You are currently viewing And I Quote… January 25

And I Quote… January 25

And-I-QuoteIn our contemporary context, the ‘Lord’s will’ is frequently understood by Christians to refer to matters of personal guidance, and thus to God’s immediate plans for their future. But the divine will in the Pauline letters, particularly in Ephesians, has a different focus, without neglecting the personal dimension. The ‘will of God’ is closely related to, even identified with, God’s gracious saving plan and, as a significant element of this, the formation of a people into the likeness of Christ who will be pure and blameless on the final day…. The contemporary preoccupation with personal guidance is wrongly directed if it is not understood first of all within this framework of God’s gracious saving purposes for his world. Personalised concerns about ‘guidance’ may, in fact, be evidence of a folly which stands in contrast to, and needs to be corrected by, a true understanding of the Lord’s will.
P. T. O’Brien, The Letter to the Ephesians, (Eerdmans, 1999), pg 385