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Location: Hattiesburg, Mississippi, United States

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Ultimate Will of God sermon 4 07/27/08

Ultimate Will of God sermon 4

7/27/2008

               This morning’s sermon topic will be on the ultimate will of God.  That will, which the name suggests shows us that God’s holy will, will in the end succeed.  It is important to remember that God does not have three separate wills, but only one.  I am only breaking it down into three wills so that we can better understand God’s will in our lives today.

Before I get started I want to do a quick review of what we have learned so far about the will of God.  First we learned that God’s intentional will is that his human creation would walk in perfect fellowship with him, trusting in him to provide all that we need and that they would do good toward others and his creation.

Then we learned that since Adam and Eve sinned God’s will is best seen in a different way, for his intentional will has been temporarily stopped by sin.  His human creation no longer wants to walk in fellowship and do good.  It has become self-centered and will do good, only if it serves its own purpose.  It no longer fully trusts in God to care for it and now wants to run away from God.

This has, in an earthly sense created a problem for God, for his intentional will has not changed.  He still wants his human creation to walk in fellowship with him and do good, but since it is not doing that, he has to do something drastic, for he has to work in the circumstances of which we live, fallen and broken.  That is why I am now calling what I called the intentional will of God the circumstantial will of God.

Under those circumstances God entered into our sinful, fallen, and broken world to start the process of achieving his intentional will, that is our walking in perfect trusting relationship with him while doing good.  He used the evil of the world to, as we see in the death of Jesus, to start the process of restoration.  I do not mean by that that Jesus did not complete the act of freeing us from condemnation when he died.  He did that, but as we are all well aware of the whole restoration is not complete, for there is still in existence sickness, evil, and death.

 We learned last week that although God can and does use evil, that is anything that is not good, to accomplish his purposes he does not create evil.  God is good and thus cannot create evil, even if good comes from it.  We can only say that he allows evil to exist because nothing can exist without his will.  But that is another whole subject.  We live in a sinful world.  We are sinful, and because of that we get sick, we have accidents, we have crimes committed against us, and we die. 

As I was preparing for this sermon series on the will of God, it became apparent to me that we should quit questioning God God’s will, that is what we do when we do not trust in him, and start praising God for working through the evil in the world to accomplish good, for it shows that, even though it might look like it at the time, evil does not win.  It cannot, for God’s intentional will is that his human creation is to walk in fellowship with him and do good.  That brings me to the subject for today, the ultimate will of God. 

The ultimate will of God is simply that his intentional will under the circumstances of the fallen world will ultimately take place in the end.  His human creation, in fact all of his creation, will be restored into perfect relationship with him.  And being in perfect relationship his human creation will do good.  How do I know that you might ask?  It is all in the book of Revelation given to us by God.  We don’t have enough time to go through the hundreds of verses in Revelation, but they are there and as it says, God wins. 

Some of you might be thinking.  I understand that, but what about the tragedy in my life?  What about my disease?  What about my loss of a loved one?  How does God’s intentional will ultimately get done in my life?  Those are all good questions that need to be answered.  Weatherhead in his book, The Will of God wrote of a young woman whose husband had been killed in the war leaving her two small children without a father,  She asked him how God’s intentional will of her and the children having a good life would be ultimately accomplished since it was apparent that that was not going to happen now that her husband was dead.  

He told her, “In this life no one can answer save in faith, for no one can see the end from the beginning.”  He continued with, “On Good Friday night eleven men, in the deepest gloom felt like you.  They said in their hearts, ‘We trusted him, we followed him.  It was his will to establish his kingdom.  He told us so.  And evil has been allowed to take him from us.  It is the end of everything.’  But they were wrong weren’t they?  It was only the end of their false understanding and the beginning of the most wonderful use of evil which God had ever effected.  One day like them, you will find out how wrong you are.”  God’s intentional will, will ultimately be done.  There is nothing that can stop it.

Let me finish up today with this little illustration.  It might help in better understanding the will of God as I have broken them down; God’s intentional will, his circumstantial will, and his ultimate will. When my brothers and I were young we used to go down to the creek behind the high school.  We had a great time playing in the creek.  Every summer we would try to dam up the creek, so that we could have a swimming area.  We would pile up rocks.  We fill in the holes with mud, leaves, and sticks.  We would build it as high as we could.  We would do all we could to change the circumstances of the creek, to stop it from doing what it intended to do, that is to flow downhill.

But no matter how high, or how well built we built our dam each summer we only slowed it down.  Eventually the intentional will of that creek, that is to flow downstream, even though we changed the circumstances in which it ran, by building a dam, would ultimately be accomplished.  For it would eventually run over, or run around, or if the pressure were enough it would break down the dam and continue, ultimately to its final destination, the Gulf of Mexico.    That to me is about as good an earthly example that I can think of to help us understand the will of God.  His intentional will, under the circumstances of the fallen world, will ultimately be done.

Next week, now that we know more about the will of God we will look at how we can better discern the will of God in our lives and what that means for us.  Amen.