One of the most important questions we face - over the course of our entire lives - is “How do we discern God’s will.” Bill Fullilove has lots of experience helping people with this crucial question and we explore it together. We especially consider where our own desires fit in the process.

Show Notes:

“Because I Want To?” – A Christian Approach to Desire and Vocational Calling, by Bill Fullilove.

Transcript

Welcome to Questions That Matter, a podcast of the C.S. Lewis Institute. I'm your host, Randy Newman, and today my conversation partner is Bill Fullilove. Bill is one of the pastors at McLean Presbyterian Church. He's also a professor at Reform Theological Seminary up in New York City, and he wears a number of other hats. We're going to talk today about discerning God's will. Bill, welcome to Questions That Matter.

Hey, Randy. I’m thrilled to get to do this with you.

Teaching at the Fellows Program

Yes, I've been looking forward to this. Well, let me say, when I said you wear several hats, you're in a position of helping a lot of people discern God's will. You're a seminary professor, and so seminary students are looking at what comes next. Am I correct that you've also been involved in teaching at the fellows program at your church? And so these are recent college grads looking to see what's next. Is that also part of your collection of tasks?

Yes, absolutely. It's both of those. And because I did a lot of ministry with young adults, just a whole lot of folks who would look at me, and, I think particularly when it came to jobs, say, “How do I figure out what I want to be when I grow up? Because I'm 24, and I'm going to grow up sooner or later, and I better figure this out.”

Yeah. And it's a tricky thing for a lot of Christians. I think, for some, it's a very mystical kind of experience, “God spoke to me,” but on the other hand, for some people, it's no different than just making a decision with a pro/con sheet. So just as we start this discussion about discerning God's will, what would be some places that you'd want to begin? Let's just say someone stopped by your office, someone who was involved in your fellows program, and they say, “I don't know the first thing about discerning God's will.” Where would you start?

Well, it's a trite answer, except it's a true answer, which is I think I'd start by saying, “I think I want you to know two things better to begin that. I want you to know the Bible better, and I want you to know yourself better.” And when I say that, I am absolutely committed that the Bible is the thing that gives us—to use theological language, everything we need for faith and practice. That said, I think I equally immediately say, “But, man, it doesn't give you everything you want,” because we so often want God to just look at us and say, “Do this.” And instead the Bible sort of gives us categories and then says, “Now have at it and figure it out.” And so it's equally important for us to know ourselves and our own situation. You’ve got to execute the Bible, understand what the God's Word says, and you got to execute yourself, understand your own situation, and try to put those together.

Maybe the easy example would be—get outside of sort of career stuff. I have all these conversations with people who say, “Well, I've got these two girls I'm interested in, and there's stuff that's really attractive about this one, there's stuff that's really attractive about that one. How do I figure out which one I should try to date?” And this is a great example. The Bible doesn't answer in the specificity we wish. The Bible says, “Here’s the type of woman you ought to find,” or, “Here’s the type of guy you ought to find,” and it says, “Okay, have at it.” And we want it to say, “Pick Jane, not Sarah.” And it just says, “No, no, no. You figure that out.”

And, you know, I find that this is a crucial life skill for all of life. I mean, there are certain points in time when that's the heightened need: You're graduating from college, “What do I do next?” “Do I take this job or this job, move to this city or this city?” But then, at different points in your career, the question gets revisited. And now it's notched up a few levels, but then, and yes, in selecting whether to get married and who to marry and those kinds of things. But even later in life, I mean, I'm discovering now that I'm at this point of, “Oh, I need to rethink what's the next chapter for me?” And so it's not like, “Oh, you’ve got to figure this out when you're 24 and then you're done with it.” Maybe there are only a few more times that are as heightened as that.

So dig in a little bit more for us when you say you need to know the scriptures. No one's going to argue with you on that one, at least not the listeners of our podcast, I don't think. But what are some specific areas or aspects of the scripture that are most pressing for this discerning God’s will question?

