I realize that I have been absent, but I assure you that it was not out of laziness. I have authored and published my first book (link at the bottom), and I am working on my next book.

Today, I want to examine the plan God has for our lives by posing a series of foundational questions:

• “Am I where God wants me to be?”
• “Am I where I deserve to be?”
• “How do I know that God wants me where I am?”
• “How do I do God’s will?”
• “How do I tune my heart to listen for His direction?”

The Fallacy of Circumstantial Justification

Consider the justification of the individual sitting at the bar, the gambling house, or the strip club: “If God did not want me here, I wouldn’t be here.” This phrase is not the catalyst that initiated the action; it is the anchor welded to the soul to keep that person in the seat.

The Architecture of the Anchor

“For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.” (1 John 2:16).

The rationalization, however, is a defense mechanism triggered by conviction. When the Holy Spirit presses upon the individual in that environment, the carnal mind must invent a firewall to block the conviction so the flesh can remain. To stay in the seat, the individual actively perverts the doctrine of God’s sovereignty. They construct a fatalistic argument that shifts culpability from their own free will to the Creator:

• The False Logic: God is all-powerful. I am sitting in this bar. If God is all-powerful, He could physically prevent me from being here. He has not. Therefore, my presence here is endorsed by His inaction.
• The Biblical Reality: This psychological rebellion is the act of a man ruining his life through sin and then blaming God for the outcome.
  • James 1:13-14: “Let no man say when he is tempted, ‘I am tempted of God’: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man: but every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust and enticed.”
  • Proverbs 19:3: “The foolishness of man perverteth his way, and his heart fretteth against the LORD.”

The Seared Conscience

Using God’s sovereignty to justify blatant rebellion is a highly destructive state of mind. It requires the individual to look at an environment fundamentally hostile to God and declare it to be His will. This is the precise definition of calling evil good.

When a person repeatedly relies on this justification to stay in the seat, they actively damage their capacity to process the truth, leading to a distorted moral perspective that aligns with the biblical warning against calling evil good.

1 Timothy 4:2: “Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron.”

Isaiah 5:20: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”

If you receive a text message while sitting at a bar asking, “Are you where God wants you to be?” the answer is blatantly obvious. The environment itself is fundamentally opposed to the holiness of God. However, the deception of the flesh is far more subtle when the environment appears righteous.

What happens when that same text message arrives while you are sitting in a church pew, serving at a soup kitchen, handing out tracts in a park, or building a school in a foreign country? The immediate human reaction is to assume that because the action is “good,” the placement must be ordained. This assumption is a critical error. God requires obedience, not unauthorized sacrifice.

Here is the breakdown of the five questions applied to this dichotomy of environment.

1. “Am I where God wants me to be?”

A righteous location does not automatically equal divine placement. You can be entirely out of the will of God while standing behind a pulpit or feeding the poor if God instructed you to be somewhere else. Operating outside of God’s specific command, even to do a “good work,” is rebellion disguised as righteousness. King Saul lost his kingdom because he offered a sacrifice to God instead of waiting for the prophet Samuel as instructed.

• 1 Samuel 15:22: “And Samuel said, Hath the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.”

2. “Am I where I deserve to be?”

The human mind easily accepts that the man in the bar deserves judgment. But the mind struggles to accept that the man building an orphanage in a foreign country deserves the exact same judgment. Whether in a strip club or a soup kitchen, human merit results in condemnation. Any position of service or utility in God’s kingdom is unmerited grace. Relying on the “goodness” of your current location to justify your standing before God is prideful and biblically false.

• Isaiah 64:6: “But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.”

3. “How do I know that God wants me where I am?”

You cannot measure God’s will by the visual optics of the task. A man can hand out tracts in a park simply to feed his ego or to earn the praise of his peers. Knowing God wants you there requires examining the motive and the fruit. Are you there because you surrendered your will to the Holy Spirit, or are you there because it makes you look spiritual to others? If the motivation is rooted in self, you are operating in the flesh, regardless of how holy the environment looks.

• Proverbs 14:12: “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.”

4. “How do I do God’s will?”

Doing God’s will requires executing His specific commands for your life, not executing your own ideas of what is best for Him. Christ explicitly warned that many will stand before Him citing their impressive, righteous works—prophesying, casting out devils, doing wonderful works—and He will cast them into hell because they were operating outside of His will.

• Matthew 7:22-23: “Many will say to me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.”

5. “How do I tune my heart to listen for His direction?”

To tune your heart, you must silence the noise of your ambitions, including your “spiritual” ambitions. The flesh constantly wants to do something to prove its worth. Tuning your heart requires stopping the frantic pace of self-directed good works, submitting to the authority of scripture, and waiting for the Lord’s actual direction. You cannot hear the commander’s orders if you are already charging into a battle. He did not tell you to fight.

• Psalm 46:10: “Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.”

The Danger of the Unauthorized Position

The physical location of a person—whether sitting on a barstool or standing behind a pulpit—is secondary to the posture of their obedience. The human mind is inherently deceptive, seeking to justify its rebellion by pointing either to the permissive sovereignty of God in a place of sin or the visual optics of righteousness in a place of service. Both are catastrophic errors.

If a man is in a gambling house, he is actively indulging the flesh and using fatalism as a shield against conviction. If a man is building an orphanage without the express command of God, he is offering an unauthorized sacrifice and using “good works” to mask his pride. True alignment with the will of God is not found in merely avoiding the world’s most obvious traps, nor is it found in frantically doing good deeds to validate a position. It is found in absolute submission to the precise commands of scripture.

To operate outside of these parameters—regardless of how noble the task appears to the world—is to step into the exact same rebellion as the man in the bar.

• 1 Samuel 15:23: “For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because thou hast rejected the word of the LORD, he hath also rejected thee from being king.”

This understanding demands a deeper examination of our current situation. If our location and actions must be strictly commanded by God, we must identify where we actually stand within His sovereign narrative. We must determine if we are the instrument of His deliverance, the vessel of His wrath, the unwitting interceptor, or the rebellious prophet.

This is part of the true freedom that God has given each and every one of His children.