The Best This Life Has to Offer

The will of God is its own reward.

We can call it all kinds of things — Biblical Law, the character of Christ, the Word of the Lord — but the will of God for you is, in the most absolute terms, the very best you can hope for in this life. It is fundamental to your creation and purpose; it’s who you really are. Your highest potential is bound up in knowing what God wants for you.

This is not some perfect Nirvana state, either. It’s a living thing, something dynamic and shifting with the context. Your mind can’t know it; it can only implement that moving target of personal holiness. You should never expect to be done, to take a break from holiness. There’s always the next righteous choice to make until He brings you Home.

That’s because this world cannot be redeemed. I often make it a point to assert that Creation isn’t fallen, but we are. The problem is that you also need to understand that we were made by God to manage this Earth on His behalf, and in our fallen state, it’s pretty poorly managed. So it’s not what it should be, but it’s our fault. We are fallen; we are born in a state of rebellion against God’s will. At some point in our human development, we become culpable for our sins. And the world we make for ourselves is thus inherently wrong because we are wrong. So when Christ returns to restore all things, that means He will undo all that has happened since Adam and Eve made that fateful choice in the Garden of Eden. That will restore this Earth to what He intended, what it was in Eden. That’s the only “fix” possible for what’s wrong with this world.

So we are left with fixing only ourselves, and that requires direct help from God. It requires that He elect to commune with you, to invade your soul and breathe His Spirit into your dead spirit and make it alive. Thus, it won’t matter if you earn a PhD in Bible, you don’t know God’s will until you know God in that sense of His divine Presence living in you. And the only way you know about that is in your heart, because He does not invade your mind. It’s a separate faculty that comes to life with His Presence, something we call faith. The one and only thing you can contribute is the will to accept His will.

You have to open your mind to hear that inner voice and choose in every moment to obey that voice. Your intellect rebels at the mere thought of such an arrangement. Your intellect very much believes in itself, but your ego must choose to ignore that boastful voice and hear the voice of God in your conscience. Because that’s the only clue your mind has to God’s will. You must obey your conscience as it is today, right now. You do so knowing it will begin to change and shift in valuation of what is good and what is evil. That’s the whole purpose of seeking Him in worship; it is to open up that link and purify any fallen tendencies, little by little (Exodus 23:20-33). The more you worship and pray, the more you know, and the more of your divine heritage you reclaim.

We try to help each other by sharing our experience. Not that any of us are masters of all this, but perhaps in some ways we are simply down the same road ahead of you. Some of what we can share will be pertinent, and the farther you go, the more you will share of your own discernment about such things.

You see, insofar as there is a goal in this life, it’s developing the ability to fellowship and commune with others who are pursuing that same will of God for themselves. The only true fellowship comes from sharing your real self, the self God made you to be, with others who experience Him in similar ways. If you get this for yourself alone, you didn’t get it. If you don’t hear God urging you to fellowship with others, you aren’t hearing from God. That’s so fundamental to what He’s doing in this world that you simply cannot obey Him without engaging fellow believers. The character of Biblical Law is summed up in how you commune with others. Of course, that “others” includes all of Creation, but humans are the focal point.

Because everything in the written record of revelation — the Bible — counts as the endpoint this one thing: our ongoing fellowship and communion with others who have been brought to this eternal life. The fullness of His promised blessings reside in the community of faith. You haven’t gotten your share of the divine estate until you are sharing it with His other children. He won’t divide the inheritance; it’s a living thing we all have to share.

This is the reward of God’s will in this life.