Yeah. That’s fabulous, Randy. And you’re absolutely right. The reason I even called it sort of a trite answer. It’s not like the Bible's trite, but of course you're supposed to say that. But it's a big book. And it’s a complicated book. And this is one of those places I really think that people misunderstand, because they start reading the Bible looking for it to answer the specific question, this job or that job. And the Bible is far more focused on forming who we are than informing us about a particular decision. So, sure, sometimes you read the Bible, and it will just tell you something like, “Hey, that's immoral, don't do that.” And of course, if that part of knowing the Scriptures answers the question, well, then it's easy.

But most of the types of decisions we're trying to make aren't that cut and dried. And so I really think when I say know the Bible, there is some principial work we can do about what the Scripture says about God's control and about our responsibility, and there is some principial work we can do that the Bible teaches us about how to make decisions.

But before any of that, I think the dominant thing is starting to have it form us into the type of person that God would have us be as we make those decisions. And it's a long-term process of spiritual formation. It's not the Google way of getting answers. You Google something, and it gives you 85 pages of hits in 0.000008 seconds. This is more like beating your Bible up to let it change your heart, so that our will starts to conform to Christ's will.

You know, if I can jump in. That’s a really, really important point you just made, and I don't want it to just kind of fly by. You said this is in contrast to the Google approach to getting answers. And this isn't a critique of Google or the internet or anything like that, but you're right. When we go searching for information on a search engine, we get a million options, and then basically it's pick the one you want. And you're not using any criteria that…. I mean, they're using some criteria about which things that you see first. But we get this impression that, “I'm the chooser of my own reality.” And, as Christians, when we look at scripture, well, we're going to get to and talk about our desires and our choices, but it first narrows things down under the lordship of Christ. I mean, the starting point is, “I submit my entire life to God,” and I say, “I'm willing to do anything,” and I want to seek first the kingdom of God, which also narrows down things. Not just eliminates sin, certainly that, but it really says, “Okay, I need to first and foremost be committed to God's lordship over every area of my life.” Only then do I start asking the specific questions of, “Now, do I take this job or this job?” Am I putting words in your mouth? Or driving you crazy? Maybe both.

No. Absolutely, Randy, because… I've even been going through a bit of one of these pivot points you mentioned. To go back to what you said, and then to answer your question, I had this crazy idea when I came out of college that you'd make all the big decisions in the first five or six years, marry somebody, pick a career, pick a place, and then be like driving straight for the next fifty years. And I don't know why I believed that, because nobody had told me that, but I really thought by my late twenties, I'd just be playing out the string, and my goodness, that's not at all how it really works. And really, for most people, about every ten years you go through a cycle where you do a major set of rethinking these things.

And so I've been recently in one of those, just because it's been about ten years. That’s the way these things go. And when I've been going through it, my dominant prayer has actually become, “Lord, let me want the things you want more than the things I want.”

Good, good, good.

Because goodness, I know how selfish I can be. And it's been a very sort of intentional working my way around, to say, “This needs to first be a question of me putting my whole life before You and not me assuming that I know what's best for me.” And so, if you think about it, the doctrine scripturally that we're talking about is the doctrine we call providence, that God is, in a remarkably specific way, in control of everything that happens in this world. And it’s a doctrine that at some point butts up against even the limits of our human understanding, because if you read the scriptures, God is in control. I mean it's almost definitional. To be God, of course He’s in control of everything. But then we start saying, “Well, then how in the world do the decisions I make matter?” But, my goodness, if we don't start by accepting the truth that there's Someone greater than me who's really in control. And then here's the really great thing: And He’s good! In fact, so good that He’s going to answer every one of my prayers the way I would have prayed it if I knew what He knew.

Where Desire Fits

Yes, yes, yes. Well said. Well, you know, I've had the privilege and opportunity sometimes about teaching on this subject, and most of the time, I start by looking at Romans 12:1-8, but zooming in on 1 and 2. I start with: Paul says, “I urge you brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices.” That's the first thing, offering up complete and total lordship to God. And then he says, “Do not be conformed to this world,” so you have to say, “Okay, how have I been formed by the world? What are the messages the world is saying to me, and how does scripture differ from that?” So you start with this offering your whole entire body. Your second is saying, “I got to get rid of this bad advice that I'm hearing.”

