Bobby Bosler: Welcome to the Thee Generation Podcast.

I’m Bobby Bosler and I’m speaking to you today from Greenville, South Carolina.

I wish you a happy new year here.

I know it’s a couple weeks in, but I don’t know about you.

I’m excited about what God is doing and is going to do in 2023.

Already have had a number of chances to minister and preach in a variety of different places.

And my wife and I and our family are gearing up for the next month or so with some unusual aspects of ministry, a little different than we would normally do.

We’re doing a revival meeting for one week, and then we’re helping out a church in evangelism, just in reaching people in the community with the gospel.

And I’m very excited about how the Lord is going to put me in a little bit of a different set of circumstances for the sake of the gospel.

And, you know, that being said, one of the things I know, my wife and I, as we have just been seeking the Lord and seeking his plan and his guidance, one of the things that I know God has taught me over the last few weeks and continues to teach me is the whole matter of how to know the will of God.

You know, there’s a lot of ideas out there about the will of God.

Some people think that the will of God is a choose your own adventure book.

Have you ever seen one of those? you know there’s the story of you know so and so and they’re in a cave and the choose your own adventure book this is way back in the day it would say to you if you a want to turn left at the split or b if you would like to turn right at the split or c if you’d like to go back the way you came from they would tell you to turn to a certain page number and then the story would kind of play out based on the choices that you’ve made.

And, you know, sometimes people think that any choice you make is fine as long as it’s within biblical principles.

And unfortunately, there is, in my mind, a major problem with that.

And that problem, well, it’s a couple of problems, but one of them is it leaves God out of the decision-making process.

You know, if you look in the book of Acts sometime, in Acts chapter 16, Paul had just finished up the Jerusalem Council where they hashed through some theological controversy and came to an understanding together with the leaders in Jerusalem.

He was going on another missionary journey and as he was traveling, He was doing what he had been called to do.

He was trying to go and be a pioneer missionary to Gentile people.

And it says, so were the churches established in the faith and increased in number daily.

Now, when they had gone through Phrygia and the region of Galatia and were forbidden by the Holy Ghost to preach the word in Asia, after they were come to Mysia, they assayed or they attempted to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit suffered them not.

And what you find here is Paul is just trying to do what God had called him to do.

Now, I am not faulting Paul for making these attempts at all.

But here’s the thing.

The person that would say that the will of God is just to fit within biblical principles, I don’t know if they know what to do with these verses.

Because here’s the thing.

Paul was just trying to do what God had told him to do.

As far as the principles that he had received from the Lord, he was within them.

And yet the Holy Spirit said no.

See, here’s the thing.

To just say that the Christian life and knowing the will of God is a choose-your-own-adventure story where essentially all you do is just figure out what is biblical and just make your own choice within the framework of what is biblical is that it leaves God out of the decision-making process.

You don’t have to seek God about principles.

All you’ve got to do is within the parameters that have been given you in the Word of God, choose what makes the most sense to you or what you would prefer to do.

See, sometimes God calls us to do things that don’t make sense to us.

Sometimes God calls us to do things that we don’t prefer, or as is more often the cases I’ve found personally in my own life, God knows a whole lot better than me.

And what may appear to make sense or what may appear to be good for me actually is nowhere near as good for me or that it doesn’t even make as much sense as what God had in mind.

Listen, if you’ve been around little children for any length of time, I am sure there’s been a time where you sit down with a child and say, hey, we’re going to do, and you fill in the blank, whatever it might be.

And sometimes the kid doesn’t understand what you’re asking them to do.

They don’t understand what the point is of this.

And sometimes you have to say, listen, and I can’t explain it, just trust me.

And a part of a relationship with a child, and really child-rearing, is to teach them to trust you and to obey.

And when it comes to understanding and knowing and finding and obeying the will of God, yes, absolutely, when we don’t know what God wants, we need to act on principle.

But God does have a will. when it comes to your future.

A lot of you young people, I’m sure, in the next couple years, you’re going to be grappling with probably one of the biggest decisions of your entire life, and that decision is where are you going to go to college.

And if it’s just about biblical principles, if it’s just about making your choice within the confines of what is biblically appropriate and right, Well, then if that’s all there is, you just need to look at the doctrinal statements of these places.

You need to maybe take a look at the degrees that they offer and figure out what you want to do with your life.

Okay.

And figure out which college is best going to serve within a biblical framework, what you want to do.

Do you see who’s in the driver’s seat there?

You are.

And listen, as far as I understand the will of God and interacting with God, I shouldn’t be the one who makes the final call.

I want God to do that.

