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Most of us have wrestled with questions like these at one time or another:

• What career should I pursue?
• Whom should I marry?
• Where should I attend college?
• What church should I attend?
• Should we have another child?
• Should I accept a job offer that moves my family far away from our hometown?
• What community responsibilities should I accept?
• And so on ...

You recognize, of course, that questions of this sort are much more significant than simple ones like, "Should I wear my green shirt or my gray one today?" What we decide about which shirt to wear, and other questions of that ilk, generally has no bearing at all on the direction of our life. But what we decide about jobs, marriage partners, and relocating often makes a considerable difference in how our lives go.

Some Christians maintain that for these bigger questions, these life questions, God wants us to make one particular choice or another, and that our job is to try to ascertain what his will for us is in the matter.

That God has a definite will in some things is clear from scripture. In Matthew 12, for example, Jesus is out teaching some crowds when someone tells him that his mother and brothers are at the edge of the crowd, wanting to speak to him. There is no indication that he refuses to see them, but first, he takes the opportunity to say something to the one who brought him the message. He points to the crowd and says, "Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother" (Matthew 12:49-50).

So Jesus plainly tells us that God has a will to which we should conform. But what is less clear is what that means. There is no question that God's will for all of us is that we should live righteously and love our neighbor. But beyond that, does God have a detailed plan for each of us that includes what sort of job we should take, whether we should marry, and if so, who should we marry and how many children we should have? That is less clear from the scripture, though many Christians believe it.

E. Stanley Jones, who for years was a Methodist missionary in India, tells about his early career decision. He had given his life to Christ at seventeen, and at 23, he was asked by a college president to teach at the college. The president said to him, "It is the will of the student body, the will of the townspeople, the will of the faculty, and we believe it is the will of God for you to teach in this college." But at the same time, he had a letter from a friend that said, "I believe it is the will of God for you to go into evangelistic work here in America." He also received a letter from the Methodist Board of Missions saying, "It is our will to send you to India." And at the same time, he had the notion that God's will for him was to go as a missionary to Africa. He describes this as a "traffic jam of wills." In the end, Jones prayed about all of these opportunities, asking God to make clear the Divine will, and eventually Jones became convinced that he should go to India, which he did.1

Our reading from Amos today also tells us something about the nature of God's will. The setting for the reading is from the eighth century before Christ, during the time when the Hebrew people were divided into two kingdoms. The southern kingdom, Judah, had its worship at Jerusalem. The northern kingdom, Israel, had its center at Bethel. Jerusalem had the temple, and there was a shrine dedicated to God at Bethel.

Unfortunately, there were some unholy things going on in Israel. The rich lent money to the poor, and when they could not pay even a small debt, the lenders sold the debtors into slavery. There were lavish buildings being built while the uncared for poor and sick sat at the gates begging. Dishonest merchants used fixed scales. Court decisions could be bought. Idolatry was widespread, but even those who avoided idol worship and prayed to God instead were sometimes guilty of observing only the outward forms of religion while failing to love their neighbor. They had convinced themselves that the injustice, dishonesty, perjury, fraud, and inhumanity did not matter as long as the pious customs were maintained. Worst of all, the prosperous considered their very prosperity as a sign of God's approval of how they were living. These people clearly were not doing the will of God.

At that point, God needed someone to point out their sins and call them to repentance. There were plenty of priests in Bethel, but they had become just as corrupt as the people around them.

In the southern kingdom, however, in the village of Tekoa, there was a herdsman named Amos. He was a devout man, but not trained in religion. Yet when he was called by God, Amos responded. At God's instruction, Amos traveled into the northern kingdom, to Bethel. When he got there, he began to preach in the streets. First, he mentioned the sins of some of Israel's neighboring nations, passing judgment on them. This likely pleased the crowds, but then Amos started talking about the sins of Israel herself. He warned that unless the people repented, they would suffer God's wrath just as their unholy neighbors would. He talked about holding a plumb line in the midst of Israel, and the people being far "out of plumb" spiritually.

Naturally, these words did not please his audience. As the crowd became angry, Amaziah, the chief priest of Bethel, stepped forward to confront Amos. Amaziah reminded Amos that he was a foreigner. If you want to prophesy, Amos, go home to Judah and tell them about their sins, but leave Israel alone, Amaziah said.

Amos responded by saying, "I am no prophet, nor a prophet's son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees, and the Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said to me, 'Go, prophesy to my people Israel.'"

To put this in a contemporary setting, Amos was saying, "Look, I'm not preaching here because I've got a yen to be a minister. I'm a layperson, a farmer, but God has called me to speak to this situation, and I've got to obey him."

In effect, Amos was saying that his life had taken one of those unexpected turns. In his wildest dreams he never imagined that he would ever do anything other than herd sheep and tend sycamore trees. Yet here he was, preaching for God in another country. I suspect Amos would understand the banner I once saw in a church that was shaped like large footprint, across which were the words, "The sign of God is that we are led where we did not intend to go."

