The Standard February 22, 2025
“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God – this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing, and perfect will.” Romans 12:1-2
“The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.” 1 John 2:17
How does the Christian discern the will of God? In reading Scripture, we find some definite dos and don’ts. We are to put God first, keep the Sabbath, and honor our parents. We should not murder, commit adultery, steal, lie or have a deep longing for other people’s things. Jesus says, “If you love me, keep my commands.” John 14:15 He tells us to go the second mile, to love our enemies, and to pray for those who persecute us.
Some of our decisions fit neatly into categories of obedience versus disobedience. Other choices, like where to go to school or which career to pursue or whom to date, require more discernment from prayer and reflection. Perhaps it was God’s will for you to turn down a job opportunity at one point in your life, but years later, accepting a second offer from that organization was the right decision.
Although most of us face some complexity in discerning God’s will, few will have to wrestle the way Dietrich Bonhoeffer did. In Germany during the reign of Adolf Hitler, Bonhoeffer ran an underground seminary which trained Christian leaders who opposed the Nazi regime. He had to decide if deception and murder, usually immoral acts, actually could be God’s will for himself. In the end, Bonhoeffer believed God wanted him to participate in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Under the Fuhrer, over 11 million people were executed, with approximately 6 million of those being of Jewish descent. Among the victims were Dietrich, his brother Klaus, and two of their brothers-in-law.
Bonhoeffer wrote, “The will of God can lie hidden very deep under many available possibilities. And because it is not a predetermined system of rules, but new and different in different life situations, the will of God must be tested again and again. Heart, mind, observation, and experience must work together in this testing. Precisely because it is no longer a question of one’s own knowledge of good and evil, but of the living will of God, precisely because it is not at our own human disposal but solely by the grace of God that we know his will, and precisely because this grace is and want to be new every morning, this testing of the will of God must be taken very seriously. Neither the voice of the heart nor some kind of inspiration nor some kind of generally valid principle can be confused with the will of God, which is revealed anew on to the one testing it … The knowledge of Jesus Christ–the metamorphosis, the renewal, the love, or however one might express it–is something that is alive and not something given once for all, something fixed and possessed. For this reason, each new day brings the question how–today and here and in this situation–I will remain with God, with Jesus Christ, and be preserved in this new life. This very question, however, is the meaning of the testing of what the will of God is.”
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