Oh, don’t get me wrong.

You want to do your homework and you want to know as much as you can, let’s say, about these different institutions that are out there.

There’s a lot of great places out there, by the way.

But ultimately, you need to say, God, what do you want me to do?

See, the principal approach leaves that step out.

I would argue the principal approach, and I know some people probably aren’t going to like that I say this, don’t want to know what God wants.

In fact, there was a young man who traveled on my team.

He’s probably going to be listening to this podcast at some point, at least.

When he traveled on my team, he had let this whole a principial approach.

All you have to do to know the will of God is to just operate within the confines of biblical principles.

And he came and he traveled on my team.

And to be honest with you, when he first started traveling on my team, he was a little bit of a mess.

He had gotten into his head that there was no specific will of God and that he could do whatever he wanted as long as it was within the confines of biblical truth.

And he liked that because that meant he could control his destiny.

He could control his future and he could get what he wanted out of life and have his conscience clear.

Well, the very first week of us traveling, we were in a little bit of a rough town in Pennsylvania.

He was out recruiting and one thing led to another and he ended up on a porch.

Several rough teens came out, pushed him over the balcony, chased him down the street, and pummeled him in the face with their fists until he dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes.

Jonathan is his name, the young man on my team.

We got him, and we got him back to the church, and he sat on the air mattress that he was sleeping on in the Sunday school room at the church.

It was very high-class accommodations.

And he said he put his head in his hands and he said it was as if God said to him, I’m in control, not you.

And he said that crisis was a crisis ordered by the Lord to bring him face to face with the fact that he better not leave God out of the decision-making process of the will of God.

He surrendered his life to Christ.

He surrendered to the call of God on his life, which he had known so long. and yet he was avoiding because frankly it wasn’t exactly what he preferred at the moment and I saw a transformation in that young man I saw a freedom in that young man because he finally decided to stop leaving God out of the will of God you even think about that phrase the will of God that means God is the one who has a will and wants something to happen and our job young people as those that want to be totally surrendered to God, is not to hold God at an arm’s length and use the Bible to get our own way.

Our job is to bring God into the planning room.

It’s to lay out the papers of your plans before the Lord and say, okay, God, I’ve got some really good options here. and I can see how any one of these could be the right thing.

But God, I know you have chosen one.

And God, I want you to tell me what to do.

Oh, there’s so many examples I can think of for my life.

I remember at one point, just a couple years into evangelism, full-time ministry for me and my family, the previous evangelist who had done the Cola Clash, he’d moved on to other kinds of ministries.

And the Cola Clash was now available.

Now, I had been doing at that point the war for two years.

And my pastor approached me and said, hey, this brother is no longer doing this.

We would like for you to consider taking the label Cola Clash.

And now you’d be doing the war and the Cola Clash.

And I remember thinking, man, I don’t know that I like the idea of having two different labels attached to my name.

It kind of seems to me like it’d be a whole lot simpler if folks ask, what do you do? to say, I do the war, right?

And so I remember one day, I didn’t want to just dismiss it, though I didn’t really like the idea of it.

I remember I got a room at the library, the Menominee Falls Public Library.

There was a little study room where you could close a door and just sit by yourself in peace and quiet.

And I remember I hashed out all the pros and cons.

I actually wrote them down on a piece of paper.

And I had some pretty good pros and I had some pretty good cons.

And I remember, For me, this little physical act that I did was very important.

I took the piece of paper and I sat it on the floor next to me.

And I looked up and I said, okay, God, now that we got that out of the way, what do you want?

Do you want me to take Cola Clash?

And I remember as clear as day in my heart, I knew God said yes.

I, not too long ago, as another example of this, I needed a second team member.

There was a young man who some of you perhaps will meet if you come across our paths this semester as we travel with the war.

He had approached me in the fall, and he essentially said he believed the Lord wanted him to travel on my team and to be with me in the spring semester.

And long story short, it seemed like it was not going to happen.

And I took it from the Lord.

Again, I’m not going to go into all the specifics, but I took it from the Lord.

And I began to approach several other folks about the second slot for my team.

I had one guy lined up.

I needed a second guy.

For some of you in my last podcast heard me make an appeal that I needed team members for my team.

And I remember calling up several very qualified young men who, frankly, had time and even in almost every case, had a desire to travel on my team.

And there were probably three times when I contacted somebody and I said, hey, I’d like you to pray about traveling on my team.

And at first they were like, oh man, I’ve been actually wanting to do something like this.

And oh man, I got the time to do this.

And I give them a few days to pray about it.

