Seminar 2 of this series is missing due to technical issues during recording process.

GYC Conference 2024: Wherever He Goes

<p>Seminar 2 of this series is missing due to technical issues during recording process.</p>

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Love and Life in God's Will

Micheal Goetz

01 Guessed by Faith

Father in heaven, as we journey together, as we study, as we contemplate what you're saying to us, may our hearts hear your word and fall under conviction.

And may we be changed because we spent time with you in the name of Jesus, amen.

All right, this is a five-part series on knowing God's will in life and in love.

You throw love in a title of anything and everybody thinks this is a relationship seminar.

Which I have no doubt that that knowing God's will impacts our relationships, but not We're not doing premarital or marital counseling.

This question of faith has to do with God's will.

You ask that question and you start to be like, okay, wow, wow, wow, wow, we have really, really baptized that term so much so that you will hear, you'll share a concern with somebody in church, or maybe somebody shares a concern with you in church, and they'll say to you, just have faith.

And then you walk away, and you're like, bleh, I have no idea what that just meant.

And we walk away, and in the privacy of your own journey, tell me that you don't experience this.

I have faith right now, I have faith, I have faith, because I, whoops, I just lost it.

Like, faith is some sort of emotional reaction.

It's something you get because you felt right at the right moment, and then you have faith.

And you know that you just need faith as a mustard seed and if you could just have a mustard seed and so you then you're then there's this beat-up like self self beat-up like I God why can't I even have a mustard seed of faith?

And it just spirals from there to where we just kind of give up and go back to the throwing around the term.

So there's this tension, how does faith unpack and roll out in all of this?

Now, if we, So leave that hanging, that tension of what is faith.

Most of us, I think I'm on pretty good credit to say this.

Goetz and associates did the research that most of us, most of us, some of you enjoyed that, most of us believe that if God would just tell us his will, we would be willing to do it.

Maybe we're not so willing to do God's will and that's the bigger problem.

What is God's will and how do we know what is good and what is bad, and how are we good judges of that?

I take you to the simple line of reminding you that some of you, within the last 10 years, some of you are young enough, some of you maybe it's the last 20 years, but at 1 point in your life, you cried because your mother or your father wouldn't let you eat mud.

You're not really, and I'm not really, a great judge of what's good.

It's played out in the proverb of the farmer.

The farmer whose horse ran away and all the neighbors came together and said, oh, we're so sorry, that's such bad news.

And then the horse came back, but the horse came back and brought another horse with him.

And so all the neighbors collected together and said, oh, this is great news.

And he says, I don't know if it's good news.

Well, the second horse, his son was breaking, riding, training, and the horse threw him and his son broke his leg and wasn't able to help his dad anymore.

So all the neighbors came back together and said, this is bad news.

And the farmer shrugged again and said, I don't know.

Well then the king sent his military through the land to gather all able-bodied young men to go off to war and when they came to the farmer and his son with a broken leg they passed by and said he's not able-bodied.

So all the neighbors came back together and said, oh, this is good news you see see the tension there of our perspective like we're the ones that cried over not eating mud and and How do we really know if it feels good then it's good news If it feels bad, it's bad news.

Are we really going to settle on that as the determining factor when what you feel right now, you probably won't even feel for the rest of today?

Now, even godly parents that have prayed for wisdom and gotten it straight from heaven about how to raise their children, their children can still make the decisions and walk away.

Don't you dare call out somebody else because they're kids.

Now Samson went down to Tinma and saw a woman in Tinma of the daughters of the Philistines.

Now you have to understand when Bible writers wrote this, they didn't write with keyboards, like, oh yeah, let's just type this out.

They actually had to write with the quill and ink, right?

Why, if you were using quill and pen, would you repeat, now Samson went down to Tinma and saw a woman in Tinma.

You just say Tinma once, or the Philistines once.

But the point is, wait a minute, where did Samson end up when he saw the woman?

Now, you can extrapolate this and apply this to to things beyond romance.

Well, he's just talking to the singles, unmarrieds, I'm free of this.

You can extrapolate this to every other...

What is the context that you place yourself in?

Now, let's go to patriarchs and prophets.

Just as he was entering upon manhood, the time when he must execute his divine mission.

Remember, God delivered this boy to his parents.

The time above all others when he should have been true to God, Samson connected himself with the enemies of Israel.

Some of us, some of us are making absolutely no sense when we are spending our time with the enemy of God and asking, pleading with God for his will to be made known.

Now I know, I know that, we're gonna get to this about entertainment here in just a few, not in this session, but tomorrow.

I know that Ellen White takes some heat because of a line that she wrote about angels standing at the doors of theaters unwilling to go in.

But her point was the same as she makes here.

The context that you place yourself in will and can determine how you hear God's voice.

Samson connected himself with the enemies of Israel.

He did not ask whether he could better glorify God when united with the object of his choice or whether he was placing himself in a position where he could not fulfill the purpose to be accomplished by his life.

