In my previous building block posts, we’ve spent a lot of time decluttering our understanding of sin, repentance, and the realignment of faith. But there is one area that remains a massive source of anxiety for many Christians: the search for “God’s Will.”

When we don’t get this topic right, we end up treating God’s will like a high-stakes scavenger hunt where the clues are hidden, and if we can’t find a path, we’ve ruined “God’s plan” for our lives. We’ve invented a version of God’s will that doesn’t actually exist in the scriptures, and in doing so, we’ve created a burden that was never meant for us to carry.

---

If you’ve spent any time in modern Christian circles, you’ve likely been taught that God has three distinct “wills”:

1. The Sovereign Will: What God decrees will happen (He’s in control).
2. The Moral Will: What He has revealed in the Bible (the “rules”).
3. The Individual Will: The “secret” plan for your specific life, who to marry, what job to take, which house to buy. The plan that pleases God when you act in it.

Some denominations will classify these as the Directive, Preceptive, and Permissive (or Dispositional) Wills of God. The first two have some merit, and we will get there, but it is this third one, “the Individual Will” that causes the most spiritual paralysis in Christians. When we focus on this, we spend our lives terrified of the “What if?”

What if I marry the wrong person?

What if I take the wrong job and step out of God’s perfect will?

This turns God into a cosmic micromanager and turns us into anxious “will-seekers” rather than free children of God. It suggests that there is a “Plan A,” and if we miss it, we are relegated to a “Plan B” existence. But the truth is you cannot randomly flip to a magical verse in your Bible to solve your current problem and that gut feeling may just be bad pizza from the night before.

The Logos: Living Within His Being

To simplify this, we have to look at what God is rather than what He plans. There isn’t a “will of God” checklist floating out there that you need to find and fill out. Instead, there is the existence of His being (the essence of who He is) that we are called to live within.

In the beginning was the Logos (John 1:1). We often translate this as “Word,” but it carries the weight of the Divine Reason, the Ultimate Truth, and the very expression of God’s nature. As Paul told the Athenians in Acts 17:28, “For in him we live and move and have our being.”

God’s “will” isn’t a script; it’s an environment. It’s the Logos—the expression of God—that sustains all reality. When we are in Christ, we are aligned with the Logos (This was the whole point of the first chapter of John). In this state, we are no longer separated from God by the choice of sin; we are residing within His expressed reality.

So what does this mean for us when we think we are trying to “Find God’s Will for our life” or we don’t know how something will turn out and we leave it to “If God wills it, it will come about.”

If you are operating in this mindset, you are living in a “Causality Mindset” and treating God as the primary cause of external events. Remember, “You aren’t looking for a secret, you are inhabiting a Person.” If someone says they are searching for God’s will for their life then they are implying God is hiding. We are not looking for some hidden blueprint for our job choice or school to attend. We are attuning our life to the frequency God expressed, the Logos. Furthermore, if we give everything up to whether it is God’s Will or not (a misappropriation of James 4:15), we are subscribing to some form of Christian Fatalism; assuming God is the one pulling the strings of every car accident or job promotion. In the 1st century when James wrote, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that”, it wasn’t about God “controlling” the outcome; it was an admission of “human contingency”. It meant: “I am not the master of the universe; only God is Eternal.” God’s sovereignty isn’t about Him making the decision for you; it’s about Him being the ground upon which all outcomes land. If a business deal fails, it wasn’t necessarily “God’s Will” that it fail (as if He sabotaged it). Rather, God’s sovereignty remains standing regardless of whether the deal succeeds or fails.

The Invention of the Separated Wills

So, how did we get so far off track? It started with a shift in how we view the “will” itself. In the 1st century, the “will” wasn’t viewed as a separate psychological faculty that makes isolated choices. However, throughout history, we began to separate the Will of Man from the Will of God as if they were two opposing forces on a battlefield. This shift didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow “Latinization” of the faith that moved away from the Greek concept of “Participation” and toward the Roman concept of “Legal Volition”.

Before this shift, the Greek fathers used the term προαίρεσις (prohairesis). This wasn’t a “force” in the soul; it was the “inclination” or “disposition” of the heart. They believed the human inclination was damaged by the Fall, but not “dead” (that Salvation was Synergia, ‘Working-together’). The man most responsible for the “Battlefield” model of the Will is Augustine. To fight a monk named Pelagius (who argued humans could be good on their own), Augustine swung the pendulum to the opposite extreme. The innovation that Augustine developed was the concept of “Liberum Arbitrium” (Free Choice) vs. “Libertas” (True Freedom). He argued that after the Fall, the human will is not just “weak,” but “curvatus in se” (curved in on itself). It is a hostile power that must be conquered by an external “Sovereign Will.” This built that case that man’s will is a broken faculty that needed a jump start through redemption and it no longer held the truth of the original Greek’s organic approach that poised the will as an inclination toward the Light. For the first time, “God’s Will” and “Man’s Will” were framed as two distinct, competing legal entities. If God’s Will wins, Man’s Will must be suppressed.

