Discovering God’s Sovereign Will

Listen Online:

Transcript:

We’re going to be in Genesis chapter 1. Genesis chapter 1. I told you before I left that when I came back, we were going to look a little bit at discovering God’s will.

I mentioned that just offhand several weeks ago, and some of you expressed an interest in that subject. And so we’re going to take about three or four weeks and look at the subject. And how this is going to work, there are eight lessons that I’ve put together.

Now the first three are about, well, I don’t know that saying the kinds of will that God has is the right way to say it, but basically the aspects of God’s will that we can look for, the aspects of God’s will that we see in Scripture. We’ll look at the first two of these today, this morning and tonight, and then the third one next Sunday morning. And then the following five lessons are about how we find God’s will.

You see, I don’t think God meant for his will to be a mystery for us. And by that I mean God’s will for our lives. It doesn’t mean that there should be, it doesn’t mean that he’s just going to stick it right in front of us in blinking neon letters.

It doesn’t mean that we won’t have to do some study and some digging and put some effort into it. But I don’t think God meant it to be this unknowable quantity out there in the universe. You know, we really start, if you’re a believer, I think you really start thinking about God’s will when it comes to big decisions.

And you really start thinking about God’s will when you get to be about 16, 17, 18. I remember that’s the first time I really started thinking, okay, what is God’s will for my life? When you’re starting to have to make decisions on your own.

When you’re a child, you know, it’s more about, okay, this is what mom and dad say. But when you’re starting to get to a phase of life where you have to make some decisions, If you’re a believer, you start or you should start asking yourself, what is God’s will in this? I remember thinking, where does God want me to go to college?

What does God want me to do as far as a job? What does God want in this situation? What does God want to do with that?

And it’s a hard question to answer. It seems like it’s almost impossible to know. I remember talking to pastors and friends and digging into the scriptures.

Well, I just don’t know what to tell you. You’ll know God’s will when you see it. Okay, maybe.

How will I know what God’s will looks like? You find yourself thinking, can I even know God’s will? Is it possible?

Well, folks, I submit to you that God’s will is possible to know if you look for it and know what you’re looking for. I believe God’s will is possible for us to know. God’s will for our lives is possible for us to know.

just because it’s his will. If it’s his will, it means it’s what he wants us to do. And if he wants us to do it, he’s going to tell us.

Hey, I as a parent don’t typically, and see God is our father, and so a lot of my understanding of God relates to parenting. As a parent, I don’t typically sit there and think to myself, I sure would like them to pick up their jammies out of the bathroom floor. I’m not going to tell them that.

or I may even tell them the opposite, but I sure would like them to pick up their jammies. I don’t see God operating that way in scripture. When God wanted people to do something, he was usually pretty clear about what he wanted them to do.

Now again, that doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be any digging, any effort on our part, but I believe God’s will is knowable. It should be knowable. And maybe better said, it’s knowable when he’s ready to reveal it to us.

See, he also doesn’t give us always 50 steps down the road. I sure wish he did. I like to see the big picture.

I don’t want to just know the next step in detail. I want to see 50 steps down the road, but he doesn’t always tell us that. But whatever the next step is, or the next couple steps, whatever they may be for our lives, whatever God’s will is, he’ll reveal them to us in his time when he’s ready for us to take them.

And so we’re going to look over the next few weeks, as I said, at these different aspects of God’s will, we’re going to look at how we find them, look at some ways of how we find them. Because even though we start thinking about these things when we’re 16, 17, 18 and start making decisions on our own, we shouldn’t grow up into adults and think, I’ve got this all figured out, it’s just what I want to do. No, we never outgrow the need to find God’s will.

Do the decisions get easier or do they get harder as you get older? Anybody? Yeah, I figured once you get older and you get to make your decisions, life gets easier.

It doesn’t work that way. I was talking to a friend from the church in Arkansas last week, telling her about how we’d gone up to Taos and visited the Pueblos, where people have been living there for over a thousand years. And, you know, I’ve always seen pictures of these things, thought they were carved out of rock.