And we talk again and they say, you know what, Mr.

Bosler, I can’t explain it, but I don’t have peace about this.

And I don’t think that meant that they were just saying, I’m afraid I don’t want to do this.

Or I got other things I’d rather do, or I don’t really want to do the hard work that’s involved.

I sensed that these young men were genuinely hearing from the Lord, and the Lord was saying, uh-uh.

This happened several times, and I began to think, what in the world?

Is there something wrong with me?

Like, if I suddenly got in a reputation, a bad reputation that I don’t know about or something, that people are avoiding me like the plague?

What is this?

Well, I texted my pastor about a young man.

Frankly, I wasn’t even convinced of myself, but I was just making attempts and just trying to find what the Lord was doing.

And he texted me back, nothing about the young man I texted about.

And he said, hey, remember that guy that we didn’t feel peace about proceeding with?

He said, I think, I actually think you need to take him.

And, you know, God did so much through that.

I can’t even go into all of it except to say the young man knew that it was the will of God. and he had given it up and surrendered it to the Lord, but he couldn’t get away from the fact that he was supposed to travel with me.

And then the Lord just clicked, brought things into line all across the board, and now that young man is going to be traveling with me this semester, and he triply knows that it’s the will of God.

You know, young person, there’s so many things that could be said here, and I haven’t given a whole lot of Bible verses, but there is one verse that I think has been very helpful.

Proverbs 16, verse 9 says, A man’s heart diviseth his way, but the Lord directeth his steps.

You know, and I think this is a good balance.

It’s not, listen, some folks, they don’t, some folks, when they approach the matter of the will of God, they do no research.

They do no thinking.

They do not even seek to use any thought processes whatsoever, and there are no options in front of them.

They’ve done no thinking about it, no pros, no cons, no nothing.

And it’s like they sit down and say, where should I go to college?

And they don’t even know what’s out there, and they expect the Lord to lead them.

I don’t think that’s the proper way to do it. a man’s heart devises his way.

You need to think about it, young person.

You need to do your research.

You need to be aware of what’s going on out there.

You need to know what the options are.

Yes, you need to bring biblical principles into play.

Obviously, if it goes against scriptural principles, you ought not do it.

That is a no-duh theological matter, okay? but within the realm of what could be biblically right.

The Lord is the one who needs to direct your steps, and therefore you need to go to the Lord.

Another verse, Psalm 37, 23 says, the steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord.

And you could take that a couple of different ways.

You could say, well, you know, as long as you’re a good man, God will make it all work out.

I’m not sure that’s exactly the point.

I think the point is this.

A good man is a man who seeks for the Lord to order his steps.

And listen, if you will delight in God’s way, if you will seek him and make as your prime desire to do anything and everything that he communicates to you, he will order your steps.

He will guide you into his will.

Young person, I want you to know, while there may be many great colleges out there, there’s one for you.

While there may be plenty of eligible young ladies, young men, out there for you, there’s only one that God wants you to marry.

There may be plenty of young men who are godly and handsome and all of those things, but listen, young lady, there is one, one that God created for you.

And that’s why, yes, use biblical principles.

Don’t be unequally yoked together with an unbeliever, but don’t leave God out of the decision-making process.

It doesn’t mean you’re passive and you just sit back and don’t do anything, okay, when it comes to seeking the will of God.

But sometimes you will find you pursue something and it becomes clear, you know what, God’s not in this, so stop. there’s so many stories going coming through my mind right now I had some things in mind I thought God wanted me to do and there came a point in time when God made it clear nope not that I want you to do this and you know what I said yes Lord I don’t care how many people thought I was going to be doing the other thing, ultimately you’re the boss.

I’m the servant.

I’ll do what you want.

So young people, again, there are folks who want to talk about decision-making and the will of God and different things like that, and they have all kinds of humanistic, self-driven, and frankly, unsurrendered philosophies on how that stuff ought to work.

And I just want you to know, Don’t leave God out of it.

Your personal interaction with him, your seeking of his will and his plan.

Listen, finding the will of God, frankly, I don’t even think it’s about the will of God.

It’s about you drawing near to God, and it’s about you listening to God.

In the case of Paul in Acts 16, he ended up in the city of Troas, and while he was there, God appeared to him at the night, and the whole Macedonian call took place.

And I’m not saying you’re going to have a vision at night.

That could be pepperoni pizza.

But what I’m saying is God will make it clear what he wants you to do.

Your responsibility is to seek him and to be totally surrendered to God and dependent on his power to do whatever he calls you to do, which I think will involve reaching the world with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Thanks so much for listening.