But then, for the next few verses in Romans 12, he starts looking at different unique spiritual gifts that God gives to some people. So that's the part of what you said earlier. You got to know yourself. You have to know what are your spiritual gifts, but also what are your natural inclinations, what are the things you're drawn to. You just recently wrote an article on The Washington Institute's website, so I want to plug that for our listeners. Check out—it's washingtoninst.org. Go searching for The Washington Institute. And you wrote an article, “‘Because I Want To?’ – A Christian Approach to Desire and Vocational Calling.” Tell us a little bit about where desire fits into this whole process.

Yeah, well this is a great example of one of those biblical balances, similar to what you said earlier. Some people sort of take a purely, almost mystical approach. “God's just going to speak to me.” Other people take a completely secular approach and just baptize it with like pixie dust to make it sound Christian. And neither of those is good. Same thing with desire. Some of us are so sold out to the false idea that God always wants us to suffer, and that, in fact, if we like it, it must be wrong, that we're skeptical of anything we want. And goodness knows there are lots of Bible verses that support that, right? “The heart is deceitful above all things.” And so we need to be rightfully skeptical of just, “Hey, I want to do this.” But some people take that one biblical truth so far that they sort of steamroll other biblical truths that are also there that we need to hold together, such as, “God delights to give His people the desires of their hearts.” So we have to ask the question, which side of the horse do I fall off of? Do I fall off the side of the horse that I trust my desires too much, which can be unbiblical? Or do I fall off the side of the horse that I trust my desires too little, which can also be unbiblical.

And the point I'm after in that article is simply to say, instead of either of those, what we really need to be doing is sanctifying our desires to the Lord. “Make my will Your will.” But then once we do that, what we want is a big piece of how God leads us. And so we have to not be entirely skeptical nor entirely just jumping in. We got to hold it in a better balance than that.

This is Randy Newman. I'm the senior teaching fellow for apologetics and evangelism at the C.S. Lewis Institute, and it is my great privilege to invite you to an event that we're hosting on September 24 at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time. It'll be a livestream event, so you can join us from anywhere. And it's centered around a discussion about my book, my new book, Mere Evangelism: Ten Insights from C.S. Lewis to Help You Share Your Faith. It's free, but you do need to register and sign up. Please go to our website, cslewisinstitute.org/mere-evangelism, and sign up. I am praying that God uses that event in great and powerful ways. Thanks.

I think some of it also is where we are in our own walk with the Lord, of how long we've been a Christian. Because I do think, for a young Christian, there’s this period of realizing, “So many of my desires have been sinful, and I have to say no to a whole bunch of things that I'm saying no to for the very first time in my life.” And it's easy to fall into the trap that you're saying of then thinking, “Well, if I have a desire, it must be sinful.” Well, not all of our desires are sinful. A whole lot of them are. And I do think that a whole lot of Christians have fallen into, “Well, I just have to completely separate my desires from God's desires.” And you're saying that, over time, the discipleship process is getting our desires to be in line with God's desires.

Sure. Well, to put a couple of illustrations on it, Randy, I remember probably four years ago, I still remember it pretty well, we were talking to a little kid at church, one of the other pastors and I, and when you talk to a little kid, the best thing you can do is get down on your knee so you're at their eye level. So we're both down on our knee, looking eye to eye with this little about six-year-old kid, and the other pastor just asked him, he says, “Well, what do you think God wants you to do about this?” And it was something that had happened. And the kid looks at us both, and he goes, “Whatever isn't fun.” That's so heartbreaking, but it is where a lot of us are. But the counterpoint to that is… John Calvin once said, “Love God and then do whatever you want.” And you get the truism, because if you really love God, then what you want is what He wants.

And I might even nuance what you said just a tiny bit. And I think you probably agree with us, it's how far we are in our walk with Christ, but that doesn't necessarily line up with how many years we've walked with Him. It's more a matter of how deeply we've walked with Him. Because I have seen the counterpoint, which is someone who's just come to Christ, and his or her enthusiasm. They are ready to throw aside everything because they finally met their Savior.