They’re actually made of mud and straw compacted together. Anyway, and they’ve lived in these Pueblos for over a thousand years. They still have no running water, no electricity.

And she said, you know, her friend said, I just don’t know that I’d be able to live that way. You know, I’m spoiled. I don’t know that I’d like the inconvenience.

And I agree with her, but then the thought also hit me. Yeah, but no utility bills. Wouldn’t that be nice?

A life with no utility bills. No bills of any kind. No, and I’m not saying the Pueblo Indians.

I’m just saying, think about a life where you didn’t have to make bill payments, mortgage, health insurance, didn’t have to deal with doctors, didn’t have to figure out how you’re going to pay this, how you’re going to do that. That’s what life is like as a child. That’s not life as an adult.

That’s life as an adult is hard. There are a lot of decisions that have to be made. There are lots of decisions that have to be made on difficult topics.

And folks, we need guidance from our Father. We need to know what His will is, and I believe it’s knowable. This morning, we’re going to talk about the first of three aspects of God’s will, which is his sovereign will.

And I want to be very clear as we start this out. There’s nowhere in the scripture where I see a listing of, oh, God has these three wills. And I’ve heard people teach it as there are five aspects to God’s will.

There are six, there are two, there’s only one. Okay, that’s fine. I don’t have any quarrel with that.

What I’m sharing with you are, as I look at the big picture through scripture, of how God interacts with people. As I see God’s will revealed in Scripture, I see it in three different ways. And so these are categories that I’ve put together to help me understand how God’s will works.

If you see it differently, that’s fine. The goal here is not for you to memorize categories, but to get a deeper understanding of how God’s will works. And I fully admit, going into this, that this is an imperfect system for doing so.

But we look in Genesis chapter 1, and the first aspect of God’s will that I see is his sovereign will. Now let’s look, starting in verse 1, and we’re going to read down to verse 13. It says, In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Now I want to stop just for a second right there. And there’s already a lot going on in this passage. God is moving.

God is active. God is at work. There is a lot going on, but outside of God, there’s not a lot going on.

There’s nothing going on. There is nothing. I can’t even conceive, really, of what nothingness is because we’re always surrounded by something.

Even if we’re in an empty room with just air, there’s air. And there’s a room. And there’s a world outside that room.

We can’t even conceive of nothingness. But there was a time before time, if you can wrap your mind around that one, there was a point before time where there was nothing but God. And God moved.

And God worked. And God determined. And God decided.

And after he moved upon the face of the waters, God said, let there be light. And there was light. He said it and it happened.

He created light from nothing. It could be kind of confusing just to look at this passage and say, well, God didn’t create out of nothing because it said he moved across the face of the waters. The New Testament tells us that everything was made by him and without him, nothing that was made was made.

So what I can read into this in verse 2 is that God has already created the waters by the time we get to verse 2. Whatever there was, God has already created. this swirling mass of nothingness, God formed into something.

You know, it’s impressive enough. Thinking again about those Pueblo buildings. It’s impressive enough to me that people could go out there in the high desert and really build something out of nothing.

They built an entire city over a thousand years ago out of mud and straw, and it’s still there. That’s impressive enough. But you know what?

They had some building blocks to do that. There was some mud there. There was some straw there.

They had the building blocks that they needed to build this incredible city. God started from nothing. There was nothing but God.

And just by force of his will, he created the waters. He created this swirling mass that he formed into everything else. And it said he created light.

He created light. He said, let there be light. And there was light.

Now, the laws of science say that energy is never created or destroyed. It merely changes forms. And in our world as it stands now, that holds true. You know, you put gasoline in the car, the energy that’s in that gasoline doesn’t go away.

It’s burned up and it creates explosions in the, what are the valves? I don’t know what all the terminology is, but it creates explosions in the internal combustion engine. It produces energy to move forward.

