Hearing God’s Will Through the Lives of Others
God’s will is the most important matter in your life. Nothing has greater ramifications. Yet some people find discerning God’s will to be difficult to understand. This is one reason why it is crucial to be intimately involved in a local church.
God does not intend for you to live a solitary Christian life. He designed people to live in community. Scripture indicates that God adds people to church bodies as it pleases Him (1 Cor. 12:18). God involves people in churches so they can know and do His will and so churches can be built up to carry out their God-ordained assignment. If you are currently a member of a church; you are not there by accident! God has a purpose for your involvement among those people.
I currently teach a Sunday School class at my church every Sunday morning for single adults, ages 26-39. These people are earnestly seeking God’s will for their careers and for a life partner. At times, members of my class grow discouraged or lose sight of what God is doing in their lives. It is always my joy to walk alongside them and to encourage them to see how God is speaking to them and walking with them. Others can often detect God’s activity in our lives better than we can!
I grew up in a church family that loved me and walked with me as I sought to discern God’s will for my life. As I progressed from being a child to a teenager to a college student, God placed a variety of people along my path, each of whom made unique contributions to me as I sought to know God’s will. One man led a ministry at a retirement home. When he learned that as a college student, I was sensing God calling me into ministry, he invited me to preach to the senior citizens. I am embarrassed by those messages now, but they let me test the waters of ministry early in my life.
God also placed me next to a widow named Marion Clark. One Sunday as I entered the church auditorium, I spied the elderly widow. I sensed the Holy Spirit prompt a question in my mind. Marion’s husband had died the previous Fall, and now that Spring had some, she had no one to cut the grass in her yard. I sat down next to her and asked her how she was going to care for her property. She began to cry. Her husband had always taken care of such matters, and she felt overwhelmed with the burden of maintaining her property. I told her I’d stop by that week. I began to care for her lawn each week. In return, she baked all manner of delicacies for me and my roommates! Each time I arrived at her house we would first have coffee. She would ask me about my classes and how she could pray for me. She became a great prayer warrior on my behalf as I sought God’s will for my future. Mrs. Clark and I had nothing in common except that we both belonged to the same church family and we both wanted to know God’s will for our lives.
If you are not currently a part of a local church, let me encourage you to find one. God’s will is too important for you to miss or to misunderstand. Seek a group of believers who will love you and walk with you so you experience everything God has in store for you.
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post supports the study “God’s Will and the Church” in 