It struck me at the time that often when we end up doing something we didn't expect or prepare for, we may think it is a result of poor planning, but sometimes the unexpected changes of direction in our lives are evidence of the activity of God. Amos never planned to preach, but apparently he had the abilities and courage God needed to deliver the message.

Of course, not every impulse we feel to go in a direction not previously planned is a call of God's will, and we need to test those calls. Amos does not tell us how he determined that God was calling him. He only says, "God took me from following the flock, and ... said to me, 'Go prophesy....'" But here are some things Christians through the years have found helpful:

1. Do the obvious. Some principles Jesus made clear for us. For example, if one direction is obviously in line with the idea of loving our neighbor and another is not, then the one that shows love is the one most likely to be God's will.

2. Do what is clearly at hand. God may be calling you to work for him on the other side of the planet, but if the needs you keep seeing are the ones in your own community, those are ones to which God is most likely directing you. There is a story about Abraham Lincoln, before he became president, seeing a slave auctioned off. He was so disturbed by what he saw that he said, "If I ever get a chance to hit that, I'm going to hit it with all I have." And of course, that opportunity came, clearly at hand, and Lincoln acted.

3. Consider your abilities and talents. Some things we can rule out because we are not capable of doing them. I, for example, have very little talent in art -- so little that it seems unlikely God would call me into any kind of service where I'd need to do much with it.

4. Test your call by the Christian community. Among the silent-meeting Quakers, there is a practice called the "clearness committee." This is a group of five or six members whose sole function is to meet with a person who is trying to make a difficult decision and ask the person questions. They do not give advice, but ask the sort of penetrating questions that help the person discover for him or herself what the course of action ought to be. While we don't have such a formal structure, there is always wisdom in checking out a call with a few fellow Christians -- asking them to listen objectively and probe your motivations.

5. Use your best God-given judgment and pray for clarity as you proceed. A man once said, "I prayed for advice but got no clear answer, so I just used my common sense." Of course, God can use common sense as a way to communicate with us. So ask yourself what seems most likely to be the direction you should go? One way to test that is to pray, "Lord, I think you want me to do thus and so. I am going to begin in that direction. If this is not what you want, please let me know in some way." Oswald Chambers, a devotional writer from an earlier era, wrote, "If we are saved and sanctified God guides us by our ordinary choices, and if we are going to choose what he does not want, he will check, and we must heed."2

6. Allow for the direct workings of God.

One such case is the story of Dr. Steven Kopits. Although of normal size himself, he became the one of the few surgeons in the world who specialize in medical care for people who are born dwarfs, or as they prefer to call themselves, little people. Although that term is also sometimes applied to midgets, there is a difference in the two. Midgets are simply small people, but their limbs and torso are proportional to their size. Aside from being small, they look normal. Dwarfs, on the other hand, suffer from a genetic condition that causes them to be born with severe deformities, including club feet, bowed legs, splayed hips, and limp spines. Their limbs and torsos are disproportionate. But the biggest problem of dwarfism is dysplasia, an abnormal alignment of bones and muscles that causes pain, crippling, functional disability, and even death if left untreated. As an orthopedic surgeon, Kopits works to correct these problems so that these little people have a chance to lead reasonably normal lives.

One thing that sets Dr. Kopits apart from some of his colleagues is how involved he gets with his patients. "I love them," Kopits admits. "The preached doctrine is that you cannot be a good physician if you get emotionally involved with your patients. My doctrine is that you cannot be a good physician unless you do get emotionally involved." He also reports that his major motivation for working with dwarfs is not because they are dwarfs per se, but because "they are a disabled population that was not being helped."

Kopits didn't set out to treat this population. He simply became an orthopedic surgeon because that field interested him. But after a patient with dwarfism came to him, and Kopits was able to help, others began to come as well.

Here's what I want you to hear: Kopits has helped many of these little people, but he refuses to take all the credit. He says, "Always I have felt that I was being taken by the hand. If you can say nothing else about me, you can say that I am a man who is doing exactly what he was meant to do."3

And so, it seems was Amos. And so can we. God's will doesn't normally come to us written on a cloud or spoken as an audible voice. But God's will can be ascertained nonetheless, in the opportunities that present themselves, in the talents he has given us, and in the inner nudges God gives us.

Our job is to listen, test, and intend to follow his direction.

__________

1. E. Stanley Jones, The Divine Yes (New York: Abingdon Press, 1975), pp. 68-69.

2. My Utmost for His Highest (Westwood, New Jersey: Barbour and Company, n.d), p. 155.

3. Kopits' story from Brad Lemley, "Loving Healer of Little People," Reader's Digest, May 1985.