Dial In with Jonny Ardavanis - God's Will Explained: How to Know God's Plan for Your Life | Costi Hinn and Jonny Ardavanis

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

Discover the truth about walking in God's will with Pastor Costi Hinn and Jonny Ardavanis as Costi demystifies what it means to follow God's plan for your life. In this powerful conversation, learn the difference between God's sovereign will and His revealed will, and why biblical literacy is essential for making confident decisions.Are you paralyzed by fear of making the wrong choice? Struggling with decision-making anxiety? This episode tackles common misconceptions about God's will and provides practical wisdom for Christians seeking direction.Key topics covered:- Understanding the different types of God's will- Why humility is essential for discerning God's plan- How biblical literacy empowers confident decision-making- Breaking free from analysis paralysis- Making peace with your past decisionsBased on Costi Hinn's new book "Walking in God's Will: Demystifying God's Plan for Your Life and Make Decisions with Confidence" - available now wherever books are sold.Watch VideosVisit the Website Buy Costi's BookBuy Consider the LiliesFollow on Instagram

The misconception needs to be addressed that God doesn't want you to know his will for your life. Yeah, it's like this moving target. Yeah, no, he wants you to know his will, which is why he reveals it in his word. And over and over again, even in the New Testament, you read the terminology of this is the will of God. When we read about God's secret will or his sovereign will, we hear in Deuteronomy 29, 29, the secret things belong to our God. It brings a humility over us to say, you know, there are things I'm just not going to know. And I don't need to have anxiety about those. I don't need to worry and try to control them. I just need to trust the Lord. And I've got plenty to worry about over here.

Sometimes we get so caught up in the adventurous side of God's will that we don't do the basic things he's already revealed. Welcome to Dial-In Ministries podcast. I'm here with my friend Kosti Hinn. Kosti, how you doing? Doing great, man. How you doing? So good. I'm holding up your new book, which comes out on March 11th, five days after Shaquille O'Neal's birthday. That's something I know because I memorized basketball cards as a kid when I went to bed. But March 11th, just to print it in your mind, five days after Shaquille O'Neal's birthday, walking in God's will. If it's okay if I break the fourth wall here, I'm going to look at this camera.

This is a book. The subtitle is Demystifying God's Plan for Your Life and Make Decisions with Confidence. Now that question, what is the will of God for my life, for our future, for the decisions we make, is a question that every single Christian asks in every single age. So let's just define, let's provide a definition of terms. You do this in your book, I think in a really helpful way, because there's in scripture, you could say different types of the will of God. You have God's will will not be broken, Ephesians 1.11, he's ordering everything according to the counsel of his will. But then there's the will of God

that people disobey all the time because they refuse to submit to his command. So just explain that to me like I'm a total novice, which you are the expert here because you just wrote a book on it. But talk to me about the different types of God's will. Okay, so that's the way theologians would categorize it. They have God's, what's called, you could say God's sovereign will or God's will. Okay. So that's the way theologians would categorize it. They have God's, what's called,

you could say God's sovereign will or God's decretive will, like God's will of decree. You can hear kind of even the word decree in that. Some people call it God's secret will because it's things that he knows. I don't like that term as much per se as a overall category for God's sovereign will

because there are things that God will do in his sovereignty that become revealed and we see it. So when it's secret, it's sometimes confusing for people. I think, well, I guess I'll never know that. Well, no, it'll come to pass eventually. But I would just say God's decree of will, God's will of decree. Everything in part of God's will of decree is going to happen. Yes. He knows it. We don't always, but it will become eventually revealed. Second category is going to be God's revealed will. That is his will of command, or some will call this his preceptive will, because his precepts, you can hear the word precept in that.

It's what God has revealed. It is his commands, his prohibitions, his promises, his warnings, his judgments, all of those things. You can see them in scripture. And so not to be pithy and oversimplified with it. It's very simple when we say God's word is God's will. Or if you want to know God's will, you need to be saturated with God's word. It's not just being kind of a fortune cookie, one-liner Christian and saying things that sound pithy and we put them on bumper stickers. Sincerely, genuinely, if people would be saturated with the word of God, they're going to have a lot more confidence in knowing the will of God and

walking in it. At the same time, we got to be humble. And I talk about this in the book, the number one quality you need to know and understand and walk in God's will. I would argue, and I do this in the book, I argue for it being humility. The reason for that is because we're going to read things or understand things in scripture, then wrestle with them. Well, what about this? Or it doesn't seem fair that God would not that. Or, well, I just want to know, wouldn't it be better if I knew? And well, I feel like God is going to do this. And I feel like God is telling me that it might be this. We wrestle on the human side because we are control freaks. We want to know and we want to establish and we want to order.

