Long, long ago when I was in college I knew a fellow named Steve Hays. We occasionally commiserated about theology and one of a few observations he shared was that there seems to be a paradox at work--the Christians who are often biggest into free will are very concerned to discern what God's will is, to pray that one would find God's specific will in a specific situation. In other words a lot of effort went into the whole process of discovery. It is as though the more freedom you insist God has given you the more anxious you are to find out what GOD'S will for you in any given situation is.
Conversely, there were many people who were sure of God's providential direction who, to put it a bit simply, were content that anything not expressly forbidden to do in scripture was entirely within their Christian liberty to do. God has not given any specific instructions about what kind of job to have so you go and pursue the kind of job you would like to have provided it is not something that is prohibited by scripture. The Bible does not say whether or not YOU specifically should marry so you marry if you choose at the time that you choose. God does not generally tell you anything outside what is revealed in scripture so within the confines of what scripture does not prohibit you do whatever you want. These correspond roughly to what Mark Driscoll referred to as normative and regulative principles.
The paradox is that these modes seem to have applications that are inversely proportional to the formulated principles. The more likely you are to advocate the power of your freedom the more likely you are to be concerned in discerning what God's will is for your life. The more certain you are that God providentially directs all things the less certain you are that God has any particular interest in actually telling you whether you're going to have X job in Y place at Z time.
This often manifests in another paradox, that those who describe their calling and direction from God in the most passive terms tend to be the most active, even activist, in how they live out their life of faith. For instance, when I consider the life and example of Mark Driscoll he describes his calling in the most passive terms imaginable. God told him to marry Grace and plant a church to reach young men. Everything is about what God told Mark to do. He describes himself in many cases as the passive recipient of whatever God tasked him to go do.
Yet if you look at how he goes through life (especially if you've met the man) no one could be more active or even activist about trying to figure out and implement the nuts and bolts of what he believes God wants him to do. If a person is unusually cynical they have another assessment but I'll get to that cynicism and the problem of the flip side momentarily. Perhaps the most vivid articulation of the active implementation of what might otherwise be a man prone to describe his calling as passive is how Mark talked about prayer in his Ruth sermon series. In discussing Boaz' prayer of blessing for Ruth Driscoll had this broad observation to share, "sometimes you have to answer your own prayer." Now this was the same series in which Driscoll described himself as Abimelech, a guy who "could" ask God what His will is but generally doesn't bother to because he's got it all figured out. So, again, the paradox is that a man who describes his ministry as passively received by command of God admits that he's pretty much an action guy who makes plans and figures out what he's going to do.
Now lest someone get overly cynical this paradox, has precedent as far back as Paul. Paul wrote that he did more than all the other apostles yet also said that it was not him but Christ at work in him. Paul, too, describes his conversion experience in exceptionally passive terms. He is a recipient of salvation and not someone who "made a decision for Christ'. While a person could make the suggestion that a guy like Driscoll uses descriptions of God's calling to do what he basically wants to do we could say this about all sorts of religious leaders, even the apostle Paul. Unbelievers, of course, have been saying this for generations so it's no surprise there. It is the Christian in danger of hoisting himself on his own petard trying to use this argument selectively. The argument that someone else's spiritual hero is just doing what he wants in God's name applies equally well to your own hero, after all. And of course that is why I'm not presenting my observation and that of others as an argument, just as an observation.
But what I DO present as an argument is a caution, namely that what I have seen in a guy like Driscoll is a willingness to present his own words from the Lord at face value while expressing from the pulpit a significant skepticism about the words of God claimed by other spiritual people. Driscoll doesn't do this quite so much any more but he used to do it regularly. Having recounted that there were people who were claiming God wanted them to run the church he was planting I understand that skepticism on his part, but as I wrote earlier, skepticism is invariably a double-edged sword here. Both experience and a lack of it or changes in it can often precipitate drastic changes in theology. We would do well to be cautious in claiming for ourselves what we would deny others.
