You know, if an angel appeared to me and told me exactly what to do with my life, I reckon my faith would suddenly become quite impressive.
If the angel arrived in a blaze of heavenly light, called me by name and gave me clear instructions about what to do next, I like to think I would at least hear him out. If God started speaking to me from a bush that was on fire but somehow not burning, I would probably take notes. If a pillar of fire appeared outside my house and began moving down the street, I would be inclined to follow it, although I might reconsider once it merged onto the Ipswich Motorway.
We often talk about the characters in the Bible as though they possessed levels of faith that ordinary people like us could never hope to reach.
Abraham left his homeland because God told him to go. Moses stood before Pharaoh and demanded that he release an entire nation. Gideon led a tiny army into battle. Mary agreed to carry a child who would change the course of human history. Peter stepped out of a boat and attempted to walk on water.
Incredible faith, we say.
But many of these people also received something unmistakable. They heard voices. They saw visions. Angels arrived with messages. Seas parted. Fire fell from heaven. Fleeces became wet while the surrounding ground remained dry.
I have received none of that.
No angel has ever visited me. No heavenly voice has told me which job to take, which house to buy or which direction my life should go. I have never witnessed a sign or wonder that settled the matter beyond reasonable doubt. At best, I have had a few unusual coincidences, some strong feelings, a timely conversation and the occasional Bible verse that seemed particularly relevant to whatever I was already thinking about.
Growing up in church, however, I heard testimonies from people who seemed to receive divine guidance with remarkable clarity. God told them to resign from their job. God told them to move interstate. God told them to marry a particular person. God even told them exactly how much money to donate to the building fund.
I knew that good Christians were supposed to seek God’s guidance before making any major decision. The problem was that I could never quite work out how they knew when God had answered.
Meanwhile, I was trying to determine whether God wanted me to order the chicken parmigiana or the steak.
Perhaps my problem was that I was looking for something far too obvious. Maybe I expected divine guidance to arrive with flashing lights and a booming voice. Perhaps God had been guiding me all along, and I simply did not recognise it.
All I know is that when I faced the biggest decisions of my life, God’s will rarely seemed as clear as people at church made it sound.
That creates a difficult tension. You genuinely want to honour God with the choice you make, but you have no idea which direction, if any, God is guiding you. You pray, search the Scriptures, ask for advice and pay close attention to every coincidence that might conceivably be a sign. Yet, sooner or later, a decision still has to be made.
So, what do you do when you want to honour God with your decision, but God does not seem to be telling you which way to go?
Great question. I’m glad you asked.
Maybe There Isn’t One Correct Choice
Perhaps the first thing we need to reconsider is the assumption that God has already selected one correct option and hidden it somewhere for us to discover.
Many of us were taught to think about God’s will as though it were a narrow path running through every major decision. Choose the right career, marry the right person, move to the right city and attend the right church, and your life will unfold according to God’s plan. Make the wrong choice, however, and you might step outside that plan altogether.
No wonder we become anxious.
When every major decision has one divinely approved answer, uncertainty begins to feel potentially catastrophic. Taking the wrong job is no longer merely an unfortunate career move. It could mean disobeying God. Choosing the wrong house might place your family somewhere God never intended them to be. Marrying the wrong person could alter the course of your entire life.
Suddenly, we are not simply making a decision. We are sitting an exam without being given the questions.
This way of thinking can make us obsessed with finding signs. We ask God to close doors, arrange coincidences or give us a particular feeling. We open the Bible at random and hope the first verse we see will settle the matter. We treat an encouraging conversation as confirmation, then wonder whether an unexpected setback means God has changed his mind.
But what if some decisions do not have one correct answer?
What if God is less concerned with whether you choose Option A or Option B than with the kind of person you are becoming as you choose? What if both paths contain opportunities to love people, act with integrity, grow in wisdom and contribute something good to the world? What if there are multiple paths of blessing?
Perhaps seeking God’s will is not always about uncovering a decision God has already made for us. Sometimes, it may be about learning how to make a wise and loving decision ourselves.
So, how do you do that?