But when we read about God's secret will or his sovereign will, we hear in Deuteronomy 29, 29, the secret things belong to our God. It brings a humility over us to say, you know, there are things I'm just not going to know. And I don't need to have anxiety about those. I don't need to worry and try to control them. I just need to trust the Lord. And I've got plenty to worry about over here.

God has told me to do this. I'm not. Maybe I should. Maybe I should be more concerned with my purity or making wise decisions or who I would marry or what I should do at work by way of my work ethic versus which job would God want me to take? And I wish I knew that. Sometimes we get so caught up in the adventurous side of God's will that we don't do the basic things he's already revealed. So those

two categories help us with the start of the conversation. So let's go to God's revealed will. And you talk about this a little bit in your book, but let's talk biblical literacy. Yeah. Because you mentioned in your book that basically the biblical alliteracy, like people just don't know the word of God, so they can't know the will of God. This is kind of a preliminary step to, if you want to know the will of God for your life, you said it, you have to be saturated in the word of God. Just maybe expound and extrapolate on that for a moment. Why is biblical literacy so important to even this conversation? Let's talk basketball for a second.

Come on. Come on. I was like, what's going on here? You're talking about Shaquille O'Neal's birthday and all those things. Let's say somebody goes to their first basketball game and they have been very, very avid as a fan. There's a level of joy right now just waiting for what you're about to say. Let's say that they've come to that basketball game as an avid curling fan. Have you ever heard of curling? This thing? Yeah, when they broom the ice and yell, hard, hard. I've seen it, you know,

for eight years or so. I'm Canadian. I grew up watching curling once in a while. It's like a giant version of shuffleboard with broomsticks. And you come to that with your own obsession with another sport, rules, context, players, different playing surface. And you look at basketball and you're constantly nitpicking basketball or opinions on the game or why are they doing this?

They should be this. Why is no one wearing sweaters? Where are the brooms? And you're thinking through how wrong what they're doing is or the issues with it or the things that don't match because you've come with a completely different context in your mind. We come to God's will the same way. I think, I feel, well, it should be this. Well, this is my life. This is what I want. This is what God should do. Even a bad approach towards who God is, an unbiblical approach, like he's just this magic genie and he exists for our happiness and he exists for

our wishes. And so if we do the right things, God will, we view God's will as a transaction. And so you've got to put aside your presuppositions and your context and what you would assume, put it all off to the side. Not that what you want doesn't matter, but it needs to wait until you understand what God's word says. Then you go to the word of God. And when you study that and go back to what you want, then it begins to, I think, fit together. And again, back to humility. So I make everyone go on this journey with me with a pit stop.

We take an exit at bibliology, the study of scripture. And in a very everyday, kind of everyday people way and very simple everyday language, I walk people through what they should believe about the Bible and what's important about what you believe about the Bible in order to really embrace and understand God's will. And so we talk about inerrancy,

that God's word is without error, that it is true. Because now when you say God's word is God's will, well, what if there's mistakes? I want you to understand you can take it to the bank. What about the sufficiency of God's word? You say, well, the Bible's helpful here, there, and in a few other places, but I need this in order to really know what to do. I know that the Bible won't teach you how to change your oil. I know that the Bible is not going to teach you how to do heart surgery, but the Bible will teach you and tell you what God's will is for the kind of person you should be as the heart surgeon doing the heart surgery.

No one's under some false illusion that the Bible is a book for medical procedures, but it'll teach you how to start a business. You say, how? Better than Alex Ramosi, better than anybody else. The Bible will teach you the kind of person you should be in order to properly handle business, success, people, staffing, teams, direction, vision, strategy, and all of it. So if we start with what the Bible says and understanding scripture, then move to action and decisions with a belief that God's word is true. It will then impact the way we operate. Yeah.

Well, first of all, that's great. And then secondly, I think I was extra engaged because you started with basketball. And so I want to give for that. I appreciate that. So let's even, you know, you talked about presuppositions. Unless we're grounded and I would say submitted to the word of God, we come to the subject of the will of God with our own level of thoughts and maybe we want the scripture to affirm what our idea of God's will for our life is.

