable
for doctrine and reproof and correction, and instruction in the way of
righteousness, that the man of God might be thoroughly furnished unto every good
work. So furnish us, then, Lord, by instruction from Your word, for Jesus’
sake. Amen.

Psalm 23:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green
pastures; He leads me beside quiet water. He restores my soul; He guides
me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake. Even though I walk
through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil; for Thou art with me;
Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me. Thou dost prepare a table before me in
the presence of my enemies; Thou hast anointed my head with oil; my cup
overflows. Surely goodness and lovingkindness will follow me all the days of my
life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Amen. And may God add His
blessing to the reading of His holy and inerrant word.

When I was growing up, a
teenager, I inherited a number of books that are very precious to me, and one
that my daughter has stolen and now regards as hers. And one of them was Louis
Carroll’s, Alice in Wonderland. I can’t tell you the number of times as
a young teenager I read Louis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. You remember
the wonderful tale. Alice comes to a fork in the road, and she stands there
frozen, not knowing which way to go. And she looks up to heaven and what she
sees is a cat, a Cheshire cat, on a limb of a tree, and it’s grinning at her.
And Alice asks the cat, “Which way shall I go?” And the cat replies, “Well,
that depends.” “On what?” Alice says. “On your destination,” the cat says.
“Where are you going?” And Alice says, “I don’t know.” And the cat says,
“Well, then, it doesn’t matter.”

Now, many of us can in a sense relate to that
little scenario. We stand at a fork in the road, and there are several choices
ahead for us, and we’re asking the question, which way shall we go? And the
answer to the question lies in the direction of the answer to another question:
where is it that you eventually want to get to? And the problem is that many of
us, many Christians, are confused about what the long-term goal and ambition is,
and therefore, we are confused about which branch of the road we ought to take.

Guidance is something
that God promises. Yes, it is. We see it in this wonderful Psalm. “He guides
me in the paths of righteousness.” It’s a promise, it’s an assertion, that God
guides His children. “He leads me beside still waters.” But even though
guidance is something that is affirmed and assured and promised in the Bible,
guidance is still a problem. Many Christians are troubled by guidance. They
lose their way.

I think if you were to
examine–and some of the college folk and interns here would verify this…I’ve
not done it, but it would be interesting to know of the ‘hot topics’ in RUF
circles, all the themes that you study, the topical themes that you’ve
studied…and I know, relationships and all of that is probably number one… but
actually that’s not a million miles away from guidance. And I’m almost certain
that right up there near to the top, somewhere, will be this perplexing issue of
guidance. We want, as God’s people, to do God’s will. That’s our hearts’
desire. We want to follow Him in the way that we should go. But the question
is, which way? Which way should I go?

I want to say three
things: I want to say, first of all, God has a plan for us. God has a plan for
us; secondly, that there are right ways and wrong ways of discovering that
plan; and, thirdly, to assert that God will make that plan known to us.

God has a plan, there are right ways and wrong ways of discovering that plan,
and God will make that plan known to us.

I. God
has a plan for us.
Let’s begin, then, with this assertion: God has a plan for
us. God has a plan. Every Presbyterian believes that. Every Baptist who
subscribes to the 1689 Confession believes that. God has ordered the end
from the beginning. There’s a plan. When you take the Bible in your hands,
that’s the wonderful thing. That’s the miracle of the Bible. It’s a miracle.
You hold a miracle in your hands. But something written over 1500 years, with
forty different authors, in three different languages, over two million words,
and yet, it has a coherent plan! Despite all the attempts of the critics and
the liberals, and the Marcionites of this world, the Bible still affirms to us
that there’s a plan, a coherent plan. A plan that you can discern in the
opening pages, and a plan that is unfolding throughout the whole of Scripture.

God has a plan. It’s
what we sometimes call in its grandeur perspective, ‘a decree.’ God has a
decree. In the Westminster Confession, in the third chapter of the
Confession
, we read these wonderful words: “God from all eternity did, by
the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely and unchangeable ordain
whatsoever comes to pass.”

Now, you can look at
that, and read that, and hear that, and hear something that’s terribly
threatening. Or, you can, as a child of God who loves Jesus Christ, be wholly
reassured by that–that the future is not chaos. That the future is not
uncertain. That God holds tomorrow in the palms of His hands, because He’s
ordered it from the beginning. There’s an order, there’s a structure to the
world in which we live. There’s a goal, and a direction to the unfolding of
Providence, and to the affairs and circumstances and contingencies of our
individual lives. There’s a definite future ahead. And God knows it.