It produces heat energy. And that energy dissipates and it changes forms, but it doesn’t go away. Folks, this is the only time, this is the only time in the history of the universe that energy was created.

It was created at the instigation of God. See, God wrote the laws of physics and God can suspend them. God can work around them.

God can work above them, maybe a better way to say it. He said, let there be light, ladies and gentlemen, and there was light. I can say let there be light and it changes nothing unless it’s some kind of parlor trick for my kids.

You know, if I happen to have a remote control that they don’t see, I can say, let there be light while I click a button, and they think daddy’s magic. But really, my word doesn’t affect space and time. God said, let there be light.

There was no argument. There was no hesitation. God said it, and light merely leapt into existence.

Something there never had been before came into existence just because God said so. if you’re wondering why are you camping out on this verse for so long we’ve heard that you know we hear this all the time I’ve said let there be light and there was light and then we move on to the next few days of creation I want you to stop and think about this god spoke and by the by the words of his mouth the very atoms of the universe jumped when he said so they jumped into existence when he said so. And they followed his every command.

There had never been such a thing as light before. God created it with the words of his mouth. Let there be light and there was light.

And God saw the light that it was good. And God divided the light from the darkness. Light and darkness don’t coexist, do they?

The light always drives out the darkness. There’s a separation between light and darkness. You know, for all the talk today that the Bible is backwards, you look at the Bible and there’s a lot of cutting-edge science that was way ahead of its time in there.

It makes you think, oh, somebody who wrote this knew what was going on. Of course, we know how that happened. He divided the light from the darkness, and God called the light day, and the darkness he called night.

And the evening and the morning were the first day. So God spent the first day creating something called light that had never existed before. God created a new form of energy that had never existed before.

And he trained the photons in the light to sometimes act as particles, sometimes act as waves, and I still don’t understand how they do everything that they do, but scientists are still studying light today. But God, at that moment, created it, knew how it would work, knew how fast it would move, the speed of light. God understood all of that, And God put all of that in motion with just the words of his mouth.

And God said, let there be a firmament, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters. And let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament and the waters which were above the firmament.

And it was so. And God called the firmament heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

So God took this swirling mass of waters, all this matter that was there that he had already created as his building blocks. He took all of it and he began to form it into a very rough shape. It’s not earth, I mean, it’s not water and land here.

He’s separating the stuff of earth from the stuff of the sky. He’s separating the earth from the sky. And he’s beginning to form the earth in a very rough form so that later on he can come and refine it and put the fine touches on it.

And God said, let the waters under the heaven be gathered together into one place and let the dry land appear, and it was so. And so now God says, I want the water to go here, and I want the land to go here, and the Bible says it was so. What God said happened.

We cannot control, even with all of our collective intelligence as the human race, we cannot control the water. I mean, we can direct the water, but eventually that water gets loose. It’s going to go where it wants to go.

Do you remember, what was it, about six months ago, where we had to cancel services here, and we thought we were going to have water up the center aisle here because the Ouachita River was rising. You would think in 2015 that we’d be able to do something about that. I mean, they have dammed some of the strongest rivers in the world.

They built levee systems. They built the entire city of New Orleans under water, I mean, under sea level, and built levees to hold back the water. The Dutch have figured out how to build piles of earth that will hold back the sea so that they could build on more land. You would think in 2015 we would have the capability of holding back the Ouachita River.

You know what? Eventually enough water comes and it goes where it wants to go. And even we saw after Hurricane Katrina, that water in New Orleans went where it wants to go.

Sometimes they get strong enough storms in the North Sea, people in the Netherlands see that the water goes where it wants to go. We as human beings can’t control, can’t entirely control nature. We can try to tame it, but we’re sort of like people hanging on to the ears of a mad dog.

we’re kind of holding on for dear life and eventually it’s going to get loose from us. With all of our collective strength and wisdom, we can’t control nature. We can’t control the waters.

We can’t control land. I-35 wouldn’t have been shut down because rocks were sliding out of where we thought they ought to be going down through the arbuckles. We can’t control where the land goes.

