THE WILL OF GOD

Sermon Summary (11/13/16), “The Will of God”  Mt 22:15-22

When we lost our son, Jeff, friends called, letters poured in many saying things like, “God always takes the best first.”  Oh, we wish he hadn’t been so good.  Or, “Everything happens for a reason.”  I can’t imagine what possible reason that could be!  Or, “It must have been the will of God.”  Well, I don’t want anything to do with a God like that.  I don’t believe that was the will of God.

I ran into a friend Terry three weeks ago.  He said it had been the worst year of his life!  He had lost a son.  He had been flat on his back for five months.  Now his wife had been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s.  Friends, that can’t be the will of God.

We struggle when bad things happen to good people and they do.  It happened to Rev. Leslie Weatherhead, pastor of a London Church in WWII.  How could his congregation deal with the evil that was surrounding them?  He delivered a series of four sermons that put in a small book, The Will of God,” that has sold over 1 million copies.

Weatherhead believes that God’s intention for us, his “Intentional Will,” is for good.  But God has delegated us to have authority, dominion (Gen 1:28), we have choices, we choose to harm one another, to harm the world we live in.  Under those circumstances God acts.  He had no intention that Christ go to the cross, but under the circumstances it was the only way he could reconcile the world to himself, “God’s Circumstantial Will.”  Ultimately God cannot be thwarted and “God’s Ultimate Will” will prevail (Rev 21-22).

First, let me say that we are people of hope and I believe in miracles.  Miracles range from protection, to timing, to the seemingly cessation of physical laws of the universe.  Not often, but they happen.  But the greatest miracle of all is that God will walk with us through the storm. 

God doesn’t cause the storm, but God will walk with us, sustain us, and he will force good out of our circumstance.  Our circumstance was that we were lost, now we are within God’s arms.  The greatest realization of my faith is that God loved me so much that he would do for me the greatest act of love of all, to give up his life for me.

God walks with us.  God forces good out of evil.  We are a different family because God walked with us, because he forced good out of evil.  Because of God’s Circumstantial Will, we are people of Hope.  “All things work together for good for those who love him.” Ro 8:28