Not only is that true on
the grand scale, but it’s true in the details. Not a hair falls to the ground,
not a sparrow dies in a side street of Jerusalem without the decree and the
permission of Almighty God. God has a plan. God has a wonderful plan for your
life. Now, that’s a slogan, of course, that’s usually in the form of “God
loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” And it’s true, but it’s
inadequate as a representation of everything that God may have for you, and
especially if you’re saying that to somebody who isn’t a believer. But let’s
push all of that aside for a second and just take it at its face value. God has
a wonderful plan for you.

You know, I’m tempted
just to say, “Let’s go and celebrate Independence Day now, and have done with
it!” Because that’s just a wonderful thought in itself: God has a plan for me,
and it’s a good plan, and it’s a wise plan, and it’s a holy plan. And it’s a
plan that is a part and parcel of His love and redemption of me as a child of
God. I can trust Him for that plan which He has for me.

Now, more needs to be
said than that, of course, but that much, at least, is true. God has a
wonderful plan for you. There are folk–and there are some, perhaps, in here–who
are the victims of spiritual depression. They’re melancholy because they’ve
lost sight of that particular truth. Because they’ve lost sight of the fact that
God has a plan for you. A wonderful plan, a loving plan, a gracious plan.
You’re a Christian, you’re a child of God, you love Jesus Christ, He wants to
bring you to Himself, and He’s ordered every aspect of the way that you’re going
to get there. That’s special. That’s encouraging. That should–as the English
might say (forgive me for reminding you of the English today)–but it should warm
the cockles of your heart. God has a plan, a wonderful plan for you.

Now! It gets a little
complicated, because we are meant to discover that plan. You see, the trouble
is that God hasn’t given us a plan in the form of a 150-gigabyte hard drive with
all of the details. You know: on day one do this at x-hundred hours, and then
this, and then that, and turn left here, and turn right there, and do this and
do that….God hasn’t given us a plan in that form. We’re meant to discover
that plan. And it gets tricky when we say things like “you can break that plan”
and “you can rebel against that plan as Jonah did.” There’s a plan of God, and
yet Jonah rebels against that plan. And Jonah flees in the opposite direction
to the way in which God wanted Jonah to go. So we’re introducing now a
complication.

There’s a plan which
cannot be broken. Theologians try to unravel this complication, and they’ll say
things like “there is a plan, a secret plan, a plan that is known to God, and
that plan can never be broken. But there’s a revealed plan. There’s the plan
that you and I discover. There’s a plan that is revealed to us in all of our
frailty and weakness, and that plan can be broken, and often is broken, and
often rebelled against.”

And I’m thinking just now
of that second plan. Not the secret plan, not the hidden plan, not the
inscrutable decree of Almighty God which cannot be broken, but I’m thinking
especially of the revealed plan. The revealed plan of God that is written down
in Scripture, and that we are to discover and unfold. And the one that says
“This is what I want you to do. This is what I want you to be. These are the
circumstances in which I want to find you, and I want you to discover that plan,
and I want you to live it out.”

And God says, “Some of
these you will discover easily, and others you’re going to have to find out by
using certain skills, which I will give to you in varying degrees, and you’ll
need to show responsibility and maturity and wisdom, and discernment. I’m going
to treat you like an adult. Sometimes I’ll treat you like a little child, and
I’ll do it for you. And I’ll pick you up and carry you and put you down. And
sometimes I’ll treat you like an adult, and I’ll tell you, ‘Now use the best
wisdom that you can discover, and go!’ And it’s possible that you may miss part
of My plan, because you’re unwise and foolish, and you don’t know what that
plan is. And it’s possible that you may miss part of that plan because you do
know it, but you don’t want to do it. Actually, you know it all too well. And
you think you don’t know it, but actually you do know it, but you just don’t
want to do it. You just don’t want to walk in that way. But I want you to
know,’ God says, ‘that there is a plan, and I will guide you through it.”

And the interplay–are you still tracking?- because
it gets complicated now, because there’s an interplay between what God does for
us, and what God does through us. And Christians will fall into a kind of
pendulum because sometimes we tend to think that what we need to do is to sit
back and relax and let God do it all for us, like when you get on an airplane.
You don’t get anywhere near those controls. Not since 9/11! You don’t get in
there, you don’t sit up in the front, and you don’t see all those buttons and
play with them. You don’t’ do that any more. You just sit in the back and
relax. And that’s what He says, isn’t it? He says, ‘Now you sit back and relax
and take it easy and have a doze, sleep, read a book, and I’ll do all the flying
for you.’

