Exploring the connection between faith and knowing God’s will.

Michigan Camp Meeting 2025: He Must Increase

<p>Exploring the connection between faith and knowing God’s will.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Life in God's Will: A Young Adult Seminar

Micheal Goetz

01 I Guessed by Faith

You're about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2025 Michigan Conference Camp, held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

We pray that the Lord will bless you as you listen.

Father in heaven, today we open our hearts, consecrate ourselves to you.

We surrender as much as we know how and pray that you And Your will will be done in our lives.

What that looks like and how we journey with that, may it be that we better understand when we leave than when we came.

I was on a mission trip to Panama, the country of Panama.

And my role was… Are you looking for brighter or dimmer?

I was, in fact, I was pastoring here at Pioneer Memorial Church in Bering Springs, and I had a group of young people.

So my role was not to do the preaching, the evangelism, but to go from site to site and visit the evangelists and the young people preaching.

Just 1 of the most phenomenal life-changing events I believe is possible for not just young, in fact, in just a few weeks I'm going to be taking a group of adults to Peru where they will be preaching.

And the only advantage of taking young people is that they take on the challenge.

You got these 40s and 50-year-olds and 60-year-olds and they're like, no, I don't preach.

But everybody can go on these mission trips and preach and be a part of evangelistic.

So we're in Panama, and the sites are all over the city and the surrounding outskirts.

And My driver is a retired pastor that was working for the conference in some sort of ministerial role.

And we would drive around the city and visit these sites, different sites.

He was a local guy, but he was as lost as could be.

I didn't know the city at all, Panama City, but I knew that when we passed the same spot like 3 times, like, and he would use this, he would constantly talk to himself and he would say, Here we go, here we go, yeah we're almost there, here we go.

Like for an hour sometimes driving, here we go, here we go, Almost there.

And I'm like, yeah, this street, we've been on 3 times.

Let me just disabuse us of this, and this is incredibly hard for any of us, and maybe even more so, type A personalities, but this idea that God's will is a straight line, that's what we feel it should be.

If It's God's will, you will have the straight line.

Remember as Esau and Jacob wrestled in the womb?

Like, why is there conflict if this is God's will for these boys?

We think, and this alone is just worth your trip to camp meeting.

We think God's will is a straight line, but what if it's not?

What if it's this dear old ministerial director, here we go, Almost there.

But God, this is the third time I've been in this place.

What if He wants to take us down the same road again and again and again.

And you say, we haven't even left this neighborhood.

To just deconstruct what we have just somehow put together is God's will will be a clear, clear path, will be straight, it will always be upwards.

All right, let me just take you into the world of pastors.

This isn't for everybody, but I've heard it discussed among the churches as well, that God is preparing you for something more, something, and it's this idea that the next thing is gonna be bigger and better and maybe more pay or more exciting or more, what if God says, I love it when I see a conference president take a call to a church district, say, no, this is where God's leading.

As if in the pastoral world, I know we're not all there, but Professionally, we often think, well, 1 thing always leads to the next thing, which is bigger, or more pay, or better.

But what if God shows up and says, no, no, my will for you in your 30s was this big thing, but now I want to take you and put you in this small place.

Part of the journey of knowing God's will, the largest part of it, is deconstructing what we are prescribing to be God's will.

This is a picture of, does anybody know What genre of gardening this falls under?

There's a term that is used to describe this kind of gardening or garden.

It doesn't mean it's in France although it looks like it could be.

There's just clean cut edges and there's a straight path and right angles.

All due respect to the French and the English, they're terms that are used, if you just Google, hey, I want a picture of French garden.

And it feels like things were dumped, and they're growing over, and there's not clean-cut edges, and this path is kind of taking just a wide turn.

We picture, when we picture, if we are in God's will, this is what life would look like.

The only reason life doesn't look like this is because of my own sin or my own fallenness or my own rebellion or life's brokenness.

But if God had His way, this is what it would look like, right?

