Open your Bible. It tells each one of us His will for us, which is to repent and believe the gospel, to obey all that He commands, to seek His kingdom, to disciple the nations. The Bible contains the law of God and that is what we call His “revealed will.” Most of us, however, when we wonder about God’s will for our lives are asking a different kind of question. We aren’t asking what is right or wrong, but what He is, well, wait a minute. He is what? Hoping I’ll do? Expecting me to do? What He has ordained for me to do?
When we understand that He has ordered our days (Psalm 37:4) we understand that the other way we speak of His will is His decretive or hidden will, that will by which He ordains whatsoever comes to pass. God may not tell you whom you are to marry, which job you are to accept, what car you should buy. (Though He might. My father once had to make a decision between accepting a job in Philadelphia or accepting a job in Boston. In the middle of the night, the decision being due the next morning, he received a long distance phone call from an old friend, not a believer. That friend said, “RC, I can’t explain this but I woke up with a compelling need to call you and tell you ‘Boston.’”)
You can, however, know God’s hidden or decretive will without a special message. You can read about it in your diary, or in your memory. That is, if you buy this house and not that one, such was God’s will. If you marry that spouse, such was God’s will. That doesn’t mean God’s will isn’t that you sell that house and buy a different one. What He willed in the past doesn’t mean we can determine His will in the future. It might be a sin to buy a particular house, an act of poor stewardship. It might be a sin to marry a particular spouse. Even those choices, while our responsibility, if we make them, were determined before all time. (If this troubles you, I’d encourage a dive into the deep waters of Romans 9.)
What is not possible is that you can make a decision that gets you off the course of God’s decretive will for your life. God never looks down from heaven, sees what you have done and responds, “Oh no, what do I do now?” Even our sins can do no such thing. Which should remind us that when we are faced with decisions, our job isn’t to try to discern God’s hidden will for our future, but to discern His revealed will for our right now. We don’t need to guess the future. We need to obey the One who wrote it. Such begins with trust. God’s will for your life is that you trust Him. He is altogether trustworthy.