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As the saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt. Sometimes the things we are most familiar with become the things that we take the most for granted. One such popular phrase in the church is this: “God has a perfect plan for your life.” Many of us have heard it so many times that it has begun to lose the power of its effect on us. Scripture makes it clear here and here that God does indeed have a perfect plan for us. If the infinitely good, all-knowing, sovereign God of the universe has a plan for our lives, then it must be the best way to live. The essence of folly would be to live outside of his perfect plan, to live out of step with his will.

Here are 5 questions that I ask myself to help me keep in step with God’s will:

1. Do I care about what God wants for my life? – When we are truly submitted to Christ as our Lord, our deepest desire will be to live for him and his will. If we don’t care about what God wants for us, its time to reevaluate things. I love the psalmist’s prayer in Ps. 143:10, “Teach me to do your will, for you are my God! Let your good Spirit lead me on level ground!”

2. Have I surrendered my desires to God? – Sometimes the things we desire most are not God’s best for us. It may be a relationship or an activity that is actually drawing our hearts away from the Lord. Sometimes our “quest for God’s will” can actually be nothing more than trying spiritualize our disobedience so that we feel better about it. At the end of the day we must be able to say like Jesus, “Not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42).

3. Have I spent time in real prayer? – It is so easy to casually say, “I’m praying for God’s will” when we have actually spent little or no time in actual prayer. God does not desire his will to be a secret. He wants to show us, we just need to ask! I love the promise of Jer. 33:3 which says, “Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known.”

4. Have I sought godly counsel?- One indication that we are outside of God’s will is that we are avoiding the counsel of godly people. When we know we are living in sin, the last thing we want to hear is the counsel of godly people. Prov. 13:20 tells us that “Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm.”

5. Will my decision further myself and my goals, or God and his goals? - Living according to God’s will means living primarily for him and his agenda and not ourselves and our agenda. May we say with John the Baptist, “He must increase, I must decrease” (John 3:30).