Ask What Love Calls for in This Situation
A useful place to begin is with a much simpler question: What does love call for in this situation?
Jesus said that the greatest commandments were to love God and love our neighbour. He described these as the foundation upon which everything else rested. If that is true, then discerning God’s will may have less to do with decoding mysterious signs and more to do with identifying the most loving course of action available to us.
That does not mean choosing whatever will keep everyone happy. Love is not the same as people-pleasing, avoiding conflict or sacrificing yourself to meet everybody else’s expectations. Sometimes love requires staying. Sometimes it requires leaving. Sometimes it means offering another chance, and sometimes it means establishing a boundary that should have been established years ago.
The question is not simply, “What would make other people happy?” It is, “Which choice most honours the dignity, wellbeing and legitimate needs of everyone affected, including me?”
If you are considering a new job, for example, love may call you to think beyond the salary. How will the decision affect your partner, your children, your health and the people who depend on you? Will this work allow you to become more generous and present, or will it demand so much that the people you love receive whatever is left of you?
If you are deciding whether to leave a church, love might require you to consider whether remaining is helping you become more compassionate, honest and whole. It may also require you to consider the effect the church is having on your children, your relationships and people who are repeatedly pushed to the margins.
If you are facing a financial decision, love may involve asking whether the choice provides genuine security or simply satisfies a desire to appear successful. It may mean considering who carries the risk, who receives the benefit and what other commitments will be neglected.
Of course, even this question may not produce an immediate answer. Two genuinely loving values can pull us in different directions. Providing for your family may require accepting work that gives you less time with them. Caring for someone else may come at a cost to your own health. Telling the truth may cause pain, while avoiding it may preserve peace for a little longer.
The aim is not to find an option that has no cost. Major decisions rarely offer one. The aim is to identify which costs you can accept without betraying your deepest values or treating another person as though their life matters less than your own.
When there is no clear sign from heaven, love gives us somewhere concrete to begin. It turns our attention away from interpreting coincidences and towards the actual people whose lives will be shaped by our decision.
Before asking which option God is secretly pointing towards, ask which choice allows you to act with the greatest honesty, compassion, courage and care.
That may not give you a miraculous answer, but it will usually give you a better question.
Separate What You Know From What You Imagine
Once you have asked what love requires, take the decision out of your head and put it on paper.
Draw four columns and label them:
- What I know
- What I assume
- What I hope
- What I fear
Then write down every thought you have about the decision and place it in the appropriate column.
Suppose you are considering a new job. You may know that it pays more, requires a longer commute and includes a six-month probationary period. You may assume that the workplace culture will be healthier. You may hope the role will lead to better opportunities. You may fear that declining it means you will never receive another offer.
While these thoughts are circling inside your head, they can all feel equally convincing. They are not equally reliable, and they should not be given equal weight.
Begin with what you know. These are the facts you can reasonably verify rather than the conclusions you have drawn from them. “The salary is $15,000 higher” is a fact. “I will be happier there” is not. “The position requires two evenings each week” is a fact. “My family will eventually get used to it” is an assumption.
Next, examine your assumptions. For each one, ask whether there is any information you could obtain that would either confirm or challenge it. Could you speak to someone who already works there? Ask to see the employment contract? Visit the neighbourhood at different times of the day? Request the financial records? Talk to a doctor? Obtain independent legal or financial advice?
People sometimes keep praying for guidance when what they actually need is more information.
Then turn to your hopes. Hopes matter because they reveal what you want from the decision, but they should not be mistaken for promises. You might hope that moving interstate will repair your marriage, that accepting a promotion will finally make you feel successful or that joining a different church will give you the community you have always wanted.
Take each hope and ask: If this does not happen, would I still make this choice?
If the decision only makes sense when your most optimistic expectations come true, you may be choosing an imagined future rather than the option actually in front of you. A sound decision should remain reasonably sound even if reality proves less rewarding than you hoped.
Finally, examine your fears. Do not dismiss them, but do not allow them to disguise themselves as facts either. Fear may be alerting you to a genuine danger, or it may simply be trying to protect you from uncertainty, criticism, embarrassment or disappointment.