Now I'm going to take a Just a quick detour.

You and I were all born with a mission to accomplish for God's kingdom, every 1 of us, every 1 of us.

The example of why Samson is placed in Scripture is to tell you that an angel came and said, you weren't delivered by a stork, you were delivered by an angel for this time.

And when Samson was supposed to place himself in a position where he could not fulfill the pur...

He was placing himself in a position where he could not fulfill the purpose to be accomplished by his life.

03 God’s Will and the “One” for Me

The goal is presentation, summary, practice, and this whole summary of practice, the whole thing is meant to be practical.

But the idea of practice is that some of us have less than goldfish attention spans.

And so we're going to just like drift off.

So if you do that, just know that when we talk, okay, here's the practice, that's like the summary stuff like, all right, boom, boom, boom.

Here's what you can, what can we do about this?

Then participation, GYC is just genius thought into, hey, we don't want just seminars, we want conversations.

And so an invitation to participate, it doesn't have to be a question, it could be a comment.

Of course, like a 15-minute testimony at some point may need to be in a different venue.

But all right, we're gonna pray and then just race through this and we're gonna get as far and as fast as we can.

Father, thank you for giving us this new day.

What a privilege that we have just maybe, maybe just become callous to that life.

And today we want to live and grow in the center of your will.

And so bless us, we pray, as we journey together in the name of Jesus, amen.

First 1 is a bit about romance, but don't get hung up on that because it's gonna be a journey that you can extrapolate the same principles.

We're just gonna use a bit of romance as an example, and sometimes it's even gonna be a, we're gonna tread on thin ice, and you'll see some of those moments.

And then we're going to talk about what about my desires and God's desires.

And then thirdly and finally, what about signs and signals and how to know His will there?

A lot of water has gone under the bridge since yesterday.

I was so moved as those buses came through and we loaded up and went out.

Hey God, your will, because you're perfect, means that you would operate in straight lines.

That's because we've been, that's how we're programmed to think, all right, straight, clean, neat lines, not a weed or a mess anywhere to be seen.

That's how God is gonna, and if I'm going to live in the center of God's will, this is how my life will look, right?

I will just cleanly, neatly go through life and it will just be like sailing on smooth seas because I'm in the center of God's will.

And then we realize that, wait a minute, this is what everyone?

Maybe God loves to put a little splash or a little throw.

I don't...don't get hung up on the English-French God thing.

The point is, this as they define it, this is an English garden.

But we think God would have my life like this.

But what if God says, no, I'm going to take you on a detour just for the beauty that it will create.

Hebrews chapter 11 verse 1, faith is the substance.

That is something we can hang on to that we know that we know that we know of things hoped for.

This just blows our minds, but faith is this out of body, out of reality experience that is very much reality.

Alright, and then we have Abraham's example.

By faith, when he called out to go out to a place, he would later receive as his inheritance.

He obeyed and went even though he did not know where he was going.

Just because you have faith doesn't mean you see, you have it.

Faith just means that you know that God is taking you there.

And so whatever the detours, you can trust.

All right, George Mueller's 4 points, great summary points, right?

90% of knowing God's will is choosing to have no will of our own, and that's why it takes a long time.

I remind you, that's why it takes a long time.

Because to quiet our own minds, to quiet our own ambitions, and to live in a place that we're open, God, I'll go either direction.

And then, and then number 2 is very operative.

It will always be in accordance with what the Bible teaches.

You will never be asked by God to do something outside of the bounds of Scripture.

Thirdly, look for God's providential circumstances.

If you're looking for, wow, it was just a bing, bap, whoosh, like he created Adam right before my eyes and then I knew it was him that I should, no.

Providential, in fact, providential, you can tell me the story of God's providential circumstances and it won't sound unusual to me.

Providential is your journey with Jesus, private prayer closet kind of journey where you see God working through what otherwise could be argued normal ebb and flow of life.

So if you're sharing your story and you're saying, this is how I, because of my private prayer closet.

Now without the private prayer closet, providential turns into something else.

But with the private prayer closet, providential is how God opens before you and you tell the story to me and it would sound like, okay, I would have had to be there.

And then he argues through the check with your inner circle.

I do something, I've committed to those in my inner circle something that I would ask of them at the same time.

When I'm up against a tough decision, or they're up against a tough decision, I tell them, I'm with you in it.

You want 3 days, 7 days, what do you want?

We'll pray together, I'll fast with you for those 3 days.

Next Wednesday, you're gonna make the decision next Wednesday, I'm in your inner circle.

I'll pray and fast with you for the whole next 3 days, 7 days, whatever it is, and then you make the decision.

And we're gonna come back to that a little bit later today.

Ellen White's summary, it's paragraph style, but she says, there are 3 ways in which the Lord reveals His will to us to guide us and to fit us to guide others.

How may we know His voice from that of a stranger?

How shall we distinguish it from the voice of a false shepherd?" Number 1, God reveals His will to us in His Word.

