One Aspect of God’s Will Most People Overlook
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- Updated Apr 21, 2023
Knowing God has a purpose and plan for your life is one of the great joys of being a Christian. It is even better when everything aligns perfectly, and you see God’s plan unfold right before your eyes.
A few years back, I had just gotten laid off and began looking for a job. It just so happened that my layoff coincided with a company posting a job that was the perfect fit for me. They had already hired four people for this position two months ago, but decided they wanted to hire four more. To make a long story short, they never hired four more people; they ended up only hiring one. I was the one. If I had not been laid off at the right time, I would not have been looking and would have missed the opportunity which has been one of the best jobs I have ever had in my life.
In the search to find and do God’s will, there is an element we can easily overlook. That element is his timing. Even if you have a good understanding of what his will is for your life, you can miss how his timing works. Considering God’s will without considering his timing will lead you to frustration, discouragement, despair, and even poor decision making. To avoid this, you must understand how God’s will and God’s timing work together.
God’s Will and God’s Timing from Two Perspectives
God’s will is the plan he has for your life. God’s timing is the timeframe with which he desires to execute that plan in your life. When people think of God’s will, the tendency is to stop at the plan and leave the timing out. There is a good reason for that. Thinking about the things God wants to do in your life is exciting. Waiting for them to happen is not as appealing.
Every year, my daughter counts down the days until Christmas – even more so when she sees the gifts going under the tree, especially the ones with her name on them. She gets so enthusiastic about the gifts, that waiting for the day to open them becomes almost too much to bear. This is how we often view God’s will. The excitement of seeing his will being done in our lives can lead us to become impatient as we wait for it to happen.
There are two different vantage points to view God’s will and timing. From God’s perspective, his will and his timing are always in perfect alignment. He knows what he plans to do in your life and when he plans to do it. In his mind, they are in perfect correlation. From our perspective, even if we know what he plans to do, we often don’t know when he plans to do it. This can make you feel like his will and his timing are out of sync. This will often cause you to ask questions and can lead to frustration.
Missing God’s Timing Can Tempt You to Take Matters into Your Own Hands
If you have ever felt the frustration of waiting on God to do something, you are in good company. God told Abraham he was going to have a son, however he left out one important detail. He didn’t tell him when he was going to have it. After ten years of trying to have a son, nothing had happened, which caused Abram and Sarai to get frustrated and impatient. In their frustration, they felt it was a good idea to help God out.
“Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar; so she said to Abram, ‘The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her.’ Abram agreed to what Sarai said” (Genesis 16:1-3).
When you read these verses, you must recognize part of their frustration came because they believed God. If they didn’t have an expectation of God fulfilling his promise, they would not have been frustrated. Even though they believed God’s will, they did not account for God’s timing. In their minds, after ten years, these two things were out of sync. Because it wasn’t happening fast enough, they wondered if it would ever happen at all.
God Will Not Bring His Will to Pass in Your Life before It’s Time
God’s will happens when he wants it to and not a minute before. This theme of God’s will and God’s timing occurs throughout Scripture. Sometimes God’s may require you to take actions with no understanding of the timing when he will bring it to pass.
God told Noah to build an ark because he was going to destroy the world with a flood. That was God’s will. However, Noah did not know when the first raindrop was going to fall on the earth. The Bible doesn’t record this, but I wonder if they ridiculed Noah for building this ark. I wonder if they called him a fool, as he was following God’s will with no knowledge of his timing.
Jesus Experienced This Too
“At this they tried to seize him, but no one laid a hand on him, because his hour had not yet come” (John 7:30).
Let me ask you a straightforward question. Why did Jesus come? The main reason he came was to offer his life as a sacrifice for our sins. Ultimately, this would lead to Jesus being arrested, tried, beaten, mocked, and eventually crucified. This was God’s will for Jesus.
However, what we see in John 7 is they attempted to seize and arrest Jesus, but they couldn’t because it wasn’t time yet. Even though it was God’s will, because the time had not yet arrived, there was nothing they could do. Remember, God will not bring about his will in your life before it’s time.
Final Thoughts
The national dish of Jamaica is Ackee and saltfish. Ackee is a type of fruit, and when it is prepared and eaten with the saltfish, it is delicious. However, there is something you need to know about ackees. If you attempt to eat them before they are fully ripened, it can literally kill you. As wonderful as the dish is, it can end your life if you eat an ackee before its time. God’s will is much the same way. It is phenomenal, but if you try to make it happen before its time, it may have devastating consequences in your life.
If you are waiting on God’s will, I encourage you to remain patient. Resist the temptation to take matters into your own hands and to make it happen before its time. If you are tempted, just think about our friend Abraham. He had a child with Haggar named Ishmael and later, when God fulfilled the promise, he had Isaac. Ishmael became the father of the Arab nations and Isaac, who was the son of the promise, is a father of the Jewish nations. Those two peoples have been fighting ever since. This resulted from Abraham taking matters into his own hands. Even though God’s timing may seem slow to you, wait for it. If you try to do things on your own, you might end up doing something that could have consequences for generations to come.
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