Jim is trying to decide whether God wants him to go an a mission trip to Mexico for spring break. He has prayed about this but hasn’t felt God leading him one way or another. But just within the space of a few days it all becomes clear :

• A missionary from Mexico speaks at the Sunday night service
• Jim’s friends decide to take him to the Mexican joint for his birthday
• Jim’s mom gets a chihuahua since all the kids are out of the house

And it all becomes clear. These are obvious signs that God is telling Jim to go on the mission trip. Who could argue with this?

You may chuckle but this is exactly the kind of method that many Evangelicals use to determine what God wants them to do. The events are deemed just too coincidental to be an accident and so therefore must be direction from God.

But what Jim sees as signposts from God are the kinds of things that go on around us all the time. There are thousands of events that happen every day that we could play connect-the-dots with if we so desired. But there is no evidence that God has so arranged these events to be in some kind of code that we need to decipher. In fact there is nothing in scripture at all to hint that finding God’s will is such an elusive affair. We have read this into scripture - perhaps because we want God’s personalness to be more explicitly evident in our lives. Perhaps for other reasons.

But knowing what God wants us to do - or rather, how He wants us to behave - is not so hard. Let me give a few examples :

So, the knowing is not the hard part. The doing, on the other hand…