This was further solidified in the thirteenth century when this “Battlefield” model was fully codified during the Middle Ages by men like Thomas Aquinas and later Duns Scotus. They began to ask: “Is something good because God wills it, or does God will it because it is good?” This was a shift to “Voluntarism”, the philosophy doctrine that the will is a fundamental or dominant factor in the individual or the universe. The result was that they solidified the will as a “power” of the soul that makes choices. This made God’s Will seem arbitrary; a giant, invisible hand making choices that might contradict human reason. This is where the “Find God’s Will” anxiety truly began. If God’s Will is an arbitrary choice, you better hope you guess the right choice!

The last major anchoring point of this mindset was during the Reformation period of the sixteenth century. The Reformers (Luther and Calvin) took Augustine’s “Battlefield” and turned it into a total war. Martin Luther wrote The Bondage of the Will. He argued that the human will is like a “beast of burden”; it is either ridden by God or ridden by the Devil. This locked in the “Two-Will” universe. You are no longer a “branch in a vine” (the original union teaching of Christ); you are a “territory” being fought over by two massive, external Wills.

In the 1st-century Greek mind, if you were “in Christ,” there was no “battle.” There was only the Logos (Reason/Word) illuminating your mind so that you could act with Sophrosyne (Soundness of Mind). You didn’t “fight” God’s will; you simply participated in His life.

We began to view God’s sovereignty as a King making “decisions” after being informed of events. But God’s sovereignty is much deeper. Because He is sovereign, His Logos naturally puts itself forward. It isn’t a reaction, or Him putting forth His Will; it is the expressed intent of the King. His “Will” is the very direction of the universe. It is not a set of blueprints He consults, but the very light by which the universe is visible. Therefore, what we call ‘Sovereign’ and ‘Moral’ are not different ‘modes’ of God’s mind, but the same current of His Life encountered from two different perspectives.”

Reframing the Wills of God

When we broke God down into an ultimate decision maker, we invented a different operating framework for God than what God’s people originally described him as. Now, as I said earlier, there is some merit to the first two Wills described. But what we need to do is actually fold them both back up into the Sovereignty of God Himself. When it comes to his Sovereign Will (or His Directive Will), instead of a decree made in a courtroom, think of it more as the “Laws of Physics” for the Soul. Sovereignty is the “gravity” of the Divine Nature. It holds all things together, not by force like physics, but by its sheer consistency in who He is. In the first three centuries, scholars like Athanasius viewed God’s sovereignty as the “Incorruptibility” of the Logos. It isn’t that God “decides” that life is better than death; it’s that God is Life, and therefore, His sovereignty is the inevitable triumph of Life over non-existence. It’s not so much as, “God made it happen” as it is “God’s presence is happening.” This is the very nature of the Logos, the expression of who God is himself. So, the sovereignty of God is not the decisions He makes and pronounces as His Will, it is the undeniable expression of himself through the consistent display of who He is.

The Second Will that was created, his Moral Will, is still the expression of his sovereignty but this time it is from the perspective of us towards God. God expresses himself through the Logos and we desire to be part of that Logos and live a life that is reflecting that Logos right back at him. This was the point as Christ being called “The Word” (The Logos) in the first chapter of John. It was not to build a flimsy framework to say that Jesus was with God in the beginning of creation; by calling him the Logos. Rather it was to show that “In the beginning was the Logos, and/for (kai) the Logos was unto (pros) God, and/for God was the Logos” John then goes on to personify the Logos as a narrative tool much like Wisdom is personified throughout Proverbs. This Logos “Became Flesh” in Jesus meaning that, for the first time, we saw what it looked like for humanity to express the Logos back to God. We call this having morals, or living Christ like, but it is really just Loving God through the reflection of the Logos back to him (and we reflect the Logos to others when we Love Others as well).

Stewardship and Alignment

Knowing that there are no real “Wills” of God and it is all the direct expression of his Sovereignty through his Logos, which was perfectly displayed through Jesus (God made him the Christ for this very reason), then we have the blueprint we seem to be looking for. Through what he taught us while he was here and by what we learned from his disciples who discussed these things firsthand. We must remember that Christ has been given stewardship of the earthly kingdom until the end of this age (1 Corinthians 15:24-25). Within this age, our goal isn’t to guess “secrets”; it is to seek alignment with Christ.

By aligning ourselves with Christ (our Patron), we naturally align ourselves with the Logos of God. We aren’t trying to hit a moving target of “Plan A”; we are choosing to reside in the expression of His life. When you are in the Logos, your will isn’t fighting God’s Will; your will is being fueled by His life.

The early Christians didn’t ask “What is God’s individual will for my career path?” They understood God’s intent through the inaugurated Kingdom. They looked at the Logos, the Ultimate Truth, and lived in response to it.

We must stop trying to “Find” a secret Will of God that you have to decode. When we do that, we make the Christian life about us and our ability to listen correctly. Instead of looking for “God’s Will for your life”, live knowing that “God’s life is in your will”. If you are abiding in the Logos, if you are aligning your faith as a client of the King, and if you are walking in Love, then your choices are no longer a gamble; you are free. You don’t have to find the “hidden path” because you are walking with the One who is the Path (John 14:6).