You know, like, so we can do that. You mentioned some misconceptions and I want to maybe go off on that for a second. So you talked about how some people view God as a magic genie or God's will is transactional. You use the term in your subtitle, demystify God's plan, you know, because there's a lot of ambiguity around the subject. It's like a cosmic Easter egg hunt. Let's find it. It's a riddle wrapped in a mystery, packaged in an enigma, people say.

So talk about misconceptions regarding God's will, because obviously you've said we got to ground ourself in bibliology. And it's not just because we can approach the subject with an errant philosophy of God's will, but it's because there's no clarity unless we look at it through the perspective of scripture. So let's just talk misconceptions

regarding God's will for a moment. Yeah, so I think a few misconceptions right away is that it's really hard to know. That'd be maybe the first one is like, it's just not that easy. I'm always, I'm just trying to find what God's will is for my life and not at all to be cheeky or patronizing to people.

I would say it's very easy to know the will of God. If you understand what we've already talked about, the difference between God's sovereign or decreed will and God's revealed will, it's easy. And we need to go back to the Bible and that would eliminate that misconception in particular. I think also another misconception is that, well, the Bible can't really inform my real decision,

my practical decisions, Johnny. I know you want to be theological, but we need to be practical here. God's not interested. He's not involved with, and there's not really much the Bible can do to help me decide which university. I mean, it's either this one or this one or which job. It's either this one or this one. I've got to decide those things and I've got to figure it out. And actually, I would disagree completely. God's will, even if not explicitly commanding which job you should take or which restaurant thou shalt eat at P.F. Chang's and not, you know, Mastro's or Maggiano's or whatever else. Thou shalt have shrimp and not steak. No, but I mean, we don't go too far.

I know. We don't want to get into that. Carnivore is God's will. But I would say that God's will has, or sorry, God's word rather, has a number of key principles that you can apply to knowing and enacting God's will. So the misconception being that God is divorced from these everyday decisions and the practical. So first, it's not easy to know. I just can't know. Or, you know, what I do need to decide on, God's not in. And I think those two are the key errors for sure. And you talked about it already, just in, even in your terminology that there is a revealed will

of God, you know, so God, I think it, the misconception needs to be addressed that God doesn't want you to know his will for your life. Yeah. It's like this moving target. Yeah. No, he wants you to know his will, which is why he reveals it in his word. And over and over again, even in the New Testament, you read the terminology of this is the will of God, your sanctification, that is you abstain from sexual impurity, 1 Thessalonians 4, 3. Then you have 1 Thessalonians 5, rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus, 1 Peter 4, those who suffer according to the will of God. So God's will is revealed in the sense where I think even in your view of God,

people need to realize, hey, God wants you to know this because he wants you to live a life of mission and purpose and not be, I don't know, tangled up, so to speak. You're a pastor. Why do you think or how do you see maybe a lack of clarity in understanding the subject as a whole? Maybe just trip people up from living a life of urgency, peace on the other side, trust, dependency, mission from a pastoral perspective.

So one of the reasons I wrote the book is watching people spin in cycles of confusion, anxiety, fear, shame, doubt, all of that. And I remember walking in one day, the genesis of the book was I had two book ideas I was going to write about. And I walked in to Brett McIntosh, you know Brett, one of our pastors at the church and another brother named Tom who heads up prayer ministry.

And they're in a meeting. I know, good Tom. Tom's a good man. Hey, Tom. Hey, Tom. And I're in a meeting. I know, good Tom. Tom's a good man. Hey, Tom. Hey, Tom. And I walk into Brett's office. They're meeting. I said, brother, sorry to interrupt the meeting.

Just really quick. Two book ideas. Here they are. Boom, boom. One of them was God's will. I said, which one would you recommend I write about? And both immediately were like, the book on God's will, the book on God's will.

I said, why? Tom, who heads up prayer ministry said, almost every week there's a question on this. I mean, deep questions, repeated questions, multiple questions. And Brett was like, yeah, that's one of the number one questions that people are always asking in small groups. They're confused about, they're fearful of, or they get disillusioned by. And I said, done, closed the door, walked out, wrote the book. In that regard, here's what we're seeing. People get crippled by fear. They're so scared to make the wrong decision and so worried that they're going to miss God because his will is

one thing. And if you miss that, well, then your life is going to be terrible and it'll be all your fault. You missed God's will. And so you should have leaned in more. You took the wrong fork in the road. That's it. You can't go back. So there's that. There's also shame over past decisions that were bad decisions or mistakes. And so people get crippled. And it's almost like the enemy just whispering and in their own mind, we think thoughts this way

in the carnal, the fleshly mind. You know, I messed this up last time. I'll probably just screw it up again. Or look where that last decision got you. Now, and all of a sudden we're crippled by shame, not just fear. And then I have another phrase in the book, I call them decision-making cripplers.

