love and knowledge

We continued this week in our reflections on Paul's letter to the Philippians. We focused on his prayer for this young church, particularly on this portion of it: "And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best." We noted that God's word reveals that there is a dynamic interplay between love and knowledge. Knowledge needs love in order to be full, robust and play its role in offering us guidance in living. Love, of course, is not just any old love but the love at work in a Christian community - the love the Holy Spirit brings to us through one another (Romans 5 - the love of God is shed abroad in us). This is the love that God has revealed in the the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. This interplay between love and knowledge is said here to give insight, moral wisdom, which will help us make good decisions about what we do and how we live. We can't really talk about this, though, without butting our heads up against the question that so many well meaning Christian people always want to ask of these verses and other like them: "How can I know God's will for my life?".

I love Tod Bolsinger's comments on this from his blog:"when most of us talk about God’s will, we couldn’t be further from the truth. Most of us think of God’s will as a clear, step by step blueprint or map for living. That God has every detail of our lives completely and utterly mapped out and that our job is to find out what that will is and live accordingly. We think of life like as an Amtrak training heading from “this world to heaven” And that God is the conductor of the train and our job is make sure that whenever we have to change trains or make a decision that we are on the right train so that we never get off track. Getting on the wrong train or making a decision outside of God’s perfectly mapped out will is a tragedy, leading to missing what God wants for us. So then, we spend a lot of time fussing over the perfect decision. If God has every part of my life mapped out like a cross-country train track then there must be one perfect will of God for which school I attend, which person I marry, which job I take, how many children I have, when I retire and so forth, right? I mean if we miss the will of God in these decisions we are doomed, right? We might eventually make it to have eternal life with God, but we won’t experience the blessing of living God’s will here and now, right? Wrong. There is absolutely no place in the Bible where we are told that God’s will is about figuring out every single detail in your life according to some master plan. Indeed, there isn’t one master plan. Not one place in the Bible are we told to discern the will of God as we make decisions in our lives.In fact, the Bible says that God’s will for us is really just one thing and is the same for all of us: To make us more like God. To change our lives so that we are in every way like Christ. This is what it says in 1 Thessalonians 4:3: For this is the will of God, your sanctification… or as it says in another translation, “God’s will is for you to be holy…” You see God’s will is that we would be changed, transformed, become more like him. And when we make decisions in life, when we pray for God to be at work in our lives, God’s concern is that we would be transformed people, sanctified people, holy people. God’s will is not in the details of the journey but in the end point, the goal.

Some of you are going to be troubled by this. What? Some of us say. You mean there ISN’T God’s perfect will about which school I attend, which church I join, which career I enter? There isn’t one perfect person to marry, one perfect will to live as a Christian following Jesus? Doesn’t God love me and have a wonderful plan for my life? Yes. That plan is that you would become like Jesus in every way. That your life would reveal God's saving work to the world in every aspect. That you would become sanctified. (Romans 8:29, 1 Thes 4:3)."


Great we may say. That sounds weighty and freeing all at the same time but what does it look like to live that way? Here are a few suggestions:


* That your life would reveal God's saving work to the world in every aspect can be an intimidating prospect and invites those with perfectionist tendencies to abandon ship or become terribly self-righteous in their desire to look "right". It is important to remember that revealing God's saving work is by believing the gospel in obvious and observable ways in our failures and our successes.
* In evaluating decisions, especially complicated ones, we must remember that love and knowledge must work together. For example, a parent who has shown little love and grace to a child over her formative years will want to think very circumspectly about what discipline means when the child acts out in her teenage years with drugs and alcohol. Or, in a marriage relationship, if one spouse imagines that all of the problems of the marriage lie with their partner it is usually the case that the "innocent" spouse is not allowing knowledge to be shaped by love. Or, in the case of some who are single: the constant complaint that "no one will be my friend" often betrays a character trait of selfishness wherein one demands to be befriended without wishing to be a friend - here again, one's knowledge in evaluating a circumstance is not shaped by love.


To elaborate on Bolsinger's quote above we might say that God's main purpose for our lives is that we become better at reflecting the love of Christ to others as we come to a deeper understanding of Gods' character as revealed in Jesus' life, death and resurrection.


I had the privilege of interviewing Rick Bayless at Frontera Grill a few years back. He spoke enthusiastically about the longevity of the average tenure of their employees. He said something to this effect: Profitability is important; you can't keep things going unless you are in the black. But we also measure success by whether this is a place where people can flourish for, if they wish, their whole work-life. If we are not sustainable in that way, we are not profitable (please note, this is my paraphrase of Bayless from memory - if you want a PDF of the article email me and I will dig it up). Back to the point: I know, all of my finance, business and econ friends are either shouting Yeah! or Nay! right now but the point is this: Bayless' way of thinking through decisions offers us a stimulating example of how life's decisions should be approached from multiple angles; for the Christian, life's decisions must be informed by the dynamic interplay of knowledge and love.


Questions for discussion:


1. It was suggested in the homily that our approach to decision making is often so wrong-headed that we don't even ask the right questions, much less find the right answers. What is an example from your life or a general example of not asking the right questions?


2. If you obsess over finding God's perfect will in every decision you make (see Bolsinger above) how might this approach impact negatively on your community of friends and loved ones?