YP Sing Address—J. Whitaker
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I want to talk tonight about.
Knowing God's will, all of us have, I'm sure, sat through meetings on this very subject. I know I have, and I don't have anything new to say.
We've all heard probably the same thing that I'm going to say tonight, but it's good to be reminded because.
We want to be.
Found in God's will.
I'm going to read a few verses, like 5 or 6 verses and.
Without comment and then go back and see if we can learn something from them. And the first one is in First Timothy.
Let's see First Timothy 2 verses three and four. If you have a Bible you can turn to it. If not, I'll just read it.
First Timothy.
And verse three says God our Savior, who will have all men to be saved and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.
The next verse I want to read is in Second Timothy.
Chapter One.
In the end of verse 8.
Second Timothy One.
End of verse 8 God.
Who has saved us and called us with an holy calling?
Not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace which was given us in Christ Jesus.
Before the world began.
God, who has saved us and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace.
Next verse.
Is in Exodus chapter 3.
Exodus chapter 3 and this is the story of Moses when God called him.
Exodus 3 and verse 14.
Well, back up. I'll read verse 13.
And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your Father's has sent me unto you, and they shall say to me, What is his name? And what shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses, I am that I am. And he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I am has sent me unto you.
And the next verse.
2 verses. We could probably sing them. I'm sure you know. I'm Proverbs 3, verse five and six.
Trust in the Lord.
With all thine heart.
And lean not unto thine own understanding, and all thy ways acknowledge him.
And he shall direct thy pass.
Let's go back to the one in First Timothy.
There's a lot of us here. We're all I was listening to Bernie's prayer this this afternoon and he mentioned about how we're all at different stages along life's pathway along our journey and and we are and whatever stage you're at, you want to be found in God's will.
It's something that applies.
To all of us and.
Some of you here, probably the youngest of us, might be thirteen and on up to.
You know, 50-60 years old, something like that. And some of you are most of you here are at the stage where you're kind of wondering some things, there's some some questions you'll have to answer in your life and it will set the course.
For your life and you want to be certain that you make the right choice.
Because it will affect the rest of your life. It's a point in your life.
That's so critical.
That you get it right.
How do you how do you know?
Some of these big questions, what are the answers like?
What do I do for a living? Where do I live?
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Who do I marry?
Do I have children or not have children?
Things like that, big questions and.
This verse in First Timothy.
Says God our Savior, who will have all men to be saved and come unto the knowledge of the truth.
It's helpful to keep in mind that God has a plan.
And I liken it to like, say, if I live in Florida.
So you went down to Fort Lauderdale. There's lots of big ships there in the harbor. What if you got on one of these ships and you headed off into the Atlantic and you were on this ship and you were thinking.
You know, I'm thinking about asking the captain if maybe, maybe we could stop in Nassau, Bahamas and go shopping in the local shops there.
I wonder what he'll say. Maybe he'll do it.
It might be appropriate to ask that sort of a question of the captain if you were on a cruise ship.
And the captain might say, well, yeah, we were going to stop there anyway. Or he might say, no, we're actually going to go to Providenciales and Turks and Caicos. And you say, oh, OK, well, that's good. But what if you were on, like, a battleship? Would that be an appropriate question?
It wouldn't. You have to know what ship you're on.
God's will.
Is that?
All men be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. That's his. That's where the ship's going. So in a sense, you're sort of on a, on a mercy ship.
When you get saved.
You want to be found in God's will.
And so the kinds of questions that you would ask him would have that kind of overarching theme.
But he does have a plan for you specifically. There's lots of jobs on that ship.
Baby.
If we go over to the second verse we read and second Timothy one.
Verse eight and nine God.
Who has saved us and called us within holy calling?
You know.
When the Lord.
Took the Israelites. They were enslaved in Egypt. We all know the story. He brought him out of Egypt.
But God doesn't just save you just so that you get out from under slavery.
His goal, his purpose, was not just to get them out of Egypt so that they could wander around forever in the wilderness. He didn't want him to wander in the wilderness at all. He wanted him to go straight to the promised land. It should have taken him about 11 days.
But something went wrong.
And when God saves us.
He doesn't just save us, He also has a holy calling. He has something for you and for me to do.
And.
It's not according to our works. So when we pray to him.
What I meant to say before I even started as I wanted to tell you the punch line before I told you the question, but.
The solution, and we've heard this, to knowing God's will, is to study the Word.
And to spend time in his presence.
In prayer.
