Introduction — Asking the Better Question
If you’ve ever said, “I just want to know God’s will for my life,” this book is for you. Before we believed, we did what felt right to our darkened minds. Now we know that our feelings deceive us and our self-serving logic betrays us. So without meaning to, we can start to treat God like a cosmic Dear Abby, a kind advice columnist who answers our hardest questions about relationships and circumstances. Because we don’t trust our own judgment, we ask him who we should marry or which job we should take.
Those aren’t terrible questions. They show a real desire to honor God in our daily lives. But they don’t get to the heart of what it means to follow his will. Often the answer to “What should I do?” could go either way, and God can use the outcome of any decision for his glory and for our good. Maybe you’ve known the frustration of asking and hearing only silence. Or worse, you acted on a hunch, only to find out later that you apparently hadn’t heard the Lord at all. But if Scripture teaches us anything, it’s this: God is always more concerned with the decision-maker than he is with the decision itself. So the first question to ask isn’t “What should I do?” It’s “Who should I be?”
The two questions are connected, but the order matters. If we focus on our actions without dealing with our hearts, we may just end up as better-behaved lovers of self. Think about it. What good is it to choose the right job if I’m still consumed with selfishness? What good does it do me to make the right choice if I’m still the wrong person? A lost person can make “good choices.” But only a person filled with the Holy Spirit can make a good choice for the purpose of glorifying God. The hope of the gospel isn’t just that we’d make better choices. It’s that we’d become better people.
God made us and stamped us with his mark. He created us to bear his image and to represent him in our work, our play, and our worship. So what is God’s will for your life? Put simply, that you’d be like Christ. Paul writes that those God foreknew, “he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Romans 8:29). God wants the cracks in the image we carry to be repaired, so we grow to look more and more like our brother, Christ. As John puts it, “Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked” (1 John 2:6).
That’s what this book sets out to do: answer the question of God’s will for our lives, once and for all. It’s for anyone whose deepest desire and dearest delight is to be remade in his image.
Chapter 1 — God Most Holy
There’s an old Roman saying: “Repetition is the mother of learning.” What the Bible repeats shows us what it most wants us to remember. And it repeats a plain answer to the question “Who should I be?” Be like Jesus Christ, who perfectly shows us God in human form. So each chapter of this book takes one trait of God and asks a simple question. If God is like this, how should knowing that change the way I live?
But not every trait of God belongs on that list. Some are true of God alone. Only God is infinite and eternal. Only God is everywhere at once, knows everything, can do anything, and is in control of all things. When we try to become like him in these, we set ourselves up as his rival. And that’s exactly what we tend to do. Rather than trust a God who knows everything, we want to know everything ourselves. Rather than celebrate his power, we go after power in our own small corners of the world. Like Adam and Eve, we reject the limits God gave us and crave a limitlessness we foolishly think we can handle. To crave the traits that belong to God alone is to listen to the Serpent’s lure: “You shall be like God.”
Those of us who’ve been given a new heart have to learn to crave different traits. These are the ones that fit a limited being and describe the full life Jesus came to give us. They’re the traits of God that can become true of us too. God is holy, loving, good, just, merciful, gracious, faithful, patient, truthful, and wise. That’s the list we mean when we talk about being conformed to the image of Christ. And those ten traits are the ten chapters of this book.
If the Bible repeats what matters most, one trait clearly belongs at the top: holiness. No other trait is joined to God’s name more often. Wilkin admits she’s no expert on angels. But it seems likely that the first thing that comes to their minds about God is the one word they repeat without stopping: holy, holy, holy.
The Bible presents holiness as something both given to us and asked of us. In effect it says, “In Christ, you’ve been made holy. Now be holy.” God told Israel, “Be holy, for I am holy” (Leviticus 11:44). It’s tempting to write that off as one more strange line from a strange Old Testament book. But Jesus echoes it in the Sermon on the Mount, and Peter repeats it to the early church: “As he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct.” In other words, don’t be shaped by who you used to be. Be re-formed into who you should be.
