Reflecting on the experiences of his life and ministry, Rev. Jack Harnish ponders the complexities of knowing the divine will.
REV. JACK HARNISH
Retired Pastor, Michigan Conference
I guess I’ve struggled all my life with the business of knowing God’s will. Oh, I’m pretty good at seeing where God’s hand was at work or where God was leading in hindsight, but I’ve always been hesitant about claiming to know just what God wanted in advance. I had friends in college who seemed to know exactly who God wanted them to marry or where God wanted them to go in life, while I was still dating around and fumbling with my calling. It was spring of my senior year before I got around to asking one Judy Stone, “the question”. Lucky for me, she said, “Yes” and the rest, as they say, is history. If you had asked me back then where my ministry would take me, I never would have guessed much of what has taken place in the past 50 years.
God’s direction has usually come to me with all the force of a nudge–just a hint, just a sense that this might be the right way to go, but if I had gone a different way, I think I would still be looking back saying, “It must have been God’s will.”
Maybe part of it is because when we were at Asbury College 50 years ago, the school went through four presidents in four years. The campus was often in turmoil, but there were plenty of folks who thought they knew who God had chosen to be president. I learned that even saints could be wrong and downright nasty at times, so when someone says, “God wanted Donald Trump to be President,” I think, “Well … maybe.”
I thought the same thing this week when a spokesperson for the Traditionalist Plan for the future of the United Methodist Church put out a podcast where he invited everyone to pray for God’s spirit to lead in the upcoming General Conference, and then spent most of his time directing exactly where that should be.
The one promise I have built my life on is Romans 8:28: “God works, in all things, for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.” This is where the old practice of diagramming sentences would be helpful. God is the subject, works is the verb. The prepositional phrases modify it: in all things, for good, with those who love him. (I think the King James Version gets it all wrong when it says, “All things work together for good.”) St. Paul doesn’t say that “all things” are God’s will or that “all things” are good. To me it says whatever happens, whatever good or bad decisions I make, whatever blessings or burdens or “things” life throws at me, God will still be at work in everything to bring about good, with and through those who love him.
There’s a wonderful hymn which doesn’t appear in the United Methodist hymnal, but it was in the old hymnal we used at little Mt. Zion United Methodist Church in Beautiful Lookout, Pennsylvania. It was one of three small churches on my first charge out of seminary. With only a half a dozen regular worshipers, we closed Mt. Zion, but the faithful witness of those wonderful saints who held it together to the end still inspires me:
God of our life, through all the circling years, we trust in thee.
In all the past, through all our hopes and fears, Thy hand we see.
With each new day as morning lifts the veil,
We own Thy mercies, Lord, which never fail.
Last Updated on September 20, 2022