Or to live your lives in a state of prayerfulness so that you always have the consciousness of God being with you.
Umm.
It's good to go to him.
And.
Ask him to.
Put us into His will.
In other words.
It's it's a subtle difference between asking him what his will is for you and asking him what his will is and how you can fit into his will, where he becomes the focus and not you.
We don't want to try to bend God's will to fit our plans.
If you know what I mean.
I can't go to God and say.
I am so good.
I have all these gifts, I have all these talents, I have all these abilities. I have all these plans, all these desires, and I want you to fulfill them for me because you know the verse. Our righteousness deserves filthy rags. He's not interested in our abilities. He has his plans. He's given you a gift, a spiritual gift, and he expects you to use it, of course, but.
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It's according to his grace, like this verse says.
He's the one who gives us the strength.
In Exodus, that story of Moses. I love that story and I'm sure you've you've read it.
I've been enjoying recently that that verse God is called Moses. And we all know that Moses, his life is divided up into three phases, right? He spent 40 years in Egypt. He was the son of Pharaoh's daughter.
And he made a choice. In Hebrews, it tells us he made a choice, a conscious decision.
To leave Egypt and to leave all of that privilege that he had.
And he he chose to be identified with God's people, and he led them out.
And he spent the next 40 years on the backside of the desert, said Herd and sheep. And Moses went from being a somebody to being a nobody.
And I'm sure.
If it was me out there, I would be.
Probably struggling with depression. Like why am I here? I had everything, I left it and now I'm here on the backside of the desert. My life's almost over. I'm all I'm 80 years old and what's there left in life for me? But that's right when God called him.
So even if you're 80 years old, God might have a plan for you. Now. Most of us these days don't live 220, but.
Like Moses did, but.
You could kind of divide his life up like this in the first half or first third of his life. He was pretty self confident. He thought he was the real deal. And I don't know what his plan was, whether he meant to go out and kill Egyptians one at a time, but you know, he killed the one and then he found out that he.
His.
His murder was discovered and so he he fled.
But after all of that, he.
Spent the next you know he learned what sheep are like and he.
By the time God comes up to him when he's 80 years old, he has no confidence.
And the last 40 years of his life, he learned to have confidence in God.
And what I've enjoyed about this verse, verse 14, when he says, who shall I tell these people?
That who shall I tell him sent me.
And God sent him to Moses. I am that I am.
I am has sent me unto you that.
In our lives, we have past tense, we have present tense, and we have future tense, right?
All of us live in the present.
No matter where we are, we're always here in the present. Every time you make a decision, you make it right here, the second in the present. And this.
Tense I am is in the present tense.
We want to live our lives.
With the awareness that God is with us.
If we would have read a little bit before, you know the story, how he sees the burning Bush.
And God sees that Moses turns a size and he says to him, take off your shoes. Seems like an odd request, right?
I don't know if this is somebody shared this with me and I've enjoyed it.
God saw.
That Moses had been through these 80 years of experience and he was going to draw on those experiences.
And.
It seems like what he was telling Moses is take off your shoes.
I'm going to send you to do something that you can't do. It's impossible.
But I'm going to wear your shoes.
I'll be walking in your shoes and they're not going to wear out. And we read that later.
Those shoes of Moses didn't wear out for 40 years.
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Do you know who wrote the most books of the Bible?
Any guesses?
If you had to divide it up, it's either Paul or Moses, right? Well, in my Bible here, if you add up all the pages, Moses wrote 279 of them.
The Apostle Paul.
Wrote about 97 up.
And I just heard the other day I was listening to a, I don't know what you call them, a paleontologist or, or somebody who is.
Digging through evidence in the in the Holy Lands, looking for.
All sorts of clues about the authenticity of the Bible and things like that.
Said that.
Deuteronomy is written in the same format that the treaties between world powers were written in. It's an identical format and it's way over my head the exact way in which he did it. But Moses wrote Deuteronomy and he wrote it in a format.
That he probably learned in Egypt he was, he was going to be the next pharaoh probably and.
We go through these phases in our lives. I know like for myself.
There's times in my life where I'm like, man, this is just not not very much fun. I don't really know where I'm going.
For me.
There were times where.
When I I was going through high school, I can remember thinking about what I was going to do and the thought of spending four years in university did not appeal to me at all. And I, I told my dad no uncertain terms, that that's not something I was going to be doing.