Take each fear and make it specific. What exactly are you afraid will happen? How likely is it? What could you do to reduce the likelihood? If it happened anyway, what would you do next? Would the decision be reversible? What support, money, skills or alternatives would remain available to you?
Fear often becomes less powerful when it is forced to explain itself.
This process will not remove every uncertainty. Eventually, every major decision requires us to act without knowing everything. However, there is an important difference between uncertainty that cannot be resolved and uncertainty we have simply avoided investigating.
Before interpreting another coincidence as a sign, make sure you have asked every ordinary question whose answer could materially change your decision.
Then ask yourself two final questions:
Would I still choose this if my greatest hope did not eventuate?
Could I recover if my greatest fear did?
If the answer to the first question is no, you may be idealising the option. If the answer to the second is yes, the risk may be more manageable than it feels.
Let Your Values Lead
When people talk about making decisions according to their values, it can sound like something you would hear at a corporate planning day. Everyone writes words like family, integrity and courage on sticky notes, places them on a wall and then goes home without having decided anything.
The problem is that almost every option can be defended by appealing to a value.
You might be considering whether to move closer to an ageing parent. Going would allow you to support them, but it could uproot your children from a place where they are thriving. You might be deciding whether to proceed with a medical treatment that could extend your life but significantly reduce its quality. You might be wondering whether to lend money to a family member, knowing that generosity could help them through a crisis but also place strain on your own household.
In decisions like these, there may be no option that honours everything you care about.
That is when you need to stop asking what your values are in the abstract and ask what they require from you here.
What does your family actually need at this point in their lives? What responsibility is genuinely yours, and what are you carrying because you are afraid of disappointing someone? What part of your life has already absorbed too much neglect? What are you unwilling to achieve at the expense of your health, relationships or integrity?
These questions are uncomfortable because they force us to acknowledge that our values sometimes compete. Caring for an ageing parent may conflict with the stability of our children. Generosity may conflict with financial responsibility. Loyalty may conflict with honesty. Preserving life may conflict with preserving the kind of life someone considers bearable.
There is no single order in which those values must always appear. The question is which one most needs to guide you in this particular situation.
It can help to ask what you would regret betraying. Five years from now, which choice would be hardest to explain to yourself? Not which outcome would disappoint you, because outcomes are never entirely within your control. Which decision would leave you knowing that you ignored something you believed mattered deeply?
Acting according to your values does not guarantee the outcome you want, but it does mean your decision was grounded in something more substantial than fear, pressure or the desperate search for a sign. Sometimes God’s guidance may not arrive as new information. It may lie in taking seriously the convictions, responsibilities and relationships already entrusted to you.
Get Away by Yourself
Before making a major decision, get away by yourself for a while.
I do not mean sitting in your car for ten minutes while answering messages. I mean finding somewhere you can be alone, preferably in nature, without music, podcasts, emails or another person telling you what they think you should do.
Jesus regularly did this. The Gospels describe him withdrawing to lonely places, going into the wilderness, climbing mountains and praying alone. Even when people were looking for him and there was important work to be done, he sometimes stepped away from the noise.
Perhaps he understood something we tend to forget: constant input does not necessarily produce clarity.
When a decision matters, our instinct is often to gather more opinions. We talk to friends, search online, listen to podcasts and replay every possible outcome in our minds. Some of that is useful, but eventually all those voices become difficult to separate. We can no longer tell the difference between what we actually think, what someone else wants and what fear has been repeating most loudly.
Solitude creates enough distance for those voices to settle.
Nature helps because it demands very little from us. Trees do not need an answer. The ocean does not care whether you make the impressive choice. A walking track is not waiting for you to justify yourself. Away from the usual environment, the mind can loosen its grip on the problem rather than endlessly forcing it towards a conclusion.
This is where the contemplative mind becomes important. Most major decisions begin in the analytical mind, and rightly so. We compare costs, gather facts, consider risks and think about consequences. But the analytical mind can reach a point where it simply rearranges the same information. It produces another list, another hypothetical disaster and another reason to delay.