If you’re still wondering what God’s will is for your life, Paul clears it up: “For this is the will of God, your sanctification” (1 Thessalonians 4:3). God’s will for your life is that you be holy. That you live a set-apart life and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, go after complete purity of character. Every story in every book of the Bible is chanting the same call: Be holy, for he is holy.
Growing in holiness means growing in our hatred of sin. It also means growing into the rest of this list, becoming loving, good, just, merciful, gracious, faithful, patient, truthful, and wise. It means learning to think, speak, and act like Christ every hour of every day God gives us on this earth.
Chapter 2 — God Most Loving
Of all God’s traits, his love may be the hardest to picture without leaning on the smaller, human kinds of love we already know. The Greek of the New Testament helps here, because it had four different words for love. Eros meant romantic love. Philia meant the love between friends, or between brothers and sisters. Storge meant a parent’s love for a child. And agape meant the love of God.
We usually think of love as a feeling. But agape is a choice. It doesn’t just feel. It acts. The Bible describes this love that acts 259 times. It’s the love Jesus means when he says, “Love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return” (Luke 6:35). And it’s the love in the passage read at so many weddings. “Love is patient and kind,” it says. “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” Wilkin says those words push a couple past romance, and even past friendship. They call the couple to show each other the love God has shown them: unconditional, selfless, active, and never-ending.
Earthly love is tied to need, and it wants something back. When it isn’t returned, it withers over time. Agape is different. It comes from a God who has no needs at all, and it flows through people whose greatest need has already been met in Christ. So we can give it freely, whether it comes back to us or not. Agape shows up most purely when we give it to people who can do nothing for us. That’s how God loved us in Christ.
When Jesus was asked which commandment was the greatest, he answered with love. Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments, he said, “depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:40). So if I don’t murder, but I hold back for some reason other than love for God and others, I haven’t practiced true holiness. Paul says that if he speaks in the tongues of men and of angels but has no love, he’s “a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” If he gives away everything he has but has no love, he gains nothing (1 Corinthians 13:1–3). If I try to be holy without agape, I add nothing, I am nothing, and I gain nothing.
Loving God rightly is what makes it possible to love ourselves and others rightly. When we struggle to love a neighbor, we usually try to fix it by trying harder. But a shortage in our love for our neighbor always points to a shortage in our love for God. Fixing the vertical relationship, between us and God, is the first step to fixing the horizontal one, between us and other people. Wilkin gives an example from her own marriage. When she holds back love from her husband because he’s hurt her feelings or let her down, she shows that she believes agape has to be earned. But when she remembers God’s unconditional love for her, she’s stirred to love God more. And that moves her to love her husband freely, the same way she’s been loved.
There’s one warning here. It’s possible to love the love of God too much. We do that when we put his love front and center and push his other traits aside. Then we end up loving a version of God that isn’t accurate. That’s the basic definition of idolatry: a love that’s out of order.
Once we follow Christ, we can’t sort people into “lovable” and “unlovable” anymore. We decide to love our neighbor even if it costs us. And it does. It costs our preferences, our time, our money, our sense of entitlement, and our stereotypes. But as we set those things aside, we see more deeply how broken people really are, and we grow in empathy.
So what is the will of God for your life? That you love as you’ve been loved. When you face a decision, ask yourself, “Which choice helps me grow in agape for God and others?” Then choose that one.
Chapter 3 — God Most Good
Wilkin compares God’s traits to gems buried in Scripture, waiting to be dug up. Some take a lot of digging. You have to go all the way to Genesis 18 to find the first clear mention of God’s justice, and to Genesis 24 for his love. But just four verses into the Bible, his goodness is sitting right out in the open: “And God saw that the light was good” (Genesis 1:4). The light is good because it reflects God’s own goodness. He’s the source of all good, and he’s completely good himself.
The Bible can’t wait to tell us this. Its first chapter says it again and again. Sea and land: good. Plants: good. Sun, moon, and stars: good. Fish, birds, and animals: good. Then people. “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). And God isn’t only good for a season. He’s good without change.