This is a lot closer, I'll speak for all of us, and maybe it's unfair, but this is a lot closer to what we picture heaven than this, for most of us at least.

This looks like the angels have not been keeping up with their responsibilities.

It feels a little like there was no good planning.

I mean, there are plants growing on top of plants, and no, this can't be.

Some are already far ahead of us, but this, for many of us, is, hey, this is heaven.

But when God shows up and our life looks like this, Then it's like, wait a minute, God, you didn't have stuff together.

You guys all came in like you were friends and then all sat in different places like, yeah, we're not gonna...

So sometimes we're like, God, no, this is how you would, this is how you lead, or rather, this is how you lead, And this is me messing it up.

Let those words echo now as we go to Hebrews.

We're gonna start in Hebrews 11, because Hebrews 11 is the chapter of faith and we're titled this morning's seminar, I Guessed by Faith, the connection between faith and knowing God's will.

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

That sentence alone could just exhaust our entire week.

02 God Doesn’t Like Pretty Girls or Handsome Boys

Lord Jesus, as we go into today, we consecrate and dedicate ourselves to You.

We choose to serve You no matter the cost.

The question we have on a very practical level is how do we follow your will?

Our Father, may you and you alone speak to our hearts and grow us closer to your own heart.

To review, we visited some individuals like Hannah Smith yesterday and George Mueller yesterday and found that 2 common teachings, conclusions that they had drawn, knowing God's will, was 1, immersion in scripture.

You just, you have to be hearing and hearing and hearing God's voice.

And on that, I believe, at a very real level, and a supernatural level as well, that as we acquaint ourselves with just the exposure to scripture, just reading it through.

I have a discipline where I read 4 chapters a day, Genesis to Revelation.

Some people pick a chapter here or there or stay longer in a chapter.

I read through the Bible in a year, 4 chapters a day, Genesis to Revelation.

I skip the book of Psalms because I read a psalm a day.

So it's really 5 chapters a day, but 4 chapters wherever I'm at, and then a psalm a day.

And Other people are like, no, I just want 3 or 4 verses every day.

And that's a win too, because that drives you deeper.

My wife loves to do the Sabbath school lesson every day.

And that's a great use of your morning worship.

But immersing yourself in this, let me see if I can make this comparison.

Have you ever heard an author speak and then you read their book and you recognize that's exactly how they speak.

Like that, in fact, on the drive here, my wife and I were listening to an author.

We had read the book first, and then we were listening to this author present, and I'm like, I literally feel like I'm reading out of the book.

Like, that's exactly, yep, that's exactly the illustration he gave and how he gave it, the words he used.

Not only are we learning and growing in information, but we're learning and growing in the voice recognition.

And then when God speaks or leads in your life, you recognize it.

If you had never been exposed to the book though, to his word, you won't recognize it when he speaks.

So it's, in fact, when I read the author's book, It was great information, but I had nothing to compare it to outside until I heard him speak, and then I said, wait a minute, that's him.

There's several authors that are just like that.

And that's 1 of the journeys, that as you expose yourself to scripture, you learn the tone and the vernacular of God.

And so when he speaks to you, you say, wait a minute, I recognize that voice.

I recognize how he's leading me, because you've been exposed to scripture.

So that was 1 of the 4 areas that George Mueller and Hannah Smith Both agreed on Ellen White said that she listed 3 things 1 was scripture, but the other 1 was yield, surrender.

And that's the biggest, the secondly equal difficult task of surrender.

What if God was leading you into a place of pain?

Immediately when we experience pain or discomfort, we assume that we are outside of the will of God.

Because pain and discomfort would not come with God's will.

We kind of picture it with this, again, this easy, wide, hey, if I'm in God's will, then obstacles will be removed because I'm in his will.

But what if his will does have obstacles?

In fact, when the disciples were with Jesus and they said, looking at the, all the brokenness around them, of course for the Jew, an unwealthy and unhealthy person were out of God's favor.

And that's not terribly far removed from where we have arrived.

If you are healthy and wealthy, you think, well, I must be doing something right.

