Big Idea: We will know God’s will when we know God’s heart.

This weekend, I was talking with a family member – a pastor – about this sermon series, and more broadly about God’s will and God’s power. He remarked that it wasn’t necessarily important to him exactly if or how God knows what’s going to happen, or what that even means, but instead that he takes comfort knowing that God’s will is always seeking to make things right. At the end of the day, we have broken hearts and faulty minds, and we can’t see how it all works. Frankly, it might never make sense to us. But there is hope in knowing that God has the power and the possibility to make this broken world right. We can take comfort in a God who looks at our broken world, at the pain and suffering we experience, at our faults and failures, at death itself, and says, “Behold! I am making all things new.”

When will this happen? How will this happen? Why can’t it be now? Why must we still struggle? This, to me, is the great mystery and yet a great hope. I hold onto the knowledge that it will happen as the kingdom is realized on earth. And I know that it depends on our action in the world; this especially is a hope as I personally seek out the will of God. This week’s message was about discerning the will of God, and that His will is always wrapped up in His heart. There is no better picture of this, to me, than this picture of restoration and reconciliation. When I am unsure what to do, I think back on this – that God’s heart is for the confused, the broken, the downtrodden, the downcast, the hurt, the discarded, the lost, the lonely, the least of these. When we don’t know what to do, or what God’s will is, we can always move in towards these people and places and seek restoration. If we do this, we will never be far from the will of God. Perhaps even more incredible, God’s relational purpose requires us to do this! It is only through our response and action that God can say, with us, those beautiful and powerful words: “Behold, I am making all things new!”

Brent