Double-mindedness brings your mind at war with God’s mind.  The Spirit against the flesh, the flesh against the Spirit, these two are contrary one to the other; amen?  So, I go to prayer.  I go into prayer.  I go into that fellowship.  I go with bold access because of the blood of Jesus and I take with me the promises of God.  I don’t take the promises of God to the throne room to try to manipulate God.  I take the promises of God not to remind God of what He promised but to remind me of what He’s promised.  If the words are sure and they do not return void, then this great promise here in the fifteenth chapter of John, down in verse 7 after He declares we can do nothing without Him, He makes a statement, “If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.  Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be my disciples.  As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love.  If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love.”

We see that this aspect of keeping the commandments of God, the ears of the Lord are opened to the cry of the righteous, we keep His commandments.  Take a little time and just go back and look at the will of God.  It’s amazing over all of these fifty years of dealing with people, one of the most asked questions I get is, “How can you know the will of God?”  That’s why we did the teachings and wrote the book that we did on Spiritual Guidance.  The one thing that I’ve found after all of these years is, people are asking to know the will of God mostly pertaining to the things that are temporal in their lives.  “What’s God’s will for me?  What job should I have?  My vocation?”  Here’s what we can know about that.  First of all, working is a curse.  You know that it’s amazing to me how some fundamentalists put such a great emphasis on working, the work ethic.  “We need to be the best under the curse.”  God never intended for us to live by the sweat of our brow.  He intended for us to live in His great merciful hand to where everything we had need of was on those trees, was in this earth without toil.

What do we know then?  We know this, that this is the environment that we find ourselves in and that whatever we do, we’re to do as unto the Lord.  We are to look for that character to be built in us and if you don’t work, you shouldn’t eat, right?  So, nobody has the right to be in the fellowship and sit around and expect everybody else to work and hand it to them in whatever way it gets handed to them.  There’s a responsibility and with that is the responsibility of providing for your household and you’ll see that God breaks it down throughout the Scriptures.  Your household is not just your wife and your children.  When we have true widows that come up in our midst, those that are in the immediate family take care of that person and that burden is not put over on the church.  So, those are things that have to do with the will of God.

When we are asking about these things, let’s look more to the character aspect.  One of the things that we should ask when getting ready to take a vocation, we’ve shared one of them, we know that there are great declarations of the will of God and the will of God is that we not forsake the assembling of ourselves together; amen?  So, we can’t take a job, then, that makes us forsake the assembling.  That is not the will of God and you can never say it is.  Those are the things that we have to begin to understand the will of God not just always stated, “This is my will.”  We find the will, the heart, the mind of God’s preferences as we abide and get to know Him and to know His heart.