Does God have a plan for your life? Well, not really.

Well, not so fast. Is this claim actually supported by Scripture?

Immediately after the Day of Pentecost and its empowerment of the church by the Holy Spirit, Peter and the other disciples began preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ in Jerusalem. Acts records that "great numbers of both men and women" were converted to faith in Christ by their preaching. As a result, the Jewish high priest and some allies on the Jewish high council had the apostles arrested and locked in prison.

But during the night an angel of the Lord opened the prison doors, brought them out, and said, 20 'Go, stand in the temple and tell the people the whole message about this life.' 21When they heard this, they entered the temple at daybreak and went on with their teaching" (Acts 5:19-21).

When the council discovered it, they had the Temple police bring Peter and the others to stand before them.

Acts 5:27-32:

   27 When they had brought them, they had them stand before the council. The high priest questioned them, 28 saying, “We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you are determined to bring this man’s blood on us.”

   29 But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than any human authority. 30 The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. 31 God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. 32 And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.”

“We must obey God,” the apostles said. I have to tell you, I am not impressed by those words. God commands it! That was what Osama bin Laden declared before 9/11, when he said that it is the duty of every Muslim to kill infidels wherever they are found. Since then al Qaeda, ISIS, and other such groups have made grisly work of what they insist is divine duty, most recently a week ago in Sri Lanka.

Now, it's easy to point fingers at Muslim terrorists. In fact, it's required, but it doesn't get us Christians off the hook. When I was a boy, I worked a couple of summers in the now-gone Woodlawn Market in Nashville. The owner was the staunchest racist I ever met in person. He was absolutely ironclad in his belief that God's will was that black people be oppressed. He was convinced beyond persuasion otherwise that black skin was the mark of Cain. Cain was the first murderer in the Bible, whom God sent to exile with every hand against him. Racism was to Pappy literally a holy duty.

I am guessing that most of us can think of someone who was convinced he or she was obeying God in things we thought were disturbing, even shocking. So I read Peter's retort to the high priest as potentially troubling. "There's what you want and there's what God wants," Peter is saying. "And we obey God, not you."

That's real in-your-face stuff, and following verses explain that the officials there were so vexed at Peter's defiance they wanted to kill the apostles.

I am going to take the high priest's side here, at least for a moment. I don't defend his desire to have Peter killed. But the high priest and I have something in common. We're both clergy of well-established religions. When something upsets the apple cart of proper religious order, we get our hackles up and immediately set about trying to bring it under our control.

Of course, this makes us no different from business managers or most parents. But what makes the issue especially nettlesome for clergy is that we formally recognize that the Holy Spirit is supposed to be breaking in and upsetting our apple cart. In fact, I often think that one on the main reasons the Holy Spirit came to enliven the church on the Day of Pentecost was to stir things up and keep believers on their toes.

Nonetheless, there are some issues for all of us, the church assembled, to consider.

One is that if it is unacceptable to excuse sin by saying like Flip Wilson's character Geraldine, "The devil made me do it," then it is equally unacceptable to use a claim of divine mandate as an excuse for doing what oneself wants to do. Cathy and I knew a woman in Virginia who told us that she knew it was God's will for her to win the lottery because she would give more than a tithe of the jackpot to the church. True story.

"God requires it" has been used to justify everything from simple murder to mass murder to tyranny and oppression. So the claim that one is acting from divine authority deserves to be regarded with deep suspicion at least at first.

On the other hand there is a real chance that someone really might be acting under God's command, and therefore we must leave the possibility open.

So how to tell?

I think a crucial key is found in what Peter went on to say: “We are witnesses,” he said, to what we testify. Which is to say, God did not reveal Christ to me privately, but publicly, with others, all of whom attest to this truth.

This is important because the unambiguous testimony of the apostles in the New Testament is that Christian faith and practice are not solitary ventures. Everywhere the apostles went they did two things, never separated from one another: they brought people to confess faith in Christ as risen Lord and organized the new believers into churches.

The apostle Paul explained more than once that the body of Christ present in the world today is the aggregation of Christ's present disciples organized as the church. I have found no evidence in the New Testament that people can live Christian lives apart from the church belonging to Jesus Christ.

More than thirty years ago my pastor in North Carolina put it this way: "I won't tell you that you can't be a good Christian outside the church. I'll tell you that you can't be any kind of Christian outside the church." That statement struck me as pretty stark at the time. We Americans are stiff-necked individualists. We pretty much think that whatever we want to do we should be able to do on our own, but that's not how the New Testament sees it.