Not to rehash a whole lot of my life story that's probably not that interesting, I took a lot of time zigzagging around doing this and doing that, avoiding what ultimately was God's will for my life. And of course, during this time when I wasn't exactly sure what I was supposed to be doing, just I wasn't going to go to school.
I did go to some school that was shorter and I worked in that field for a while.
And it was not satisfying.
And.
I wasn't really.
Taking my own advice here and spending time in the Lord's presence and and really seeing what he had for me.
And it wasn't until there were a couple of events in my life.
And you know, one of these things why I enjoy coming to meetings like this.
Is that?
You never know.
You never know when you're going to hear something that's going to make a big difference in your life.
And for me, I went to a California conference down in Burbank.
Must have been 30 years ago or so.
I wasn't planning on going.
But my dad again encouraged me to go and I went.
And I was at him saying, just like this, and Beth's grandpa, Don Don is your grandpa, right? Don Bellisoli stood up and he told the story about how he went through the exercise of soul to move to Newfoundland and do the mission work that he did up there. And I was there. The Lord made sure I was there and I heard it and it changed.
The course of my life when I was.
Trying to decide where to go and what to do and I wound up.
Going.
In a direction that was not really something I would have chosen. I'm a homebody. I like to stay at home and.
I wound up moving to South America and living down there.
Rewind 2 years prior to that, I had been there on vacation. Dean and Debbie Rule had invited us down there and.
I went and it was one of the best two weeks of my life and.
I don't mind admitting when I went there.
I knew my wife, of course. I'd known her for probably 10 years.
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And, and we lived across the country from each other, so we'd see each other at camps and things like that and.
I, you know, I liked her, but I wasn't interested in her. And it wasn't until I was in South America and I.
Saw we it was like a sort of like a mission trip and we we followed Dean and Debbie around and we did what they did and it kind of gave me a little window into something that.
I felt maybe that's what the Lord had for me to do, and it wasn't until I was paying attention.
To his will that I noticed.
The woman who became my wife and I saw something that she was doing that was very parallel to the course that I now was on and.
I would encourage you I guess.
Some of your you know, beyond the stage, already married, have kids and all that, but.
For those of you who aren't, if you're just sort of.
Wondering that question? That's a big question. You know, who am I going to spend the rest of my life with?
Go to the Lord.
And.
Ask him to put you into his will.
Into the current of his will and just go and and do what he has for you and when when you start doing it.
You look around and you'll see, oh, you'll notice things. It's kind of like when you you ever buy like a?
Blue Toyota Prius. You've never seen a Prius before, but now all of a sudden you see blue Toyota Priuses all over the place. It's like they were always there, you just didn't notice it. And and for me, speaking specifically about who I married, she was always there. I just didn't notice her until.
I found out what God's will was for me and until I was willing to submit to His will, He wasn't going to show me the next step.
And I don't know how he will work in your life or how he has worked in your life. That's just how he worked in mine and I'm very thankful.
Anyways, not to belabor this point too much, but spend time in His word. Because when you read His word, you're fed, of course, but you also find out what's right and wrong. And so when you're asking Him things you kind of know, you can ask intelligently, because you're not going to ask something that you already know isn't as well.
And then spending time in his presence.
And.
It's not magic, it's not secret. We all know it. We've heard it.
Spending time in his presence is so wonderful.
And it's so essential. It's part, it's what's why I saved us. He didn't just save us to free us from the slavery of sin. He wants a relationship with us. And he doesn't want you just to wander around in the wilderness for 40 years. He wants to bring into the promised land. He doesn't want to feed you.
Just the the bare sustenance, like the man that was never his intention to give them mana. He wanted to get them straight into the into the into Canaan where there was the old corn. They wouldn't have to do anything. It was just there. It was already in the in the in the storehouses, the other people that they kicked out.
Had already harvested, they just had to walk right in and start enjoying it. But they didn't because they didn't have faith.
So I just encourage you to.
You know, things aren't you feel like you're you're spinning out there in left field. You're not really sure or maybe this is something that you're starting to think about. You're younger, 1314.
Read your Bible every day. It's no secret your parents have told you, your grandparents have told you, and just make a habit of it. Pick it up, read it. And the other thing is you know the verse study to show yourself approved unto God.
I know you should pick up your Bible and read it you know in the morning 15 minutes or however long you have.
How many exams have you ever passed by studying for 15 minutes just before you go to sleep? You don't pass too many exams that way to study. You really got into it, right? You don't know that you really need to, to get into it and, and just start digging in and, and one thing leads to another and it's so encouraging and that, and that's how you grow up.