John Wesley
A great way to understand God’s will without going into much detail is to think of it in four parts or layers:
1. The Purpose
The first layer is more like the core of God’s will for your life. This has more to do with what you are than anything else. It is your humanity. God wants you–obviously–to be a human being. He wants you to feel and experience human emotions, feelings, desires, dreams, inspirations, and aspirations. He wants you to experience spiritual realities and power. He wants you to know truth and falsehood. He wants you to become intelligent, wise, productive. At the core also is where we are made “new creations”(2 Cor. 5:17), not after our first humanity (from Adam), but after Christ’s humanity in which all of our broken emotions, desires, feelings etc. are fixed and made right. The second humanity of Christ offered freely to us all is intended to fix the problems of our first humanity.
2. The Person
The second layer has more to do with where you were born, when you were born, your gender, your culture, your race, your family, your parents, and (generally) the first 18 years of your life in which you have very little control. These are aspects God chose for you. If you are a white male of Germanic decent born to well-to-do parents in the suburbs of Los Angeles in the year 1960, that is God’s will for you. It’s not chance. There is an enormous amount of shaping of and searching for identity in the first 20 or 30 years of your life. Your upbringing is beyond your control. Someone had to take care of you and feed you otherwise you would be dead. It may have been a delightful upbringing or it may have been an awful upbringing. But God’s will remains intertwined throughout—it is up to you to search it out.
3. The Calling
This is usually where “calling”, “giftings”, and “talents” fall. It’s the calling of a Christian life (i.e. fellowship, pray, know his word). God grants to us in our life various strengths and giftings and expects us to use those to their potential (Read Jesus’ Parable of the Talents). He may call us into a particular ministry, or mission overseas. He may call us to go into business for ourselves, become a politician, or work a particular trade. It is not always life callings either–sometimes he may call us to a particular thing in a particular place for a particular period of time. I find this layer to be more frustrating for most (myself included). The honest truth is, it’s not always clear. Often what God reveals to us about this layer is very limited. He says just enough to put the seed of thought into our mind and leaves the rest to carry itself out. We’d like to wish he would just give us the whole blueprint but he doesn’t, so we have to learn to trust what we don’t see. Where it doesn’t require any faith to figure out the first two layers of God’s will, here faith is often necessary.
4. The Gifts
The one we like to talk about! This is an exclusive aspect of God’s will for our lives that can only be seen with eyes of faith. It’s the mysterious one and when God does something here people are usually stunned. The Holy Spirit is most active in this area, I believe. It is when he gives a specific word, command, or impression that doesn’t have anything to do with the first three layers. To one, God might give a word to tell another a verse from the Scriptures, or lay hands and pray for someone’s healing. He may interrupt and direct you to do something completely different than the way you were planning to. The best and most important part of this layer is that prayer largely dictates what happens here. God is an active participant in all things, and calls his children to participate in all his work by letting us pray things, events, and experiences into existence (according to his will of course – see 1 John 5:14-15).
These four points should give you something to work with the next time you mull over in your head the question of God’s will and purpose for your life. More of “his will for your life” is revealed to you than you may realize. Often times we close our eyes and forget about the obvious purpose(s) that God has for our life.