And sometimes we think
discovering God’s will is like that. You just sit back and let God do it all
for you. And sometimes we forget the Pilot altogether, fearing we’ve missed the
journey, and we’ve missed the runway, and that there’s a possibility that we’re
lost forever. And there’s a key verse, it’s one of the most crucial verses in
all of the New Testament. When Paul writes to the Philippians in chapter two
and verse twelve: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it
is God that worketh in you, both to will and to do of His good pleasure.”
You work it out! You put a hundred percent effort into it, to try to
discern God’s will and do God’s will, and God promises at the same time to work
in and through us.

Now, I hope there’s no
one here who mistakenly thinks that somehow or other you made a serious mistake,
maybe in the past, maybe when you were 21, maybe when you were at college…and
you made a serious mistake, and you can never now get back onto track again
.
It’s like missing a train. It’s like missing a flight. And you needed to get to
a certain destination. You needed to get to a certain meeting. But because you
missed that flight, you can never get there. And for the rest of your lives
you’re now living, as it were, Plan B, and it’s like living a secondary
Christian life. And that one mistake means you can never, ever, ever, get back
on track again.

And I want to tell you
this evening that that’s not true. That’s not true. I’m not saying that you
may not have made a serious mistake, because you may well have made a serious
mistake at some point in your lives. You may well have missed certain things
that God was plainly saying to you, or you may have even rebelled against His
revealed will in all of its transparency. But God can undo the consequences
of that mistake, too. He can, in the words of the prophet Joel, “restore to you
the years that the locusts have eaten.”
Who is it that says that you cannot
be restored into God’s favor again? Well, it’s man that says that, not God.
And God says, ‘yes, you may well have missed the train, but I have ways and I
have means to bring you to where I want you to be, just like that!’ And that’s
a wonderful thing.

I’m pretty sure Peter
thought his days of following Jesus were over. He made a catastrophic mistake in
discerning the will of God for him. There was a moment of test in the courtyard,
and a young girl recognizes his northern Galilean accent and says “you’re one of
the disciples.” And he cursed and he swore that he didn’t know Jesus. Three
times. It was a catastrophic blunder. He rebelled against the will of God for
one of God’s servants in that moment and time. And I’m sure Peter thought that
his days of being a disciple and of being in the center of God’s will, for the
rest of his life was over.

And he goes back to
Galilee, and he goes back to fishing. And there he is, all night on the boat,
fishing. And he catches–nothing. Because God wanted to bring him back into the
center of His purposes again. And you remember what Jesus does? It’s a
delightful little bit of minor detail in the story. You remember, Jesus says,
“Put the net down,” and they catch —what was it?–169 or whatever it was–fish,
yet that’s not the fish that they eat for breakfast, because Jesus has His own
fish, and He’s already cooking the fish on the side of the Sea of Galilee, as
though He’s saying to Peter, ‘Look, it’s going to be My way. Every part of the
journey, it’s going to be My way.’ And God can bring Peter, who made a
catastrophic mistake, and He can bring him to be perhaps the most useful servant
in the New Testament, next to the Apostle Paul. God can undo the blunder of
Peter’s mistake.

So, we need to get
a little technical. Just for a second. Because theologians have insisted that
there is what we call the secret will of God. God’s secret
efficacious will, which insures that everything falls out according to His
plan. Everything, in all of its cosmic and minute details. But we commit a
serious error if we limit God’s will to His secret will. You know, that’s what
Islam does. It limits God’s will to His secret will, the inscrutable will of
Allah. Whatever happens, que sera sera. And you end up with that
determinism that is so very much a feature of Islam. And Christianity has
insisted that God works out His will through human means; that there are
secondary as well as primary causes. So, God has a plan. God has a plan.

II.
There are right and wrong ways of discovering this plan.
The second thing I want us to see is that there are right ways
and wrong ways of discovering this plan. And I want to begin with the negative,
to rule out certain things in order that we might see more clearly what the
positive is. Some of you will know the name of Pearsall Smith. He was a
Keswick “Higher Life” speaker of great renown toward the end of the nineteenth
century. Abraham Kuyper was greatly enamored of Pearsall Smith for a while,
came over to Brighton, heard Pearsall Smith speak; wrote eloquently of the power
of his ministry, and then Pearsall Smith engaged in an act of adultery and it
led Abraham Kuyper to a period of depression that lasted for well over a year.