And then the deceptiveness of it is that it can creep back in over the next 20, 30, 40 years, when we start realizing, “Huh, I'm a little more tied to the American dream than I ever thought I was.” And so I've seen 60 year olds who are less mature in Christ than the person who became a Christian a month ago as a 15 year old. And vice versa. So it is, it's that we continually walk deeper with Him, and we just never get satisfied and say, “All right, I'm good.”

Right. Well, and that commandment in Romans 12, it's an ongoing, always, every day, for the rest of your life, we offer ourselves up as living sacrifices. That's the problem. It always needs to be, every single day, renewed.

Can I give you my rant on that verse?

Sure, why not? Ranting is allowed on Questions That Matter, but to a limited extent. I can disconnect you.

Here’s my limited rant: Most every ministry out there that does worldview stuff loves to quote verse 2 as sort of their theme verse. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” But man, most of them, in their marketing, skip verse 1, what you're saying, “Give yourself to Christ as a living sacrifice,” because that doesn't market well to us. But it starts with that. It starts with laying down our lives to Christ. And then the transformation comes. We typically want the cheap and easy quick way. Yeah. And God says, “No, the way this works is that when you've really seen Jesus, you can't help but be completely sold out to Him.”

How Is It that Christians Are Not Buddhists?

Yes. You know, I skipped the word “therefore” as the very first word in Romans 12:1. It's, “Therefore,” in light of what he's been saying for the last eleven chapters, all of the gospel riches, all that God has done for us. “Therefore, present your bodies.” Well, let me ask you this: There's a line in this article in The Washington Institute. You said, “Desire can often be a very good thing. Christians are not Buddhists, and we do not view our faith as emptying ourselves of desire.” Now, in our pluralistic, don't ruffle anybody's feathers world, we don't hear people say that. But there is a very essential difference between the Christian faith and the Buddhist faith, and all others for sure, but on this place, can you say a little bit more? How is it that Christians are not Buddhists? And… well, I'll leave it at that. Let you explore that.

Sure. Well, and Randy, it gets to the really important point that pluralism was never supposed to be defined as sort of lowest common denominator. And there's absolutely no point in pretending that two people who believe different things actually believe the same thing. I wouldn't be a very good Muslim if I said that Islam and Christianity were the same thing, nor would I be very good Christian. There are quite apparently huge differences. A truly proper pluralism isn't, “We pretend there are no differences.” It's we say, “Of course there are differences. Now let's figure it out, because we're all in the same society and all in the image of God at some level” Then, we figure out how to live together, not pretending we're the same when we're not. And so it's entirely right to say, “Hey, I'm not a Buddhist, I'm a Christian.” Because what a Buddhist views as the fullness of life is a very different thing than what a Christian views as the fullness of life. And in essence…. Goodness, Buddhism, like everything, like Christianity, you can oversimplify so quick when you talk from the outside or when you don't have a lot of nuance.

But there is a basic tenet of Buddhism which is, “Hey, just don't want it, and that's really your approach to getting the true peace,” which is an incredibly… I mean, maybe I should channel my inner John Piper here. It's an incredibly different approach than the Christian approach, which says God has baked into you all sorts of desires that are properly filled only when you see Him. And, goodness, we ought be deeply respectful of every single person of another faith, of every Buddhist, of every Muslim, anything else, while we can still critique them. And we need to welcome the opposite and say, “If we are people who believe in truth, it's okay, let's call out the differences, and let's talk about them.” And so God has made each of us to want some things deeply, and what we realize is those things we want are all pointers towards what we really want, which is to be made right with our Creator.

Yes. I just thought that was a really crucial point in your article. Christian maturity is not the eliminating of desire. It's allowing God to channel those desires, so that there's an intersection between what our desires are and what God's kingdom desires are.

I was working with a friend who is a professional athlete, and he has had to work through this, as you can imagine, really carefully. Because he wants to win really, really badly. He has both the body and the drive to succeed at things that we never could. And it's not going to do him any good to pretend that he's not wired up that way. And my point to him is, “God made you this way.” That's fine! The question is, “Where does the glory go when you win?”