God’s goodness shines through all his other traits. It’s the reason his total power, total knowledge, and total control are a comfort instead of a terror. And even while we rebel, he keeps being good to us in a thousand ways. He gives us our daily bread, and often much more, though we tend to complain about what we lack. He gives us family and friends, though we’re quicker to rage at him over the hard relationships than to thank him for the sweet ones. He gives us more days of joy than sorrow, though we’re quicker to curse him for the hard times than to bless him for the happy ones.
Just as Christ shines with the goodness of God, so should we. Be good. Be the person who looks out for others, who gives without counting the cost, who serves with joy and doesn’t expect thanks. Be a good employee, a good next-door neighbor, a good parent, a good son or daughter. If you are, you’ll stand out like a city on a hill at midnight in the desert. It won’t always be easy. Paul admits that doing good can wear us out, but he promises it pays off: “Let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up” (Galatians 6:9).
So what is the will of God for your life? That you’d be good as he is good. That generosity would be your first impulse in the morning and your last thought at night. There’s no darkness in him, and there’s no room for it in us.
Chapter 4 — God Most Just
God is just. He gives what is deserved, and our sin deserves punishment. The good news is that Christ took that punishment on the cross, as the perfect sacrifice for sin. But people who don’t throw themselves on that sacrifice will spend their lives trying to pay for their sins themselves. They’ll offer their own good works to a God they’ve made up in their own imagination.
Believers don’t have to live that way. We don’t need to justify ourselves. We only need to confess our sins. When we try to justify ourselves, it shows we don’t understand the forgiveness we received at the cross. The cross of Christ means the score is settled. That doesn’t mean God stops correcting us. He disciplines us because he loves us, even though it may not feel loving right away.
A believer who loves God’s justice won’t live a life of scorekeeping. Their life will be marked by reverent obedience. They’ll love God’s moral law, and that love will reshape their desires to match their heavenly Father’s. They’ll humbly accept that God, like a good ruler, gets to set the limits of what’s right. The first effect of grasping God’s justice is an inward desire to obey. The long-term effect is an outward desire to do justice for others.
So what is the will of God for your life? Listen to the prophet Micah: “And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8). Those of us who have any kind of advantage should use it to help our neighbors. Those of us who have more than our daily bread need open eyes and open hands for those still waiting for theirs. God’s will is that you be just as he is just, delighting in his law and doing justice every day as a child of your heavenly Father.
Chapter 5 — God Most Merciful
Justice, mercy, and grace sit close together, so it helps to pull them apart. Justice is getting what we deserve. Mercy is not getting what we deserve. Grace is getting what we don’t deserve.
Many people think of the God of the Old Testament as a God of towering justice with no mercy. But the Old Testament mentions his mercy more than four times as often as the New Testament does.
Wilkin describes a verse that once puzzled her: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). It makes sense that God is faithful to forgive the sins we confess. But when she slowed down, the word “just” stopped her. How can forgiving our sins be just? Shouldn’t the verse say “faithful and merciful”? It took a failure of her own for her to understand it. The answer is the cross. Jesus took the punishment our sins deserved, so when God forgives us, he isn’t setting justice aside. Justice has already been done. At the cross, God’s justice and his mercy meet.
That mercy calls for a response. Paul writes, “Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship” (Romans 12:1). And we must never forget that Jesus set a table of mercy on the night he was betrayed. That night, he said of the bread, “This is my body.” And he said of the wine, “This is my blood.”
So what is the will of God for your life? The same thing Jesus told his followers: “Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful” (Luke 6:36).
Chapter 6 — God Most Gracious
John Newton, who wrote “Amazing Grace,” put it this way: “’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved.” Grace is getting what we don’t deserve. And God, in his sovereignty, gives us grace before we can even imagine it’s possible, or understand what it’s worth.
But it’s possible to see grace too narrowly. If we see grace only as a free gift that covers our sins, and not also as the way we grow in holiness, we’ll get lax about obeying. Grace covers us at the cross, and it also strengthens us for every step we take after that.
So what is the will of God for your life? That you may have life, and have it abundantly. That you’d show others the same undeserved favor that’s been shown to you in Christ. And that you’d walk the narrow path, sure every day of the grace you received at the cross, and strengthened every day by the grace you receive for each step toward holiness.