But folks, God with the words of his mouth. I want you to see with me how incredible this is. God with the words of his mouth told the water, you go here and told the land you go here and it was so they did it sometimes I think we need to just stop and be in awe of the power of god we take for granted oh god said and it was so and then the third day folks the power that it took to do these things the authority that he has to be able to command the earth and everything just falls in line and god called the dry land earth and the gathering together of the waters he called the seas and God saw that it was good.

And God said, let the earth bring forth grass and herb yielding seed and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind whose seed is in itself upon the earth. And it was so. And the earth brought forth grass and herb yielding seed after his kind and the tree yielding fruit whose seed was in itself after his kind and God saw that it was good.

And the evening and the morning were the third day. Again, here we have God absolutely dominating something that we just have a very tenuous grasp on. I’m working with Benjamin in his Awana book.

And this week it’s talking about how, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen these, they’re very cute, but the little story is about this little boy, Timothy and his cubby bear. Benjamin’s in the cubby’s age of Awana. They go and plant pumpkin seeds.

And they’re talking about how they can get the pumpkin seeds to grow. They want them to grow right now. And they’re looking at a chicken at the petting zoo and realize she sits on her eggs to make them grow and hatch.

And so they go and try to sit on the pumpkin seeds. And they do several little things like that, and it just doesn’t work. They cannot force these pumpkin seeds to grow overnight.

And Benjamin, I know that we are very city people. compared to most of you. But I’m proud that even Benjamin gets that, okay, this is silly.

Because Benjamin has planted things with me. Benjamin’s planted okra. Benjamin’s planted tomatoes.

Benjamin’s planted cucumbers. He knows you have to wait. He knows it’s boring for him.

We go out and check day after day, but they’re going to come up when they’re ready. You can’t make the okra grow faster. You can’t make the watermelon grow slower.

You really just, you have to just plant it the best you can and pray and keep your fingers crossed and hope that everything works out the right way. The plants are going to do what they want to do. And you can prod them in the right direction, but you can’t make them grow faster.

You can’t make them grow slower. You can’t, sometimes you just can’t make them grow better. And here God designed the plants and said, you’re going to bring forth fruit after your own kind.

So, apple tree, you’re going to produce apples. And apples, you’re going to produce apple seeds. And apple seeds, you’re going to produce apple trees, and so on and so forth.

And God laid down laws that these wiry, untamable plants still have to follow today. By the words of his mouth, God said, okay, you exist now. I’m creating you out of nothing, and you’re going to do what I say.

Folks, we take for granted, we take for granted so much, I think, the power and authority that God has. and this is just one area. I could have picked a number of stories out of the Bible, but these first three chapters in Genesis very well in a compact form, I think, illustrate the three aspects of God’s will that I see in Scripture.

And this first one is God’s sovereign will. And the fact of the matter, ladies and gentlemen, is that sometimes God says it, and it just has to happen. There are times God tells us to do things.

There are times God says don’t do things. And we all know that sometimes we don’t do the things he tells us to do. And sometimes we do the things he tells us not to do.

But folks, there are some times that God says it and it just has to happen. And the only difference I can see is in God himself and what he allows and permits and what he says must happen. Sometimes I believe God allows us a free choice.

And other times God says it and that’s just the way it is. that God’s will trumps everything else. In some areas, when God says that it does, God’s will trumps everything else.

It trumps the laws of physics. It trumps the laws of nature. It trumps the laws of man.

Boy, there’s a message that needs to be heard in our country these days. God’s will trumps the laws of man. Sometimes God expresses himself through a sovereign will that just, that’s the way it is.

And you’ll hear this taught in churches some today. It’s a good thing. It’s not taught enough that, you know what?

God really is the king of the universe. He really is the one in charge. Too many churches, I think, teach, or I don’t know if they’d come out and say it this way, but tend to make it sound like God is just our best friend and he just does whatever we want him to do.