Well, it’s not Pearsall
Smith I want to talk about, it’s his wife, Hannah Whitall Smith. And she wrote
a book which she called The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life. And it
was published first of all in 1928, with the title, Religious Fanaticism,
and it was later published by the title, Group Movements of the Past and
Experiments in Guidance.
It’s full of pathetic stories of sincere, godly,
Christian folk who followed impulses and urges, and mental suggestions, thinking
that this was indeed the will of God for them. Hannah Whitall Smith called
these papers that eventually were published her ‘fanaticism papers.’ And she
speaks, for example, of a woman who each morning, having first of all
consecrated the day to the Lord, would then ask the Lord in prayer whether she
should get up or not. And then, until she would hear a voice that would stir
her to get up (which reminds some of you of your teenage children, no
doubt!)–but until she would hear this voice to stir her to get up, she would
remain in bed. And having heard the voice, she would then pray for each article
of clothing, as to whether the Lord wanted her to put each article on. Very
often the Lord would tell her to put on the right shoe and leave the left one
off, and to put on stockings on her left foot, but leave the stockings off her
right foot. And so she would appear on different days wearing this absurd
collection of garments, thinking that this was God’s will for her.

And it’s a pathetic, sad
sort of story of what happens when you look uncritically to urges and impulses,
and equate those with movements of the Holy Spirit. And some have been certain
that God was guiding them to do all kinds of crazy and daft things.

I remember in Belfast
when I was a minister there, this man had called me up on a Thursday morning,
wanted to see me, and I agreed eventually to go and see him. And we met, and he
said, “God has told me that I must preach in your church on Sunday morning.” And
I said, “When God tells me this, I’ll let you know!” It’s a murky sort of area,
where urges and impulses pop into your mind, and they come out and they manifest
themselves with expressions like “the Lord has told me.”

Now, there are ministers
who emphatically, and with great pomp and assurance, will tell their
congregations “the Lord has told me to say this, this morning.” Be very careful
before you say things like that. It may be indigestion!

Hannah Whitall Smith
recounts the case of a maid who saw some money lying on a dressing table that
belonged to her mistress. And she felt … a voice telling her to take this
money, because “all things are yours.” And she took it, and she was fired. She
lost her job.

They come in all kinds of
ways: voices and prophecies, and words of knowledge and whatever you want to
call them. And the consequence can be catastrophic, especially for sensitive
Christians who pray like crazy for God to speak to them in this sort of direct
form, and then they feel totally abandoned when they don’t feel God speaking to
them. And they lose their assurance, and they lose their perspective, and
sometimes they lose their sanity. And the latter need to be encouraged and
helped, and ministered to, and told that God’s Holy Spirit doesn’t speak to us
like that. And those who insist that the Holy Spirit does invariably lead us in
that way need to be given a slap on the wrist.

So, let me pull back a
little and say that it’s dangerous, it’s dangerous to categorically insist that
God never, ever does things in that way. That could be dangerous to say that.
I’m not saying God never puts a pressure on your consciousness and urges you to
do something. I’m not saying that. If you live by those kinds of impulses,
you’re in some danger; but I’m not saying God never does that. I have known
times when I think God the Holy Spirit was indeed putting a pressure on my
consciousness and my affections in a certain direction. It was of the Holy
Spirit. Now it needed ten thousand tests, you understand! And lots of words of
wisdom and lots of counsel to make sure that that wasn’t just indigestion that
needed Pepto-Bismol or something. But I’m not saying that God never, ever
speaks to us in that way.

I’m saying that when
He does, He’s treating us like children. He’s treating us like infants, you
understand
. He’s saying, ‘Look, you ought to be wiser, but because you’re
not, let Me deal with you in this way.’ I’m saying it’s dangerous to think that
God, when He wants us to do something, always calls us by the Red Telephone in
the Oval Office. (I don’t think it’s there anymore, but you know, that kind of
a thing.) There’s a direct hot line to God. Modes of guidance that see
yourself as an airline pilot being guided down by someone in a control tower–the
emphasis that is very common, I have to say, in Belfast in certain groups of
Christians about “putting out the fleece.” You know the story of Gideon — and
you put out the fleece, and if it’s wet in the morning, God was saying this, and
if it was dry in the morning, God was saying that. And you remember that Gideon
was actually testing God, and actually he did it twice; and there’s a sense in
which God is condescending to Gideon’s lack of faith. God had already given
Gideon the word, and Gideon was testing Him. So let’s be cautious about that
kind of thing: you know, the kind of guidance that says ‘I’ll marry the girl
that first says to me ‘how’s your dog?’’ That kind of thing. And there are
wrong ways and there are right ways of discovering that plan.

