Acts 15:1-21 | Discerning God's Will預覽

Discerning God’s Will

It’s hard to overstate how important Acts 15 is. On the surface, it seems like just another meeting. And a boring one at that. What happens here guides the course of Christianity and speaks to the heart of how to discern and follow God’s will.

When Jesus met with his disciples at the Last Supper, he told them, “When he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you” (John 16:13-14).

This on the heels of, “But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you” (John 14:26).

Jesus says this on the night he’s arrested. The next day he’s crucified and killed. Three days later he rises from the dead, and after that he does appear to his disciples on occasion and spends some time teaching them. But he’s still leaving, which we see happen in Acts 1 when Jesus ascends into heaven to begin the work of establishing his kingdom.

Jesus isn’t here anymore. So what do we do when we have a question, or life presents a new set of circumstances that Jesus didn’t directly address? How do we go about discerning God’s will so we can live according to it? There’s no more practical or relevant question in the life of a Christian.

Jesus’s answer is that we’ll discern it and know it through the Spirit, but the answer just pushes the question down a bit. Because the same question can now be asked, “How do we discern what the Spirit is saying?” We can’t have a conversation with the Spirit, at least not in the way the first disciples could with Jesus like we see in the Gospels. How do we know what the Spirit is saying if we cannot hear his audible voice?

That’s what Acts 15 is about. Today, read Acts 15 and ask yourself two questions: (1) How did Jesus’s disciples go about discerning God’s will, and (2) How do you?