This is the kind of thing that we're going to talk about so much that maybe you'll have dreams about it.

But outside of sacred scripture, an immersion into sacred scripture, just reading, reading, reading, reading, reading.

04 God Likes What I Like

And so here's the whole bathroom break situation that those of you that were like, okay, if you just wait a couple minutes, they say that there'll be, because you now have a seat.

So if in the next couple of minutes you need to slide out, you'll have a seat.

You just need to use those middle doors, not these front doors.

And then give him the secret handshake and they'll let you back in.

If you don't know, what are you doing here?

Father in heaven, as we jump into yet another more exciting, if it's possible, a more exciting study may it be that you open our eyes as only you can do.

Change us from the inside out so that we leave changed, molded and made into the will of who you are.

All right, this is presentation for entitled God Likes What I Like.

God's will is also strangely similar to your will and my will, right?

Let me use an example that may get me on to, Just be patient with my example here.

In the areas of adornment, jewelry, I have heard, as I have studied it and wrestled with individuals, here's the different progressions, all right?

Somebody says, no, God is against all jewelry, all right?

Fair enough, studied the Bible, that's the conclusion they came to.

Somebody argues, no God, as long as it's tasteful.

And that's where it gets into like this, what?

As long as it's tasteful, it's not extravagant, it's not expensive, it's just tasteful.

Now, wherever you're at, whether you've studied the issue or not, wherever you're at on this, just kind of examine, this is where you feel like God probably sides on this issue.

If you're into that, well, God is into tasteful.

And how does your tasteful define what the next person's tasteful is?

So I serve as a police chaplain, and I do it because as a pastor, I am honored and privileged to represent and to work with the church.

However, sometimes the church feels like a very clean, everybody's organized and has their life together.

You may not feel that way about the church, and I don't always feel that way about the church, but when you go into the guts of a community with the police department, you begin to meet and interact with the very bowels of the community.

And those are the people that are sons and daughters of God as well, and they need hope.

And then you work alongside the police officers who see that, and their worldview is colored because of the amount that they see.

In fact, 1 guy said, I have to get off night shift because everybody I, when you stay on night shift so long, everybody you see is suspect.

And so he says, now I just live life like everybody is suspect.

He says to me, hey chap, After our conversation last week, I went to church.

This guy has sleeves, tattoos on his arms.

He says, I went into the church I grew up in, And there was some collection of people, somebody or some buddies, that said, wow, wow, Chris, tattoos, huh?

You know, tattoos are not in line with what the Bible teaches.

However they said it, they didn't sound like they were super attacking, but they said it to him.

And this is the Bible study he brings back to me.

And I'm like, this is just a guy in innocence that says, I wanna do God's will.

And so he studies the Bible, and he comes to me, and he says, you know, there's 1 time I could see where the Bible mentions tattoos, but there's like 10 times that it mentions jewelry and earrings.

And the very persons that were talking to me about my sleeves had things hanging off of their body.

Point is, besides making the Bible the only rule, not society, do not make cultural waymarks what is acceptable as guidelines for your life.

Do not judge your entertainment based on a rating of PG, I guess there is no P, just G, right?

Do not, do not, you base your entertainment choices off of the word of God.

Which may or may not align to G, PG, and so on.

All right, so I'm talking to him, and he's walking me through these verses.

And I come to the conclusion, I come to this conclusion.

So now this is my conclusion, which is also obviously God's conclusion.

I've come to the conclusion that while I am not 1 that would encourage anyone to get a tattoo, if you're just basing it off of the references and the admonition of scripture, that it's 10 times more addressed, the jewelry, of any sort, than it is the tattoo.

So if you're thinking of weight of what you do, for the record.

If it's okay, and then he said, based on the jewelry conversation.

This is a non-churched cop that did his Bible study over the weekend, and he says, based on the Bible study I did, If it's okay, and he's asking it as a question, if it's okay for women to wear jewelry, then it would be okay for men to wear jewelry.

I'm like, Take that into the tasteful jewelry department of the church.

Well, if tasteful jewelry is okay on a woman, then it's okay on a man.

My whole point in using that example, which some of you are like, I disagree.

You can disagree with the example, but still the example is there.

Psalm 37 verse 4, we're not gonna put it on the screen.

It's a text we pulled up yesterday, Psalm 37 verse 4.

Delight yourself in the Lord and he will what?

Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.

Now I do believe, I do believe we can claim that promise for saying God as I as I honor you and I delight myself in you and I surrender myself to you and I and I honor you with my life You will give me the desires that I'm praying for.

There are plenty of promises, a ton of promises, powerful, crazy cool promises, that says that God will do that.

But Sometimes we read it as if it's the desires we already have.

God will give us the fulfillment of the desires.

But Psalm 37 verse 4 says, you delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires.

Delight yourself in God and he will create in you desires for things and directions.

You want to know what God's will is for your life professionally?

Surrender yourself to him, delight yourself in him and he will give you the desire for something.