Chapter 7 — God Most Faithful
God is faithful, and he trains us to be faithful too. He uses hard things to do it. Trials bring us to our knees and remind us of our limits. They turn us back toward God. But God also uses temptation to shape us. That doesn’t mean God tempts us. James makes clear that God doesn’t tempt anyone, and he can’t be tempted himself (James 1:13). But the temptations we face can still make us stronger.
It works like a muscle that gets stronger with repeated workouts. To lift a very heavy weight, a weightlifter starts with smaller weights and builds strength over time. In the same way, when we’re faithful to God in small temptations, we build the strength to face bigger ones.
Faithfulness shows up in every part of life. We use our time faithfully, not wasting it the way people who serve only themselves might. We use our abilities faithfully, to bring glory to the One who gave them to us. We guard our thoughts faithfully, keeping them on what’s true, honest, just, pure, and lovely. We use our words faithfully, to encourage and correct, and to pray without ceasing. And we ask whether we’re known as faithful in our marriages, our business dealings, our parenting, and our friendships. In the end, every act of faithfulness toward others is an act of faithfulness toward God himself.
God’s will for your life is that you be faithful as he is faithful. Faithful to him. Faithful to others. Faithful in this moment. Faithful to the end. And what he asks of you, he also gives you the power to do.
Chapter 8 — God Most Patient
Maybe you’ve seen the old saying, “Be patient. God isn’t finished with me yet.” Patience starts with God. When he first described his character to Moses, he called himself “slow to anger” (Exodus 34:6). The Old Testament praises that trait in eight other places.
So it’s no surprise that the Bible shows patience as the path of wisdom. Proverbs says it again and again. “Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding, but he who has a hasty temper exalts folly” (Proverbs 14:29). “Whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city” (Proverbs 16:32).
James says the same thing to the early church: “My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires” (James 1:19–20).
God’s will for our lives is that we’d be patient as he is patient. He wants us to follow the example of Christ’s patience, and to wait patiently for Christ to return.
Chapter 9 — God Most Truthful
Moral relativism is the idea that “what’s right for you may not be right for me.” It says personal truth is the highest truth we can have, and that no higher, absolute truth exists. The classic picture of this idea is the story of the blind men and the elephant. Each man touches a different part of the elephant and decides it’s a different kind of animal. One says it’s like a wall. Another says it’s like a snake. Another says it’s like a spear. We’re supposed to conclude that they’re all right, at least partly.
But imagine someone who could see the whole elephant telling the blind men what was really in front of them. That’s the story of the Bible. It’s the ultimate reality check for anyone charmed by relativism. The Bible says God himself is the standard for truth. He defines what’s real. The Bible agrees that people are in the dark, and even that they love the darkness. But it also tells of light coming into that darkness, and of truth being shown to people who were once blind.
Every belief system tries to answer the same big questions. Where did I come from? Why am I here? What’s wrong? And what fixes what’s wrong? The Bible says we aren’t a cosmic accident. God created us. We exist to bring glory to God and to enjoy him forever. Like Adam and Eve, we traded God’s truth for a lie and rebelled against him, and that left us spiritually dead. And God sent his Son to bring us from death to life. Wilkin says the most convincing reason she believes the Bible is that it answers those questions better than any other belief system she’s found. The way it describes sin is accurate. The solution it offers goes beyond anything human effort can do. And the purpose it gives for life, when people embrace it, leads them to live sacrificially.
Today the big cultural message is “Live your truth.” It isn’t a new idea. It’s the same old self-worship with an updated phrase. “Follow your heart” and “If it feels good, do it” say the same thing: truth is in the eye of the beholder. You could swap any of those lines in for the Serpent’s words in the garden, “You will not surely die,” and the story of the fall wouldn’t change at all.
The problem with living my truth is that “the heart is deceitful above all things” (Jeremiah 17:9). It builds a false reality around what I want, where my wants come before everyone else’s. If my wants clash with yours, my living my truth will keep you from living yours. It wrecks my ability to live in community, and real community isn’t built on getting what I want. It’s built on laying my wants down for the good of others. The problem with living my truth is that my truth is a lie. So Wilkin prays that God would lead her into living his truth instead, the only truth there really is. It pulls us out of isolation and into the kind of community only a shared truth can hold together.