We should be friends with God, but we should also remember that he is the master of the universe. But I don’t want to go so far the other direction, ladies and gentlemen, that we think that God just determines everything that happens. That would be an easy thing for me to say.

Oh, yeah, God made it happen. It was God’s will for that to happen. When we see in the Scripture so many times, people doing things, God said, I didn’t tell you to do that.

That’s not what I told you to do. What I see in Scripture, ladies and gentlemen, is a God who is sovereign. Hear me on this.

I see a God who is sovereign, who is so sovereign, who is so unmatched in power and authority, that he can afford his creations a little bit of free will without his sovereignty really being in danger. That’s pretty secure. He’s pretty secure in his godhood, if I can put it that way.

But he does have this sovereign will that sometimes God says it, and there is no free will that matters. God says it and there is no objection, there is no argument, there is no back talk. God says it and that’s the way it is.

But that’s not always the way he expresses his will, as we’ll see in the next couple of lessons. So what is this about God’s sovereign will? First of all, God’s sovereign will entails the things that must happen.

Now sometimes God, as I said, will say things and he’ll declare that it absolutely will happen or it must happen. And it’s something that is consistent with his nature. That God is saying this is the way it is because I am who I am and this is what I want to happen.

Examples of this would be the creation that we’ve looked at already. We zeroed in on verse three here where it says, God said, let there be light and there was light. If that doesn’t illustrate God’s sovereignty in saying this will happen now, then I don’t know what does.

Because we see there God expressing his choice, his preference, his will, and the entire universe just bends to his will. There are things that happen simply because God wills them to, and the universe has to bow itself to his sovereignty. And we see this sovereignty at work throughout the whole chapter.

God says to the light, exist, and it exists. God says to this swirling mass of stuff that he’s gotten ready, okay, you separate here, and I’ll put the heavens here, and bam, there they were. And God says, I’ll put the water here, and bam, there it was.

And God said, I’ll put the land here, and bam, there it was. He said it, and it didn’t matter what anybody else thought. It didn’t matter what the properties of that material were at all.

that just went where he told him to go. We see some other examples throughout Scripture. The Bible says that the Lamb was slain before the foundation of the world.

The Bible indicates that it was always God’s plan A, that God was not caught off guard by man’s sin in the garden, okay? God was not surprised by that at all. God knew that was going to happen before he ever created us.

God knew that was going to happen while this that we’re looking at today was still going on. God knew. And it was never God’s plan B to send Christ to the cross.

The Bible indicates that it was God’s plan all along to send Jesus Christ to die for our salvation. And when you look at all the things that Satan or the world or what have you tried to throw in God’s way to keep it from happening, it still happened. We had King Herod trying to kill all the babies in Bethlehem to get rid of Jesus.

Could not thwart God’s plans. We had the devil trying to tempt Jesus, make him sinful, try to thwart God’s plans. It didn’t happen.

We had the people trying to put Jesus on the throne. That would have been great, huh? Except for the whole him not dying on the cross part.

Tried to thwart God’s plans. It didn’t happen. Had Peter trying to thwart God’s plans by defending Jesus with a sword.

It didn’t happen. Even before the life of Christ, we had people trying to wipe out the Jewish nation. Well, that was who God was bringing the Redeemer into the world through.

And it didn’t happen. And we can see how God, at all these points in history, worked sovereignly. That said, no, this must happen in this way.

And it says that Jesus came in the fullness of time. When God had prepared everything that he wanted to prepare, just as he had prepared it, he sent Jesus to the cross. And Jesus went willingly, make no mistake.

He sent Jesus to the cross because he said this must happen. And it happened, as Peter said in the book of Acts, according to the foreknowledge and will of God, that God knew and God planned it. One day, one day God will bring all of this to an end.

I don’t know all the details. I have my personal opinions based on Scripture, but in the areas of the end times, I’m open to somebody showing me I could be wrong on this or I could be wrong on that. I know very intelligent people who fall into all sorts of categories, pre-millennial, post-millennial, amillennial, and we can discuss that.