Yes. Important. And this is where I think… I often think of discerning God's will, it’s this process that's got several different components, and one of them is getting good input from people who know you really well, fellow believers in the body of Christ, who can say to you, “No. That desire is not something God wants you to follow,” or, “Oh, that desire! Yeah, I see that God has put that in you. So, yes, pursue it.” And we can deceive ourselves into a whole lot of things, but if you get input from four or five really close brothers and sisters in Christ, they're not going to let you get away with that. They're going to look at that and say, “No, I think you're flattering yourself a little too much on that one,” or, “Oh, no. This is you! You really need to pursue this.” And getting that kind of input is a crucial part of the discerning process.

Absolutely. I think we get so individualistic, particularly in Western society, about this. And the role of our church and fellowship community to protect us from our own blind spots is absolutely huge. But the key question is: Do the people that you're actually in fellowship with know you enough? And do you value them enough that you'll listen to them when they say that? I think far too many of us say, “Oh, I've got a church community,” or, “I've got a fellowship,” but if they tell us something we don't want to hear, then we're just going to dismiss it. And that's not advocating and saying, “Well, let's let everybody else make my decisions for me.” But it is saying, unless you value those people well enough that you'll listen to them when they say hard things, then you don't really have the kind of community you ought to have in Christ. And it's a good question for us all to ask, “Who are those people that I'm really going to listen when they tell me that I'm off on completely the wrong vector?”

Yeah. So let's dive for a little bit into: How do we handle it or what do we say either when we're telling ourselves this or when we hear from other people, “Well, God told me. God told me this is what I should do.” So I'm giving you the opportunity for another rant. A second rant. How do we handle all that? Because it's very popular.

Yeah. So rant 2.0. It’s one of those funny phrases, Randy, because if it's accurate, then there's only one right answer, which is, “Yeah, do it!” If God really said do this, then let Him be found true and every man a liar. That's the thing I'm going to do. But what happens in practice is that phrase gets deployed as a complete discussion ender. The moment you drop, “God told me to,” what you're effectively saying is, “If you disagree with me, you're arguing with God. So shut up, sucker.” And that’s just got to bother us as some level illegitimate, because it really is a way, too often, just to dodge the conversation, and it's entirely right for somebody else to look back at us and say, “Well, how did God tell you that?”

As sort of orthodox, and I use that with a little o, but as orthodox Christian believers, the number one answer is He speaks to us by the Holy Spirit, speaking through His word. Now, is it possible that he speaks to us in other ways? Well, absolutely! And that does depend on sort of which theological tradition you're coming from, exactly how open or not you are to that, but in any of these cases, the number one thing God's doing is using the word and the Holy Spirit working through the Word. And so when somebody says, “God told me,” that could be shorthand for, “Well, I was eating my Wheaties in the morning, and I suddenly had this vision of this person, and so that's the girl I'm going to marry.” And somebody needs to say, “With all due respect, I'm not sure that's how God talked to you.”

Or it could be, “Wow, I studied the Scriptures deeply, and here are these ten different passages that fundamentally speak into this issue that I'm dealing with. And so I think God's telling me through the Spirit working in the word. And yes, I've prayed with it, and I've wrestled with it in prayer, and there are pieces of me that don't want to do this, but I'm pretty sure God is telling me to do it anyway. And so I think God's working me around to wanting His will more than my own.”  Well, wow, that’s a very different version than, “I put salt on my Wheaties, and so I decided not to meet this person.” And so what we need to be willing to do is, if we're ready to drop that “God told me” line, we need to be able to say: How did he tell me? And then, if the way he told me looks a little sort of impressionistic, we need to be humble enough to listen to other people who say, “Well, can we test that against the Word?” Because I'm not against the idea that God might give you an inclination, but I'm very much against the idea that God would give somebody an inclination that contradicts the Bible.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This summer, we have renewed our commitment to prayer, and our hope is that you'll join us. There have been times in history when God has led his people to fall on their knees in prayer and to seek his path and power in a concerted way. We're always called to pray at all times, but there are seasons when the circumstances are such that more intense prayer, more times of fasting and prayer are needed. And at the C.S. Lewis Institute, we've prepared a number of resources. We have a collection of articles, videos, recommended books, all gathered in one place, and you can find them cslewisinstitute.org/season-of-prayer. Did you catch that?  Www.cslewisinstitute.org/season-of-prayer.

