Understanding the Will of God

by Alan Redpath

You know that God has a purpose for Your life. In a sense it's a two-fold purpose. He has a purpose for your career and He has a purpose for Your character. These are not independent of each other, but are interwoven. God's will for our character is the same for us all, "This is the will of God, even your sanctification." And from that very moment when you were born again of the Spirit of God, the pressure of that Spirit was placed upon your life and He will relentlessly apply that pressure through affliction, sorrow, trial and joy until the clay that is in the hands of the Potter has been molded. Then one day you will stand before Him in the fullness of the stature of Jesus Christ.



He also has a will for your career and that will is individual. There's some sphere in the plan of God for world evangelization which only you can fill. There's an old hymn (which I haven't heard sung on this side of the Atlantic) one line of which says, "There a work for Jesus none but you can do." Catch the thrill of that in your
own heart and mind. There's some task which the God of all the universe, the great Creator) your redeemer in Jesus Christ has for you to do, and which will remain undone and incomplete until by faith and obedience you step into the will of God.

I believe that the discovery of God's will for your career is dependent upon the acceptance of God's will for your character. Far too often in seeking to know God's will for our lives we're at the wrong end of the line. Our concern should never be our relationship to the problem of a career, but our relationship to the person of Jesus Christ. Then He will look after the career. What we are is much more important to Him than what we do for Him. We mean far more to God than the work we do.

Indeed, I believe that the sphere of service, your career, the plan which God has mapped out for you and prepared for you, is the greatest agency in His hands to conform You to His character and to His will. God takes that place of service as He puts you into it with the supreme purpose of breaking you, proving what is in your heart and teaching you to lace your utter dependence upon Him. Through that experience you become conformed to His will in your character.

The question we face is not primarily "What must I now do?" but "How can I achieve it? What are the resources that God has for me in Jesus Christ in order to enable me to step into His will?"

Let me give my own testimony. When I was 28 I went through a major crisis of my life. I was married and was in business (the British equivalent of your C.P.A.). I had a good career ahead of me. But my life was empty. I was frustrated. I was a Christian of a sort, but somehow or other I believed that God had some other plan for me. I began to wonder why I had become a C.P.A. and I came to realize it was largely my father's desire. I had no sense of vocation, no sense of calling. I wasn't there because God had put me there. I was there by my own choice.

It began to dawn on me that I had never referred the question of a career to the Lord at all. I had never acknowledged that He had any right to my life. I received Christ as my Savior and I knew my sins were forgiven and I was going to heaven, but that was all. Gradually, I began to realize that the first thing that God was asking me to do was not only to surrender my heart, but to abandon my life. I shall never forget the day my wife and I knelt together in the presence of the Lord and gave our lives utterly to the Master. Following that act of utter, unconditional surrender (only possible by His grace), God began to work. And I learned that surrender must precede service, that God could do nothing with my life until He had my consent for Him to do exactly what He wanted to do with it.

I then got out a piece of paper and I drew a line down the middle of the paper. On the left hand side I put "Arguments in favour of staying in a business career." On the right hand side of the line I put "Arguments in favour of going into the ministry." On the left hand side I listed a good job, a certain amount of money, opportunity of influencing other people in my office for Christ, a safe future for my family, etc.

On the right hand side were the opportunity of giving all my life to the service of Christ, living seven days a week for Him with no distraction, the glorious opportunity of every part of my life being in His service. Every day during my quiet time for 13 months I took those arguments to the Lord in prayer until from His Word and by outward circumstances and by the inward witness of my spirit with His Spirit the arguments in favor of staying in business were completely obliterated. I was desperately conscious of weakness, insufficiency and inadequacy for such a tremendous task.

If anybody here can find any logical reasons for staying out of the ministry, stay out! The only people God wants in the ministry today are people who have such a compulsion of the Holy Spirit that they are desperate to get in, and can do nothing else except go in obedience to what they believe to be the will of God.

I remember the sense of utter weakness and insuffiency as I stepped out of the office of Imperial Chemical Industries in London in March 1936 and entered into what we call full-time service for the Lord with an open Bible, no seminary, no college, no degree. All I knew was an unconditional surrender in my heart to Christ, an absolute conviction of the authority of the Word, and a determination to obey the Lord whatever it might cost.

The first and most important consideration is not our relationship to the problem of a career, but our relationship to the Third Person of the Trinity, God the Holy Spirit. He has come to guide us, to direct us, to teach us. May I remind you that the disciples forsook all for Christ. They spent three years at His seminary, constantly under His teaching. They were witnesses of the cross; they were eye witnesses of the resurrection; but they were utterly ignorant of the will of God for their lives until Pentecost.

One day when the Holy Ghost came those men turned the world upside down. There was no question then what to do. There was no problem of where they should go. Every task was impelled and directed by the Spirit of God who had come to take complete charge of them and of the task of world evangelization. From the moment the disciples were filled with the Spirit, God began to think through them, work through them and the strategy of heaven began to be operative here on earth.

That's what we need, men so possessed by the Spirit of God that God can think His thoughts through our minds, that He can plan His will through our actions, that He can direct His strategy of world evangelization through His Church. We spend hours in committees, board meetings, and all sorts of things in order to discover a world plan of divine strategy to evangelize the world to bring back the King.

If only the company represented here spent ten days waiting upon God as the disciples did before Pentecost, I have a feeling in my heart that the 20th century would be revolutionized. The fullness of the Holy Spirit is God's final resource for you.

You may ask what we mean by being filled with the Holy Spirit. The references of our relationship to the Holy Spirit are in two categories. The Holy Spirit is the agent by whom we believe. It is the Holy Spirit who convinces of sin. But there is a second work of the Spirit. This involves such thoughts as walking in the Spirit, quenching the Spirit, grieving the Spirit, being filled with the Spirit.