And it's paralysis by analysis. We are bombarded by so many opportunities, maybe you want to call them, I call some of them distractions. And I illustrate using the menu at Cheesecake Factory and the story- You know I'm passionate about this subject. It's overwhelming.

Why do they do this? I listed the book. I give you factual. I looked it up. How many items are on the menu? I even included the Skinnylicious menu, which is such a weird term. Have you had those fried egg roll avocado things?

No. Next book. Okay. Cheesecake Factory. Yeah, food. So I tell the story of how I'm there. We're with the five kids. We have six now, but we're with five.

And my wife and I are like, let's go to Cheesecake Factory. We'll take the kids. And no one can figure out what they want. She's indecisive. I'm just going to eat bread. Now I'm stress eating. I'm just hitting the bread.

I'm like, I'll figure something out. She gets her food to go. The kids all want mac and cheese, but two of them are like, I don't want mac and cheese. And you've got this menu with 200 plus items on it. And everyone's paralyzed because they're overanalyzing. Well, this, and then you see the wontons, and then you see the teriyaki chicken, and then you see the burger. And then you're like, you know, maybe I should

just get a salad. No, maybe I should get the steak. Too many options. And so I deal with this with young people all the time at our church. Paralysis by analysis. What should I do? Uh-oh. And they just get crippled and they do nothing. And so the failure to act, all of these things pastorally burdened me. And I just want people to be confident, not cocky, but confident. Like for example, you chose, in a sense, you can say, I chose, you followed the providence of God, you followed a process, you were prudent, you sought wise counsel, you prayed. But in a sense, you can say, I chose, you followed the providence of God, you followed a process, you were prudent, you sought wise counsel, you prayed, but in the end, you chose to take the pastorate

that was offered to you in Franklin at Stonebridge. If you go through trials, if because some situation, you endure something, does Katie now come to you and say, I just, you know, if we never would have come to Nashville, you know, if we would have just stayed in California, maybe we should have this. No, because you have followed what scripture says. You're not paralyzed by overanalyzing. You don't have to have fear. You don't have to have shame. People can

know whatever they go through. And it could be a victory, but it very well could be a defeat or a trial and a valley. They can say, no matter what we're going through right now, we have followed the word of God. This is his will for us. Let's endure. Yeah. Harry always says you measure decisions by how you make them.

That's it. In the aftermath of the difficulty that you may walk through, they go, no, we prayed through this. This is what God has for us. That's exactly right. And even going back to the crippled by abundance, I think I read a book in college, uh, predictably irrational by Dan Ariely. It's a business book, but he just talks about that reality with the, like the Amazon shopping world. You can't make decisions. And I think that's a lot of the, you know, many Christians have been affected by that.

And you said, you got to make a decision, which I think Kevin DeYoung in his book uses the Latin word is decidere. It means to literally cut off. That's what make a decision is. It's to cut off options B, C, D, E. And so for so often, or for so many people, they try to pursue as many options as possible. And they end up kind of living a life of almost they're drifting, you know, because they don't want to move forward with anything, which I think even affects the way we view relationships. Like if I say yes to this man or this girl, does that mean I'm saying no to all these other ones? What if I didn't marry the one? I mean, the ripple effects are so massive because it really does prevent us from moving forward with confidence. And I think what's at stake here is not just that you're not living life the way you intended, but I mean, life is brief.

It's short. And with the allotted time we have, I mean, if you want God to teach you to number your days, you're going to have to move forward with confidence. And that's the word you use. Make decisions with confidence because this is, I prayed about it. I sought counsel. And this is I prayed about it, I sought counsel and this is what I want to talk about more in our next episode is just you have in your book

seven P's for practical decision making and so I want to go through that because so much of trying to ascertain God's will is about discerning you know just everyday decisions but sometimes big decisions do we move, do I quit my job do I take this new one? So I want to talk

about that more. But for now, this is walking in God's will, demystifying God's plan for your life, and make decisions with confidence. It's available everywhere books are sold. Available as of now March 11th. Kosti, thanks so much, brother. Oh, grateful for you, Johnny.