R.C. Sproul

She said, well, listen to what it said.

It said, Rejoice, daughter of Zion.

Behold, your prince cometh to thee riding upon a donkey.

She said, God told me that I was going to have a husband.

I said, wait a minute.

This sounds like, you know, Cinderella or something.

Someday my prince will come, for heaven's sakes.

I said, well, the only way that's going to be fulfilled is if you see some guy riding across the quadrangle to Martha and Hun on a donkey, and there's this fat chance of that.

Well, three days later, this guy asked her out.

They started a relationship.

They got married.

He's in the ministry.

She's been a minister's wife ever since, and you cannot tell her to this day that God did not answer her specific question with her quite questionable manner of discerning the will of God.

Well, sometimes our desire to know the will of God is so intense that we resort to practice like that that I think are seriously displeasing to God.

We can become the evil and adulterous generation that seeks after a sign, and we can become so preoccupied with the explicit will of God for our lives that we offend Him by resorting to techniques that the Old Testament would have considered magic and would have frowned upon with great disdain.

And so what I want to do is look at legitimate ways that the Bible gives us and sets before us of discerning the will of God.

Now certainly praying for the leading of God is acceptable and pleasing to God, and I don't mean to suggest to you that God doesn't from time to time visit us with extraordinary providential direction.

But we call it extraordinary providential direction because that's what it is, extraordinary.

And I don't think that we should simply assume that God is going to take us by the hand and move us from town to town and from job to job and relationship to relationship with this kind of dramatic manifestations.

There is a real sense in which the just shall live by faith.