Anyone can be religious outside the church, but Jesus did not minister, teach, suffer, die and rise just to make us religious. Religions are a dime a dozen. Founding another one sure didn't require God's incarnation, or Christ's passion, death and resurrection. We are not called to be merely religious, but to be transformed and made anew in Christ's likeness – to be a new people, a new kind of community. So when we think God has some special demand for us, or someone makes that claim to us, we need to discern whether its context is related to the present body of Christ. Whom does the command serve, Christ or self?

And that leads to the second way to assess a claim that “God commands it.” It is the famous lawyers’ question, “Who benefits?” The apostles gained nothing from preaching Christ but severe tests of their character, their faithfulness, perseverance, and fortitude. All were killed but one for insisting that they had to obey God rather than human authority. They might have been killed the day of this passage had not a wise rabbi spoken against it. So, who benefited? By the standards of the world, none of the apostles did.

The experiences of the apostles and other devoted Christians through the centuries is that God play his cards pretty close to the vest. God’s commands often do not make sense to us or do not appeal to us. God generally leads us only one step at a time. So, I am leery of visionaries with grand plans, all filled in from start to finish, because I don't see in the Bible where God explains that he has

God did not give Moses a plan. He gave him a command.

a plan. He gives commands, such as telling Moses, "Go tell Pharaoh to let my people go," and that was that. When the Lord spoke to Paul on the Damascus road, he did not lay out Paul's apostolic mission to him, culminating in being crucified in Rome. Christ simply told him, "Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do" (Acts 9:6). Even Peter, in today's passage, had no sense of grand mission. He didn't tell the high priest, "God wants me to be the foremost of all his apostles and become the first bishop of Rome, founder of what will become the worldwide Roman Catholic Church." All he understood God wanted him to do was preach the Gospel. He started out a street-corner preacher and there is no evidence that on his own account that he thought God wanted him to be anything else.

God's commands are pretty simple, at least at first. Sometimes they may not make a lot of sense and leave one wanting to ask him, Why? But enlightenment is not the point; we leave that to the eastern mystics. Obeying God is the point.

Speaking of obedience, there are some basic commandments of Christ that are obligatory of all Christian people and churches wherever found. These commandments are not mysterious; they are clearly stated in the Scriptures: pray, give, love, forgive, help, worship. Bear one another's burdens, esteem others more highly than oneself. Love God, love neighbor. Be baptized. Consider our lives lost to the world and gained in Christ. Use all that we have to the glory of God and the building up of the kingdom of Heaven. These are the foundational commands God give us.

The story is told of a star college football player named Eddie. Almost every week the school paper had a photograph of Eddie leaping across the goal line for a touchdown or jumping high into the air catching an impossible pass. Oh, Eddie was good! The cheerleaders loved him. Eddie loved them back. 
One day, Eddie went to the coach and said, “Coach I’m not coming to practice anymore.” The coach said, “Eddie, are you quitting?” Eddie replied, “Oh, no, I’m not quitting. I’ll still dress for the games on Saturdays. But you know Mondays? Mondays you make us to do wind sprints. And Tuesdays is grass drills and strength training. Wednesdays is full contact practice. Thursdays is special team drills. I don’t like all that. I’m not going to do any of that anymore. But come game time, Coach, you can count on me. I’ll catch those passes, I’ll make those touchdowns, I’ll get my picture in the paper. And after the game I’ll go out with the prettiest cheerleader. I like all that! But man, I’m not going to suffer through your practices anymore.”

Now ask yourself whether come Saturday the coach sent Eddie into the game.

So, another test of discerning whether we are given a particular command from God is to ponder whether we have been faithful in carrying out God's general commands. If God cannot trust me do the basics, why would he command me to accomplish the special? 

Jesus said, "Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much" (Luke 16:10).

But suppose you work through all those things and conclude that God indeed is giving you a special command or laying upon you a special obligation. What then? Then Peter's courage is a model. Peter had to know the tempers flaring at him and his fellow disciples. Before the council, recognizing the danger, Peter and the disciples stood their ground precisely because they were under God's mandate.

The pressures and excuses the world lures us to turn from following Christ are innumerable. They are also hard to resist because to say yes to Christ we must say no to something, or someone, else – for example, Sunday morning league sports (but now I’m meddling). But to obey God, staying on course is the only faithful option. Only coincidentally will the world at large approve of our faithful service, but that's okay. The world's applause is far more spiritually dangerous than its jeers.

New Testament scholar Robert Wall wrote (NIB) that Peter’s “heroic retort to the high priest" served “missionary ends.” Peter was a “witness to God’s salvation of Israel. He [was] not the leader of a movement of protest but a movement of God."

And that is what we are under God's command to do: proclaim salvation through Jesus Christ our Lord. May we be satisfied with God's direction for each day, not for our sake, but for the sake of those who know him not.