III.
God will make that plan known to us.
Now, let me say briefly a third thing: that God will make
that plan known to us. That’s the promise of this great Psalm, this
Twenty-third Psalm. He guides us, He leads us. “He leads me in the paths of
righteousness for His name’s sake.” Psalm 23:3. Let me formulate
guidance as it emerges from this Psalm in this way. Let me try and give it a
definition: that divine guidance is divine counsel within the framework of
covenant care
. It is divine counsel within the framework of covenant care.
Guidance, like all God’s acts of blessing under the covenant of grace, is a
sovereign act. Not only does God guide us and show us the way, He does so in a
most fundamental way. He insures that whatever happens, whatever mistakes we
make, we still come home safely. We’ll slip and stray, but the everlasting arms
of a covenant God are always embracing us.

And so this Psalm says a
number of things, and they’re very familiar to you. In verse four, He guards
me.
He guards me. I’m in the valley of the shadow of death, but I’m not
afraid. Why? Because He is there, with a club in one hand and a staff in the
other: a club to ward off oppressors and violent men and women, and if I fall
into the mire, a staff to hook me out. He guards me. God forbid that we should
miss His guidance, that we should miss His guidance through an act of
disobedience. God forbid it. But if we do, He restores us. He guards me.

In verse five, He
feeds me, in the presence of my enemies.
My table is full and overflowing,
in the presence of my enemies, I’m feasting!

In verse six, He keeps
me.
He keeps me. “Surely goodness and lovingkindness will follow me all
the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
You remember the words of D. L. Moody? “One day you’ll read that D. L. Moody is
dead, but in that day I’ll be more alive than I’ve ever been,” he said. Because
God keeps me, and He keeps me forever, and He guides me. Beside the quiet
waters, in green pastures…to lie down where there’s no fear or danger. He
walks before us, and He leads me…and notice, He leads me and guides me in the
paths of righteousness. And there’s a tool as to how God guides us: He guides
in the paths of righteousness. And part, and in fact, a considerable part of
learning what it is God wants you to do in any given situation is discerning the
path of righteousness from the path of folly.
God will never guide you
into the path of folly. God will never guide you into sin. God will never
guide you into breaking one of His commandments
. If you are married and you
see an attractive woman, God is not guiding you to marry that woman, or to have
sex with that woman, because God guides in the path of righteousness.

Now, how do we learn
the path of righteousness?
And that’s the big question. It’s what we’re
going to spend the rest of the summer trying to answer. Sometimes we’re to use
our intelligence, we’re just to be wise. We’re to be led by wise principles,
what our Confession of Faith calls “Christian prudence and the light of
nature.”

“Use your common
sense!”
The problem with common sense is that it’s not so common, because
we tend to be very foolish. And God is saying, ‘Wise up! Wise up.’

Sometimes, it’s by
going directly to the Scriptures.
The Scriptures sometimes will tell us
directly what’s right and wrong, and sometimes it will just give us broad-brush
principles. And like adults, God will say to us ‘Now you apply that in your
situation, and in your context. Ask a million questions. Go to other
Christians, and go to other wise Christians, and go to other older
Christians, and go to the elders of the church and ask them for wisdom.
And let them, from the perspective of their years and growth and maturity, apply
these principles to you, so that you and I may walk in the paths of
righteousness for His name’s sake.’

Now, that’s much easier to say than it is to do.
And over the next few weeks I want to dig a little deeper into all of that, and
take out some specific issues and see what it is that Scripture has to say in
detail, but also in principle, to various life situations. And may God add His
blessing. Let’s pray together.

Our Father, on this
the close of Your day, and on this Independence Day, we ask for Your blessing,
and we want You to encourage our hearts. We thank You, bless You, for the
promise and the assurance that You will indeed guide us. Help us when we are so
slow to learn, and so prone to stray. And forgive us our sins for Jesus’ sake.
Amen.

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