Dever on the Bondage of "Guidance"
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Mark Dever: "The way many Christians practice seeking God's will before they make a decision amounts to spiritual and emotional bondage." Read the whole thing.
posted by JT at Wednesday, February 20, 2008
4 Comments:
This is a freeing and important article by Dever. I pray that more will speak on this issue clearly, I can think of many bound in this fashion, especially men.
Excellent article. Thanks for the link.
I see how a fearful sense of obligation to wait for subjective guidance could be bondage. Garry Friesen wrote a whole book - Decision Making and the Will of God - about this issue. But I also know Christians who are comfortable with a moment-by-moment subjective walk with God, and I don't sense any bondage in the way they talk or walk. Maybe it comes down to personality type and cultural background. I am afraid I often make the opposite error. Like the wicked in Ps 10, "God is not in all my thoughts."
So well put by Mark Dever, and so important. God is raising His sons and daughters to act as kings and queens, not as puppets on a string, not as the perpetually immature. He is raising servants of the Great King, image bearers of Himself -- in other words, decision makers, men and women of purpose and plan and will and intelligence, trusting and obedient. Imagine if Joseph or David, Esther or Abigail, Jesus or Paul had made their significant decisions by sifting through a subjective morass of sensings, impressions, impulses, checks, reading the presumed signs within circumstances, fleeces, flipping and pointing in the Bible, and the like. People needlessly fear "missing God's will" or disobeying a secret will (mysteriously conveyed to us by what is in fact some sort of divination process). This fear arises from fundamental confusion between God's will of command (revealed, and meant to be known and obeyed) and God's will of control (secret, and simply to be trusted). Deuteronomy 29:29 was one of the Reformers' favorites for good reason. A healthy Bible study on "God's will" (and related phrasings) is so illuminating and can redeem God's people from much of the paralyzing immaturity that you describe. The Bible passages break out just about 50-50, and the differing implications are unmistakable -- sometimes specific obedience to God, other times simply a context of conscious trust in God while we make decisions that He intends for us to make.
Bondage is one danger. Nuttiness is the opposite danger. The sensible people of those that Gustavo mentions (comment above) live without nuttiness: “conscious trust in God while we make decisions that He intends for us to make.” But there are people whose “moment by moment subjective walk with God” is in fact nutty, in that they believe they are actually obeying a God-revealed will when they follow their inner stream of impressions in microscopic decisions of daily life. I think it’s most helpful to consider which issues a person views as obedience issues, not whether they happen to be “comfortable” or “fearful”.
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