Yeah, this is a tricky topic, but such a very, very important one, and we don't want to think deeply about this issue, but we must. We absolutely must, because it's too crucial. Well, let me point us in one other direction before we draw this to a close. I noticed that you are, as I look on The Washington Institute website about your bio, it says you're a field associate with SIMA, S-I-M-A, System for Identifying Motivating Abilities, and you're also an implementer of the Highlands Ability Battery Test—I'm sorry, an affiliate with that. I personally have benefited tremendously from the Highlands battery tests. So tell us a little bit about those kinds of tests and how they can play a part in this discerning process.

Yeah. So maybe I'll tell you a slight narrative version of it. So when I was working as the director of one of these fellows programs that you mentioned for young adults right after they finished college, many of my fellows would come back to me, and they would say something like this: They'd say, “When I got here, I thought it was more holy to be a minister or a missionary than anything else. And now I've been here with you for a while, and you've taught me how God cares about all vocations, that all vocations can honor the Lord. You just made my decision worse, Mr. Pastor Boy. Now I could be anything! Help!”

And honestly, Randy, the first couple of years that happened, these guys would come back to me and say, “So now how do I figure out what to do? You made it worse.” And I didn't have a very good answer for my guys. So these men and women would come back to me, and they'd say this, and I bumbled out some junk about Christian decision making that was probably not terrible but wasn't also that deep. But it just really bugged me that I didn't have a good way to help my people answer that question. And so what I did is I started studying the biblical material as deeply as I could, and it was particularly about questions of sort of vocational choice. What job, career-type thing should I do? And, like I said, it's one of those areas the Bible gives us everything we need for faith and Godliness but just not everything we want. It doesn't tell me should I be an engineer or an accountant? It says, “Here’s how to be a godly either one. Have fun.”

And so I went looking for things from what we would call general revelation, just good, well-researched tools that could help my folks figure this stuff out. And if you study this world, goodness, there are probably 1000 tools out there, and they run the gamut from complete snake oil to some really well researched tools. And I sort of tortured my assistant that year because I told her, I said, “We’re not going to give our people anything that's not really well researched.” So we boiled the ocean, and over time, I certified in several of these different methodologies that just help people answer these questions. So, having been through Highlands, you will remember that a lot of what it does is help people answer a question: Well, what am I good at? What are the types of things I'm good at?

The one called SIMA. Great tool. Not so great of an acronym, but great tool. It really helps to answer the question more like: What do I love to do? Because, when you're working with somebody, if you can find the overlap of the two, you've got something really powerful. I mean there are things that I'm good at that I don't like to do. I would be a great tax attorney by just sort of skills and gifts alone, and I don't mean to dishonor being a tax attorney, but it's not me. By desire alone, I would be the best professional baseball player you have ever seen. The problem is God didn't give me the body to be that. Well, I may not have told you this, but in my very, very, very brief not even Little League, but church league, career, the key statistic for me was errors per inning. I was that bad.

Oh, impressive! EPI, errors per inning. Yeah.

It was atrocious, and so of course they banished me to left, because that's where you put the kid who can't field, because at that young age, nobody can turn on it. Well, then my church league career was long periods of boredom with brief moments of terror. It was just a debacle for me to play baseball. There are some things you want to do that you're not good at, but boy, if you can start to identify the things that you are both made by God to be good at and want to do, well usually you can find the opportunity to do those things. And so these are tools that I use. They're not perfect tools, but they're very good tools. Just helping people think about these questions of, “Well, what career would God have me take? Particularly if God loves all careers, and they can all be done to His kingdom and His glory. Well, then which one is for me?”

