God's Will

A friend of mine recently asked me what I thought about God's will. Here's what I shared with him:

I believe God is more concerned about WHO we are, then WHERE we are or WHAT we're doing (job, city, school, etc.)
God is after depth of godly character, faithfulness, love, closeness with us. I love what the bible says about God's will: Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks. (1 Thes. 5:16-18). Our sanctification is God's will: that we avoid sexual immorality. (1 thes 4:3).
If I focus on even these couple scriptures, I don't have to worry about the permissive thing. I think the bigger picture is growing in grace and walking by the Spirit. I don't think the will of God is always to be sought, but rather obeyed. It's something that divinely happens as we take life one step at a time
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When it comes to the WHAT of our lives: who should I marry, where should I live, what should I do as far as career, ministry, etc, I think a great scripture to look at is James 4:13-17.

13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will[a] go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit”; 14 whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. 15 Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.” 16 But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.
17 Therefore, to him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin.

Instead, you ought to say, "If it is the Lord's will, we will do such....." So we know that there are those things in life that we might not really know what the Lord's will is, but this verse shows he does have a will about those things. So how do you discover it?
For me it's been prayer, scripture, wisdom, counsel, circumstance, common sense, and trial and error. Running in grace, being free to make mistakes.

Planting a church in Toronto, the Lord confirmed it with peace in my heart, a desire to devote my life to something big, circumstances, confirmation of my pastor, and scripture verses that spoke directly to me.

When we came back from Canada, it was primarily the alignment of a bunch of uncanny circumstances that the Lord showed me to come back.

It's all a walk of faith. If we always know God's "perfect" will it's logic, not faith that we're living by. God's adventerous will for us is to sometimes not know what His will is - step out and you will find out. Gotta love it, huh?

Perfect and permissive? Yea, I think it makes sense scripturally. But I think the better question is, am I being led by the Spirit, here.

Check out the book of Acts. Sometimes they did things because "it seemed good to them" other times "the Spirit said"