The contemplative mind works differently. It does not try to overpower uncertainty. It becomes quiet enough to notice what is already there.
Take the decision with you, but do not spend the entire time arguing with yourself about it. Walk. Sit somewhere. Pray if you can. Let yourself be silent long enough for the urgency to ease. You are not demanding that God provide an answer before you return home. You are creating room to notice what remains when the noise has diminished.
You may become aware that one option brings a sense of freedom while another feels completely the opposite. You may recognise that you have been calling something “wisdom” when it is actually fear. You may finally admit what you want, what you already know or what you have been avoiding because it will disappoint someone.
Trust His Leading
Once the noise has settled, pay attention to what your gut is telling you.
I know that “trust your gut” hardly sounds like serious Christian discernment. We are usually taught to distrust ourselves and look for guidance somewhere beyond us. Yet, if we believe the Holy Spirit is present within us, it seems strange to assume that guidance must always arrive from the outside.
Perhaps the Spirit sometimes guides us through our conscience, our accumulated wisdom, our compassion or a persistent discomfort we cannot quite explain. Maybe what we call a gut feeling is occasionally our conscious mind catching up with something we have already perceived at a deeper level.
You may have experienced this. An opportunity appears perfect on paper, but something about it will not sit right. You cannot identify a single decisive problem, yet you find yourself hoping it falls through. Alternatively, an option may involve genuine difficulty and uncertainty, but whenever you imagine choosing it, something within you seems to come alive.
When that happens, try living with the decision for a day, at least in your own mind. Assume you are going ahead and see how it feels to carry that choice around. Then do the same with the alternative. I have found that one option sometimes leaves me searching for reasons to justify it, while the other brings a sense of relief I had not expected. That reaction may not settle the matter, but it is worth paying attention to.
Of course, not every feeling comes from the Holy Spirit. Our instincts are also shaped by anxiety, past experiences, unconscious bias, wishful thinking and the outcome we have already decided we want. Fear can masquerade as wisdom, just as excitement can masquerade as peace.
That is why I would be slow to turn a gut feeling into the declaration, “God told me.” Instead, become curious about it. What might this feeling be responding to? Is there something you have noticed but minimised? Is it pointing towards a concern that needs further investigation? Does the feeling persist after you have slept, prayed, gathered information and allowed the initial emotion to pass?
Perhaps mature discernment is not always being certain that a feeling came from God. Sometimes it is learning to take that feeling seriously, test it honestly and remain humble about where it came from.
Your gut may not be the voice of God. But sometimes, it may be one of the places where the Spirit whispers.
Then Make the Decision
Eventually, you have to choose.
You will probably not reach that point because every doubt has disappeared or one option suddenly feels unquestionably right. You choose because you have gathered the information available to you, considered the people who will be affected, examined your hopes and fears, paid attention to your values and created enough quiet to listen to what is happening within you.
Then you make the wisest decision you can with what you know.
That may sound less spiritual than waiting for a supernatural sign, but perhaps it requires more faith. Certainty allows us to move forward knowing everything will work out. Faith asks us to move forward without that guarantee.
The outcome will not necessarily tell you whether you chose correctly. A wise decision can lead to disappointment. An opportunity that appeared right can unfold in ways you could not reasonably have predicted. We judge ourselves harshly in hindsight, using information that was not available when the decision had to be made.
After you decide, there will probably be a moment when something goes wrong and you wonder whether you misunderstood God completely. Try not to panic. Difficulty does not automatically mean you chose badly; it may simply mean that real life is simply unfolding. Allow some time for things to settle before putting the whole question back on the table.
Perhaps there are moments when God gives unmistakable direction. Angels may still appear, doors may close dramatically and a clear answer may arrive from somewhere beyond us. If that happens, terrific. Take notes.
Most of the time, however, we are given something quieter: wisdom to develop, people to love, responsibilities to honour, facts to consider and the freedom to choose.
Maybe faith is not believing that one wrong decision can derail God’s entire plan for your life. Maybe it is trusting that God is capable of meeting you on more than one road.
Having said that, if a pillar of fire does appear outside your house, follow it.