Love God and Do What You Will
Deuteronomy 6:1-9, Luke 10:25-28
July 10, 2022
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2eVrb_r9aQ
As I said earlier, several weeks ago, one of you asked me to preach on knowing God’s will. The question, as I remember, was set in the context of prayer. “How do I know if what I’m praying for is God’s will or my own?” Or another version of that might be, “How do I know if the answer I think I’m hearing is God’s will or mine?”
This question took me back to my days as a campus minister. Fresh out of seminary, I was working with students who were within a decade of my own age. They were asking the important questions of young adulthood, about what to study and a vocation and a possible life partner. And very often, they framed those questions in terms of God’s will.
Many, but not all, of these students came from a church background where they had been taught a very specific way of thinking about God’s will. That framework might be summed up in one sentence –“God has a plan for your life.”
Maybe that is your framework, or was at one time.
If that is your framework and it works for you, then there is no need to change it and I would love to hear about that. If that is your framework and it works for you, then this sermon may not be for you.
The idea that “God has a plan for your life” often comes to mean that God has a course laid out for every day for every person. Our job, as faithful people, then becomes to learn and follow that course.
This framework breaks down for me in two ways.
First, it starts to feel like God has an important plan, but it is secret, and I’m not sure how to decode the signs to find it. If this plan is so important, then God should really make it super easy for me to know what it is.
Second, it seems too easy to irrevocably mess it up. It seems like, in the case of my campus ministry students, a person could choose the wrong major which would lead to the wrong vocation and a whole lot of other wrong dominos would fall and they would end up very far outside God’s plan for them. If you believe that God has one life partner lined up just for you, and you accidentally marry someone else, but also you made vows before God to that partner . . . well then, you really are between a rock and a hard place. Some people have a term for that. They call it God’s permissive will. That’s God’s second best choice for you when you screw up and marry a person or buy a house or take a job other than the one God intended for you.
Many of my students fervently believed that God had an individual plan for their lives. But they came to me because they didn’t know how to find it. They prayed. They studied the Bible. They listened in all the ways they knew, but they still didn’t know how to choose what would be most pleasing to God.
My answer was to offer a different framework. As we heard in Luke’s gospel, a religious person asked Jesus how to gain eternal life. That question sounds a lot like a question about finding God’s will to me. Jesus asked the man how he would answer the question based on the Bible. The man said to love God with all you’ve got and to love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus said, “That’s the right answer!”
This is how I try to answer the question of finding God’s will. I find God’s will by loving God with everything I have and by loving my neighbor as myself. Within this framework, I still have to make hard decisions. But I am not burdened by the sense that God has already made a choice for me and everything hinges on whether or not I can find it. A more positive way to say that is that God entrusts me with the freedom to make good choices.
In the Garden of Eden, God told the humans that they could eat freely of every tree in the garden except one. We have been gifted with much freedom and some limits. If we love God and love our neighbors, then some choices will be eliminated. We know that, not because there is some special secret plan for us as individuals, but because God’s desire for the well-being of all creation is repeated from generation to generation in Scripture. If the decision can be boiled down to a choice between something that is loving and something that is unloving, well that’s easy. If we are actively seeking to do God’s will, we choose what is loving.
I told this to my students. Some of them joyfully embraced the freedom. A few were suspicious that I might be leading them into contemporary, liberal thinking and away from traditional theology. The irony is that this idea is mine and it’s not new.
Perhaps you have heard of St. Augustine. I don’t mean the city in Florida, but the African theologian who lived about 400 years after Jesus. His writings and teachings greatly influenced the development of Christianity. It St. Augustine who said, “Love God, and do what you will.”[1]
Love God and drive a bus. Love God and be an architect. Love God and raise children. Love God and don’t raise children. The good news here is that we are free to choose. Frederick Buechner says that God calls us to the place where our deep hunger meets the world’s deep need. We get to choose that place, that place which fulfills our need for work and purpose and meaning, as we love God and love our neighbors as ourselves.
By now, some of have undoubtedly thought of some Biblical counter-arguments. Maybe some of you are thinking of Jeremiah 29:11, which many people have memorized. That is where God says, “For surely I know the plans I have for you, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.” Right there, it says that God has a plan. Yes, you are correct. It does. But this passage, like many, many others in the Bible is not addressed to an individual. It is offered to the people of Israel who are in exile, a whole group of people enduring a very difficult time. It is about God’s plan for their ultimate hope as a people, not any about one individual life.
Some of you are thinking about a different Biblical example. You are thinking of someone like Jonah, who God sent to the people of Ninevah. It didn’t seem like Jonah had much choice. He wasn’t going to have any peace until he went where God chose. Or you might be thinking of Jesus who prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, “not my will, but thine be done.”
To that, I would say that you are correct. I concede the point. It does seem that sometimes God calls some people to particular tasks. That’s why I said that if the “God has a plan for your life” framework might be working for you and you shouldn’t change it.
Henri Nouwen wrote “when Jesus talks about faith, he means first of all to trust unreservedly that you are loved, so that you can abandon every false way of obtaining love.” [2]
Faith is trusting, as deeply, as wholeheartedly as we can, that God loves us, that we are worthy of love. This is a process that takes most of us our whole lives. The more we seek to know God, to love God with everything we have, the more we understand that God is love. The more we believe that, the more we can live into our own place in that love, and the more we are free to love others as we ourselves are loved.
“Love God and do what you will” is an important framework for me. I celebrate the freedom that I believe God has provided.
But I suspect that the question about God’s will is about decisions that are harder than choosing between a loving action and a non-loving one. What may be harder is the decision between two loving actions. If the decision is between chocolate and strawberry, both are equally loving, feel the freedom and take our pick.
Most decision between two good things are harder than that, aren’t they? Sometimes the most loving action is to keep silent. Other times, the most loving action is to speak up loudly. The best action, the one that will bring the most love into play, is not always clear. That is not because God has a secret plan, and we can’t find it. It is not because we are confusing our desires with God’s desires. It is because life is complicated, and other get to make their own choices, and none of us possesses all wisdom and knowledge.
In addition to reading Augustine this week, I read through several essays on finding wisdom. Christians from a variety of times and places agreed on a few things about wise decision making. These are things you already know but a reminder might be helpful. First, these thoughtful Christians said, take your time with important decisions. Don’t be in a hurry to make a choice. Examine your own motivations for what is less than loving. Get to know the neighbor you are seeking to love, so that you may discern well between what is wanted and what is needed. Seek the counsel of a few trusted persons. But mostly, they said, listen to yourself. Trust the wisdom within. Know that God loves you beyond measure and trust that love as you decide. Whatever you ultimately choose, you will remain in the center of that love.
Love God, and do what you will.
Amen.
[1] Augustine of Hippo in his sermon on I John 4:4-12 https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/study/module/augustine
[2] Henri Nouwen, Letters to Marc About Jesus, (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), p. 58