Thanks so much for your note to us here at TruthBook about God’s will. Being able to discern what God’s will is for us can be a challenge, especially when we are dealing with a specific situation, which appears to be the case in your inquiry.
It seems to me that the first step in discovering God’s will is to establish what we know about God; when we know what motivates God, how he administers his creation, how he ministers to individuals, we can then gain important insight as to what he might want for us – even in any specific situation.
If you are a Urantia Book reader, you have hopefully read Part I, which tells us more than any of us have ever known about God – his reality, his nature, and his personality. If you have not yet read papers 1-5 about God, I recommend that you do so.
149:6.7 Said Jesus: “You have been taught that you should `fear God and keep his commandments, for that is the whole duty of man.’ But I have come to give you a new and higher commandment. I would teach you to `love God and learn to do his will, for that is the highest privilege of the liberated sons of God.’ Your fathers were taught to `fear God—the Almighty King.’ I teach you, `Love God—the all-merciful Father.’
“In the kingdom of heaven, which I have come to declare, there is no high and mighty king; this kingdom is a divine family. The universally recognized and unreservedly worshiped center and head of this far-flung brotherhood of intelligent beings is my Father and your Father … Cease, then, to fear God as a king or serve him as a master; learn to reverence him as the Creator; honor him as the Father of your spirit youth; love him as a merciful defender; and ultimately worship him as the loving and all-wise Father of your more mature spiritual realization and appreciation.
So, according to Jesus, LOVE is the operative attitude we should have towards God, as LOVE is his operative attitude towards us. In our past history, God’s will has sometimes engendered a kind of fear or dread that his will might mean having to do something we don’t really want; and this was as a result of our faulty understanding of God and his merciful, loving nature. But, when we know that God loves us as a Father, we can then assume that his will for us is one that would be consistent with any good father’s will for a child that he loves. If you are perplexed by a choice in your life, wondering which direction is consistent with God’s will, asking yourself what a loving father would want for you in any situation is a great place to start.
And of course, when you know that God is the most intimate friend that you can ever have, cultivating a close relationship in your inner life with him will always help you in discerning the best things to do.
111:5.1 The doing of the will of God is nothing more or less than an exhibition of creature willingness to share the inner life with God—with the very God who has made such a creature life of inner meaning-value possible. Sharing is Godlike—divine. God shares all with the Eternal Son and the Infinite Spirit, while they, in turn, share all things with the divine Sons and spirit Daughters of the universes.
You are not alone in your quest for understanding God’s will; over the years, we have fielded several question similar to yours, and I am giving you those links here, so that you can read all of them.
Does God’s Will Make Us Happy?
What does it mean to do the Will of G.od?
Thanks again for writing with this always-important question – a question that has intrigued humanity forever. Now, thanks to The Urantia Book, we children of God have a much clearer understanding of the answer to this vital question. I hope that this reply has been helpful.