I don’t know how it’s all going to play out. I think I’ve told you before, I told the church in Fayetteville when they were interviewing me, that I said, I don’t mean this as a cop-out at all, but I’m pro-millennial. However God’s going to work it out, I’m in favor of. The one thing I know, though, is that Jesus is coming back for his people.

In whatever order that plays out, we can discuss. But Jesus is coming back for his people. And God will bring all of this to an end one day.

And you know what? There won’t be one of us. There won’t be any of us.

There won’t be all of us able to stop him. Because God says it’s time. And all the objections, all the protests, all the whining and complaining won’t be able to turn him back.

because he says, no, this must happen. And so there are some times when God steps in and says, this is my will and I’m sovereign, so it will happen this way. God’s sovereign will entails the things that he says must happen.

Second of all, God’s sovereign will doesn’t require. . .

Oh, this is a good one. This is a good one for us to hear as Americans. God’s sovereign will doesn’t require anyone else’s consent, knowledge, or participation.

When God says that’s the way it’s going to be, the vote has already been taken. And if we’re not on his side, we lost. There are some times that God says that’s the way it is, and I think that’s not the way I want it to be. Doesn’t matter.

He’s already outvoted me. And God is God whether or not you or I consent to it. God is God whether or not we know every detail of his decision making and what he’s up to.

God is God whether we get on board with the program or not. And sometimes he steps in and says, this is the way it’s going to be. And folks, it doesn’t matter whether we like it or not.

And I don’t say that to be mean to you because I’m in the same boat here, whether we like it or not. He’s God and what he says goes, especially when he says, I’m not giving you a choice here. This is what’s going to happen.

And folks, we look at, we didn’t read this far down yet, But look at all the things that he did in verses 1 through 13. And look at verse 27 further down the road. So God created man in his own image.

In the image of God created he him. Male and female created he them. Okay, wait a minute.

So God created light. And God separated light and darkness. God created this swirling mass of everything and separated it into heaven and water and dry land.

and then he started making plants and we know from the rest of the story he made animals and wait, he did all of that without our permission? He did all that without our help? Yeah, he doesn’t need our permission or our help.

He doesn’t need our approval. He did all those things before we ever existed. Sometimes we’ve got to change our language and sometimes I don’t know quite how to phrase things since I picked up on this point because used to, you know, I’d hear in church and maybe even say things like, you know, let’s invite the Holy Spirit into our presence. Well, he’s here whether we, whether we invite him or not, he doesn’t need our permission or give God permission to work in your life.

God doesn’t need your permission. When it, when it comes to things about, you know, sometimes God waits until we’re willing to do to, he waits to do something in our lives until we’re willing. The way I’ve come around to saying it at this point until I can come up with something better is God wants to do something, get out of his way.

He doesn’t need my permission. He doesn’t need my approval, my agreement. Get out of the way or get run over.

You know, sometimes that’s the way we need to get away from the idea, folks, that God is a partner. We need to get away from the idea that God is a subordinate. Oh my goodness, folks, he is the sovereign God of the universe.

Sometimes he allows us a choice, but other times he says, now there is no choice in this. This is what I’m doing. Thanks for your opinion, but I’m doing it anyway.

Again, it’s like being a parent. I don’t want to clean up my toys. I don’t remember asking.

That’s just what’s going to happen. God, I don’t want to do this. Okay, I didn’t ask.

This is just how it’s going to be. Okay, so God’s sovereign will entails the things that must happen, and it doesn’t require anyone else’s knowledge, consent, or participation. Third of all, finally this morning.

God’s sovereign will does not mean that he’s decreed everything that happens. It’d be very easy in a message like this to slip into what they call fatalism. God’s just determined everything that’s going to happen in the history of ever.

There is no free will. We have no choices. We’re not responsible for anything.

That’s not what the Bible teaches. I say these are different aspects of God’s will. Not that G

Powered by atecplugins.com