Even believers can be picky about which truths we look at. We can fixate on one part of the elephant and love it at the expense of the whole. But we’re called to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That takes the full counsel of God’s Word.
So what is the will of God for your life? That you know the truth. That you walk in the truth. That you speak the truth in love. And that you obey the truth.
Chapter 10 — God Most Wise
Knowledge is having the facts. Wisdom is the ability to reach the best ends with those facts. God isn’t bound by time, so he knows the end from the beginning. And because he holds all knowledge, he can always choose the perfect end. We, on the other hand, can live a foolish life from start to finish. And because we were made to live with others, our folly always hurts more people than just ourselves.
Paul warns that “the wisdom of this world is folly with God” (1 Corinthians 3:19). We love to fool ourselves into thinking that when we choose ourselves, we’ve chosen well. And we love to convince others that it isn’t really selfish. We look wise on the outside, but inside we’re hungry for other people’s approval. James says that wisdom driven by jealousy and selfish ambition is “earthly, unspiritual, demonic.” “But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere” (James 3:17).
Wilkin lays the two side by side. Worldly wisdom promotes itself. Godly wisdom lifts up others. Worldly wisdom wants the highest seat. Godly wisdom takes the lowest. Worldly wisdom boasts. Godly wisdom is slow to speak. Worldly wisdom says trials will crush you. Godly wisdom says they’ll mature you. Worldly wisdom says temptation is no big deal. Godly wisdom says temptation, given in to, leads to death. Worldly wisdom throws its weight around. Godly wisdom works in meekness. Simply put, any thought, word, or action that hurts our ability to love God and our neighbor is folly.
But James also tells us how to get godly wisdom. It’s ours for the asking: “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him” (James 1:5). Lack wisdom? Just ask. God will give it.
Solomon shows what this looks like. When God offered him anything he wanted, Solomon asked for wisdom to lead God’s people, and God gave it. After that, Solomon didn’t need to ask for new information every time he faced a choice. He used the wisdom he had to make the best decision he could. That’s a mark of spiritual maturity. But later in life, Solomon wandered off the path of wisdom and onto the path of folly. The man who wrote that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” traded the fear of the Lord for the fear of man. He gave himself to pleasure, wealth, and power. His story teaches us that “once wise, always wise” isn’t true for anyone but God. We need a steady, ongoing supply of wisdom.
Jesus makes the same offer in the Sermon on the Mount: “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7). We tend to read that and make a list of things we’d like God to give us. But his disciples, overwhelmed by the cost of following him, wouldn’t have heard an invitation to ask for new fishing boats or bigger houses. They’d have heard an invitation to ask for things like patience, courage, compassion, or wisdom. And the verbs there mean keep on asking, keep on seeking, keep on knocking. For anyone who knows the sorrow of a foolish life, no prayer will be more urgent or more constant than the prayer for wisdom.
God’s Word gives us insight where we need it most, into the thoughts and motives of our own hearts. And the most basic act of wisdom is repentance. So what is the will of God for your life? If any of you lacks wisdom, ask.
Conclusion — Engraved with His Image
By asking the better question, “Who should I be?”, we find that God’s will for our lives isn’t hidden after all. The Bible is full of calls to reflect our Creator as we become more and more like Christ. But if the goal is to become better people, how do we keep this from turning into a Christian self-help program? How do we keep from slipping into a mindset that does nothing more than change our behavior?
Make no mistake, the Bible teaches that changed behavior should absolutely follow salvation. But it happens for a different reason than it does in the life of someone who doesn’t believe. There’s a difference between self-help and sanctification, and that difference is the motive of the heart.
The motive of sanctification is joy. Joy is both our reason and our reward. Jesus made this connection for his disciples: “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:10–11). Full joy comes when we try to reflect our Maker. It’s what we were made to do. It’s the very will of God for our lives.
God stamped us with his image, and sin has cracked it. But as we grow in holiness, love, goodness, justice, mercy, grace, faithfulness, patience, truth, and wisdom, we look more and more like Christ, who looks exactly like God. God’s will for our lives is that we be restored to mint condition.