So I got into this work doing that kind of stuff, and I still do it on the side, with permission I might add, not violating my employment agreement, because it's just very helpful stuff to, not the only big decision people make, but one very big decision people make in their lives.

Yes. Well, I'm really glad that you're involved with that, and I do want to recommend those tools to people who are listening. I really benefited. If I can take a minute to share: I was at this point of trying to figure out what was next for me in ministry, and someone recommended the Highlands test, and the Highlands tests, plural. It’s a whole bunch of different tests, and it's kind of where different aspects of things overlap that are the most insightful. So you take a whole bunch of these tests and then you meet with someone who interprets them.

And I was meeting with this woman who was trained at interpreting these things, and she's telling me all sorts of things that I sort of knew already about myself. “Oh, yes, I like that.” “Yes, I'm good at that.” “Yeah, those are good.” But at one point she said, “And so you really like to build things, don't you?” And I went, “No, not at all.” She goes, “Hm. Okay, well, wait, I'll see. Well, you probably like to fix things, right?” I said, “No, that's even worse. I don't like that at all.” And I started thinking, “I just spent a lot of money for nothing.” And she said, “Well, it's interesting because it looks like you really like to have a tangible result of your work.” I said, “Oh, yes!” I said, “I think that's one of my biggest frustrations about ministry is that you get to the end of a year or whatever, and what do you have to show for it?” And she said, “Well, have you ever tried to build something or put something together that was tangible for the past year's work?” And I said, “Well, I put together these Bible studies of things that we had studied,” and she goes, “Ooh. Now, I noticed this other test. You're really good with words and you like words.” “Yes, very much so.” And you like a tangible result, and she looked at me and she said, “Have you ever thought of writing a book?” And I just started laughing. I said, “Oh, are you kidding? I have dreamed about that. That would be great.” She said, “What would you like about writing a book?” I said, “Because when I'm done, I can hold it in my hands. It's something tangible.” And she said, “You really ought to pursue this.” So-

Well, it worked pretty well for you!

It did. And I do like holding the thing in my hand. “Look at this. You could turn the pages.”  Anyway, so that's just my story on the Highlands. A little commercial.

We need to wrap this up. Any last thoughts you have about discerning God's will? Anything you want to restate or that we haven't gotten to just for the final hurrah, so to speak?

Yeah, I guess the final hurrah here: I would actually go in a slightly tangential direction and just add a pastoral comment. I think every time I've gone through one of these big pivots and had to really figure it out, I wish I trusted the Lord a lot more than I do. And you find yourself waking up at night thinking about it, trying to find the angles and everything else. I think the point, and particularly if any of the people listening on the podcast are at one of those pivot points: Do remember that it's going to be okay and that God's good.

Now, honestly, sometimes okay comes after a bit of a period where you go, “That doesn't feel very okay.” And there are even times in life where okay comes when we meet the Lord in the new heavens and the earth. So I don't want to be at all trite when I say it's going to be okay. But we've got to remember that fundamental to our faith is that we have a God who so much cares for us that He would die for us. And if that's the case, then I don't think He did that so He can then just throw us away in all the other decisions of life. And so remember God is still there, and as much as it feels like we're living this thing by our own wits, we're not. And that gives a comfort and a freedom to then not get stuck in the decision, either. But to say, “Okay, I'm going to make the best call I can make, and once I've made it, I'm not going to do the woulda, coulda, shoulda thing. I'm just going to say, ‘Well, before the Lord, I did the best I could with this.’ Let's see where it goes.”

Well done. Well said. And why don't I just put an exclamation point from scripture on that? “What then shall we say in response? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave Him up for us all, how will he not also, along with Him graciously give us all things.”

Amen.

So, Bill Fullilove, it’s been great to have you. Thanks so much for your time. To our listeners, we hope that this podcast and all the resources at the C.S. Lewis Institute are helpful for you as you grow and as you walk with the Lord and discern His will. And may it be that God would use this so that you would love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind.

Brought to you by the C.S. Lewis Institute and the Questions That Matter Podcast with Randy Newman