At the other side are folks from charismatic backgrounds who believe that we have free will and talk about how God communicates to us. For these people the freedom is paradoxically moot because people are urged to find out what God's will for them is. It is ironic that those who lay stock by the divine permission of freedom seem least eager to use it and pray through or "tarry" until they figure out what God wants. But in the end a person could persuasively argue that in both cases people are trying to figure out what they want to do and employ different modes of theological language to figure out what that is. These people want to move to the place where they feel they are in God's will. If the annointing has moved to Toronto then visit Toronto to catch the fresh fire. If you aren't sure what to do then pursue the feeling of peace that what you are doing is in God's will and, say, doesn't this end up looking pretty much the same as with the other folks who just do what they want and trust that God is going to providentially work it all out?
The danger in the application of both "theories" of divining the will of God is that if you don't know what YOU want God certainly doesn't spell things out in most cases and it is presumptuous to suppose that God has something so important that He has to tell you about it in some unusual way. Or, to go by the precedent of saints of old, if you're thick-headed and stubborn enough that God has to actually tell you what to do then that speaks poorly of your inattention to the Lord.
There are two other considerations about the active/passive faith distinction. A "passive" faith can be considered accepting that whatever happens is God's will, whether circumstances are good or bad. The "active" faith is considered to be the conviction that prayer moves the heart of God and that if you ask in Jesus' name that prayer will be answered. The passive approach describes the functin of prayer as changing your heart toward God so that you accept His providential will while the active version of faith is seen as pouring your heart out to the Lord in the faith that God will respond.
I can't take either extreme seriously. It is true that to say prayer's chief end is to change our acceptance or lack of acceptance about circumstances does not fit with the entirety of what the scriptures teache about prayer and what saints have understood prayer to be. If someone prays for thirty years and that petition is never granted how long do we avoid the surmise that God's answer to said prayer is "no"?
On the other hand, enough prayers get answered in unobservable ways that we end up seeing that faith is faith, the substance of things hoped for the evidence for which is unseen. Abraham knew that his body was as good as dead and that his wife was barren. He believed God, often fitfully and with starts and stops and spectacular lapses, but he believed God.
This was not, however, a positive confession, nor a "blab it and grab it" or "name it and claim it" approach to trusting God. Abraham was promised something by God without having asked for it. Now we live in a time in which studies have, as unbelievers have often touted, established that prayer has no medical effect whatever and that prayer is useless to change circumstances. If your theology of prayer hinges on the idea that your prayers change the order of the universe unbelievers have a ready answer for you, your prayers don't matter. If your theology of prayer is that it changes your heart toward your circumstances and toward God's providence then your reply would be that such studies that supposedly disprove the effectiveness of prayer fail to grasp one of the key reasons God would have us pray to Him, for fellowship and to better understand His character.
This is not a case of one or the other as a chorus from a Paula Abdul song insists it is. Yet many frustrations about prayer can stem from embracing one of these two aspects without giving due consideration to the other. God is not obliged to answer our prayers insofar as He is God and owes us nothing, yet we are taught that if we pray in the Lord's name the Father will hear and grant whatever we request.
The question inevitably becomes what it means to ask for something in the name of Jesus. Many things have been asked in the name of Jesus that were declined, such as the removal of the thorn in Paul's flesh. It was not wrong for Paul to ask that that thorn be removed but the answer God made to that prayerwas clearly "no", which came in the form of "my grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness." Paul in his action of prayer was admonished to recognize the need of a "passive" acceptance of the weakness God was content to give him just as he was active more than the other apostles in proclaiming what he had passively received. As I have been attempting to demonstrate, many of the contrasts we construct in our minds about the contrast between "active" faith and "passive" faith is ultimately pedestrian, academic, and woefully inaccurate. In what may surely be a case of a broken clock telling the correct time twice a day I once heard Benny Hinn say that it doesn't matter how much faith you have if whatever amount of faith you do have is in Christ.
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