If you're unhealthy and broke, you think I must not be in God's favor.

Because God's favor, somehow we have been brainwashed into this idea that God's favor means success and painlessness.

So when the disciples are looking at some of this brokenness they point out a man and they say to this blind man, whose fault was it?

Was it his parents or his sin that caused that to happen?

Because he must be outside the will of God.

If he's broken, then he must have done something.

It's this way so that I can be glorified, so that God can be glorified.

And that makes perfect sense to us whenever we're talking about somebody totally different than ourselves.

Oh yeah, yeah, they're going through trials because God can be glorified in trials.

But the minute that we experience them, it's like, no, no, no, what's wrong with this?

Like something's wrong if I'm experiencing a trial.

But with other people, we conclude that their trials do mean that God can be glorified.

In fact, some of the greatest stories, right?

We would be, we would be, the Bible would be so blah without trials, right?

If David never had Goliath, and Daniel never had the lion's den, and Esther never had to go before a king that you weren't supposed to go before.

And if these guys didn't have this stuff, the Bible would be a pretty benign book, right?

We read about a Joseph who was, as 1 pastor was telling me yesterday, Joseph was a man that had issues and self-struggles.

He's abandoned by the King's butler in the prison.

He's abandoned by everybody he ever comes into their circle with.

Joseph is abandoned over and over and over.

We like stories by faith that somebody holds on and then there's the success.

We like the story of Joseph because no matter what the abandonment of family there was reconciliation at the end no matter the abandonment of Potiphar and of the butler and because in the end he becomes the second-in-command.

He's no less, he's no less, in fact, there's no prophet greater in the words of Jesus.

But Guys, we conclude that if our story ends like his, we must have done something wrong and outside the will of God, right?

My whole point in this, and you'll see the bridge here in a minute, is that in yielding, we are yielding completely.

Yielding in the complete sense, meaning, God, I'm going to give you my life, and if you choose to break it, if you choose to allow me to suffer in pain my entire life, emotional, spiritual.

Now, just be aware that this can also sometimes be convoluted with abuse and abuse is a separate conversation and so I'm not arguing for that but God can allow trials in our lives and pain and difficulties for His glory that never get resolved.

Again, we see the, Hey, by faith, we hold on until it's resolved.

What if God says, I'm gonna keep you in this place?

Because from this place, you can accomplish what I need you to.

I'm gonna read for you a lot of, well, a page I keep in the back of my Bible from J.D.

So I keep a short list of some of my favorite things.

03 God’s Will and the “ONE” for Me

Father in heaven, good morning to you and thank you for today.

Rain or sun, severe thunderstorms, we Know that you are here, that this day you have given to us.

So we will rest and trust and choose you today.

Bless us in our conversation and in our reflection, but may it be in that blessing that it comes from you and your word, in the name of Jesus, amen.

All right, I am compelled to do a bit of review.

The title for today is The 1 For Me, All right?

We're gonna use, like we did yesterday, the energy of romance to springboard off into our conversation about God's will.

So if you're saying, I want nothing to do with romance, it's still very applicable to all the other areas of your life.

All right, if you were here Monday, we looked at this.

This is a, it's a garden, a French garden.

This is kind of, in my mind, and some may disagree, but in my mind, this is what heaven would be like.

This is very clear cut corners and very crisp edges and very organized.

And this is what they call a French garden.

I don't know if this picture's actually in France or not, but the style is called French.

And in my mind, this looks like happenstance.

Like last year's flowers are trying to compete with this year's flowers and there's lack of order and things don't have system or process.

But I have come, and some of you are well ahead of me on this, I have come to say, what if God's plan for your life looks a little bit more like an English garden than a French garden.

We think, well, if I'm in God's will, then it will be clear.

I have heard people say, I must have been, because I dated somebody, and then we broke up, And it must not have ever been God's will for me to even been in that relationship.

And then I had a man share with me once that said, in a in a respectful relationship, in a holy, respectful relationship.