When you became a Christian you did not receive the Holy Spirit in part. At the moment you received Christ, you received all of the Holy Spirit. But He does not necessarily receive all of you. If we would know Him in fullness there must also be an act of faith which surrenders and yields ourselves to Him completely. There can be no filling of the Spirit until there is an emptying of self.

But let me put it to you in the words of the late Charles Inward who said, "There is no such thing as a once-for-all fullness. It is a continuous appropriation of a continuous supply from Jesus Christ. It is a moment by moment cleansing and a moment by moment filling. As I trust Him, He fills me. So long as I go on trusting Him, He goes on filling me. The moment I begin to believe, that moment I begin to receive. As long as I keep on believing, praise the Lord, I keep on receiving."

That's what it means to be filled up to overflowing with the Spirit of God. On the one hand there is an emptying of self, an act of surrender when I crown Jesus Christ as King, an act which you maintain by an attitude day by day. On the other hand, the Holy Spirit comes in to preserve every part of my personality: body, soul and spirit. It isn't then and only then that I possess all of God, but He possesses all of me.

The Lord Jesus Christ demands by sovereign right every bit of your personality. As far as I was able and knew how at the age of 28 He got that from me. All I can say is that every day since He's been wanting more, and the transaction will never be finished until I get to heaven. For every time He speaks to me and asks something of me and I yield and obey, at that moment my capacity is increased for more of Him. The bigger the surrender the greater the obedience, the greater the capacity for the fullness of His Spirit. That's what it means to be filled with the Spirit of God.

The fullness of the Holy Spirit is needed that you might know the will of God. How can I ever know what is God's will for my life, if my relationship with Him is not right? It is only when I have received His fullness that then He can take told of my life and put it where He desires.

The fullness of the Holy Spirit is necessary perhaps most of all to make you like the Lord Jesus. Some think that if they try hard enough, one day they'll become like the Lord Jesus. Salvation has been secured by faith, but apparently for most of us holiness is by effort. We know we have received Christ by simple trust, and yet we think we must work out the rest ourselves. While He does say we must work out our own salvation, yet we are told it is God that worketh in us. How many Christians live almost on the very edge of a nervous breakdown with sheer effort to be a bit more Christlike.

I learned two tremendous lessons in my Christian life a little while ago. (1) God expects nothing from Alan Redpath but failure. I as a man am no different today from the day before I was converted. Five minutes after I've finished preaching I would be capable of committing any sin imaginable but for the grace of God. Alan Redpath is no different as a man from what he was as a youngster. And the sins that beset him then beset him now, were it not for a constant, continual dependence upon the blood of Jesus, and the grace of God, and the power of the Holy Ghost to keep me.

(2) As long as I seek by His grace to maintain the attitude of committal and surrender to Him, then every demand, however unexpected or grim, hard, tough; every decision, however difficult; every temptation, every fierce dart of the Enemy of my soul is an attack upon the life of Christ within me. And He is always greater than Satan himself. For every situation in life God has implanted within me One who is altogether perfect, if only I let Him have His own way. How urgent therefore is this need to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

If the Spirit of God has been moving in your heart and making you see that the one thing that matters when you leave Urbana is not that you have a clear blueprint of what God wants you to do for the rest of your life but light to take the next step. It's a life of faith and not of sight. If you've come to see that the thing that matters is your relationship to Him, that He should possess you and fill your life.

The first step into fullness is a sense of emptiness, a sense of dissatisfaction with all that I am, a sense of disgust with all that I ever hope to be, a sense of utter frustration, a sense that if anything is going to happen, then God must do it. I must come to Him with a broken heart and hear Him say to me, "A humble and a contrite heart I will not despise." Before God makes you, He breaks you.

The cross is not a place where a man stands erect with his chest out. It's a place where He's flat on his face before God, a helpless guilty soul. Repentance is not a doctrine to be given only to the unsaved. It is an experience that I must know in my life today. If you would know the fullness of the Spirit (and this is a desperately costly thing) it means that you must go alone to God. Confess your pride, your self-will, your envy, your bitterness, your criticism of others, and a disgusting list of things which you as a Christian go on committing. Tell the Lord about it, and where you've been responsible for breaking fellowship with a fellow Christian because of it, you tell him too.

The second condition of the fullness of the Holy Spirit is faith. "He that believeth in me," said the Lord Jesus, "out of his inner man shall flow rivers of living water. This spake he of the Holy Spirit which they that believe on him should receive." It isn't only fullness, it's overflow. It's not overwork but overflow. The ceaselessr flow of His life through me is dependent on the ceaseless reception of a simple faith in Him.

The third condition of fullness is obedience. Emptiness, faith, obedience: it is that which leads from the initial crisis to the process. There are no short-cuts to holiness. We are bidden to trust and to obey. If I disobey the inner voice of His Spirit, I will lose the fullness. I can never lose the relationship, but I will lose the fullness. When there's disobedience in the Christian life the fullness ceases. He is there but He is grieved. And you soon know when you've lost the fullness, because the joy is gone. The fellowship is gone. The reality of the presence of Christ is gone. It's Satan's delight to tell me that once he's got me, he will keep me. But at that moment I can go back to Him. And I know that if I confess my sins, God is faithful and just to forgive me.

Are you repared to accept unconditional surrender to the Holy Spirit? Do you know what that's going to mean? It may mean a broken engagement for somebody here tonight. It may be the end of dating with a fellow or girl. God will test somebody here. It may be along that line. It may be that some friendship which has gone all wrong will have to be stopped, and God is asking for obedience to His Spirit in you. Are you willing for that? If you look up into His face and say, "Yes, Lord, whatever it costs," at that moment He'll flood your Life with His presence and power.

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