Could it be that God brings 2 people together for that time, but then that's it?

I'm not talking about marriage, I'm talking about just the dating relationship.

He had just broken up, or a girl had broken up with him and he said maybe that's okay.

Maybe that's okay and I didn't make a mistake by dating this girl but some some have come to the conclusion no I'm going to date 1 person and if I'm in if I'm following God's will it will be clear I'll date 1 person then I'll marry the only person I ever date.

And so when you date somebody and it ends, you feel like, oh, maybe I didn't follow God's will and he probably wouldn't have led me through.

In Oregon, where I grew up, 1 of the things my parents did, and they did it with a pickup truck, so this was extra fun.

But we would go to, they call them BLM roads, Bureau of Land Management, this is like public land, it's just thousands and thousands of acres of woods where they log, and So there's these gravel roads that wind around mountains with no road signs or maps.

And we would call it Sabbath afternoon drives.

We would get in the back of the truck, except for my parents maybe, and we would just drive these roads, these logging roads where sometimes it was a drop off and then you'd wind your way up to a mountain landing where they had harvested the timber.

And sometimes you'd come to dead ends and just turn around.

And it wasn't a loss, it wasn't a wow, we have just wasted our time because we came to a dead end.

This was the purpose of just going for the ride.

And so sometimes we've mapped this out that no, A has to lead to B and B has to lead to C and we have to accomplish something, otherwise it must not be God's will.

And life would look like, life would look like, really?

Life would look like this if it's God's will.

And this is certainly just guesswork, right?

But no, what if God is into taking us into the same, into a dead end or into the same route twice or 3 times and he says, no, I just wanna take you over the same ground.

This idea of surrendering to God's will is this journey that no, it's not a shortest distance to destination, it's letting Him take you where He wants to take you.

Faith is the substance of things, hope for the evidence of things not seen.

And then we concluded that this is just a bit of a review.

So some of you are like, hey, you already use it.

So the life of faith, we have often determined that faith is what we hold on to until we get to like the prize.

I'll hold on by faith until I get to the prize, the conclusion, the end.

And what Hebrews 11 is saying is, no, the life of faith is it, that's it.

We like stories that have resolution that, oh, you didn't have money and then you held on by faith, you held on by faith until you got the money and you paid.

But what if God keeps you forever in that question mark, in that wondering, because that's the life of faith.

So we like to look at conclusions and resolution to our story, but the life of faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

You don't ever see it, you don't ever get there.

By faith, when called to go out to a place, this is Abraham, he would later receive as an inheritance.

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

We read that story and we assume that that was at the beginning.

Okay, he went out, he didn't know where he was going, but shortly thereafter, God told him where he was going, and for the rest of the time, he knew the plan.

Now, we read it as, well, we can map him out quickly, but he didn't know where he was going.

He didn't know next year, this year, he was just following God.

And we revisited the Gospels or reflected on the Gospels that when Jesus invited His disciples to follow Him, He used 2 words, follow me, follow me.

God, if I'm going to trust you, I mean, I need to map some of this stuff out.

I need to know that I'm not taking these classes in vain because they're gonna lead to...

What if God says, I just want you to take those classes?

I want you to just, for no other reason, that there's no degree at the end of that.

I want you to go over this ground because it's doing something unseen to you, but the visible to God work on our hearts.

Speaking of surrender, George Mueller, we talked about these 4, 90% of knowing God's will is choosing to have no will of our own.

That's 90% of where God is trying to take us, which is why sometimes he drags his journey out.

He leaves us in limbo because we've got to be quiet.

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Series

Life in God's Will: A Young Adult Seminar

01 I Guessed by Faith

Transcript

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Parent Series

Parent Conference

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Recorded

Parts

01 I Guessed by Faith

52m

02 God Doesn’t Like Pretty Girls or Handsome Boys

1h 6m

03 God’s Will and the “ONE” for Me

1h 2m

05 I Heard God’s Voice... or My Stomach Growled

55m

Sound Doctrine