Are you excited about your life? Are you looking forward to the future? Can you confidently move forward in the direction you are going, knowing you are walking with God? Do you know His will for you, or do you even believe you can?

If your answer to any of these questions is “no”, then I believe God has ordained you to be reading this article.

Now I’m not a motivational speaker (or writer)—so if you get motivated it will be because the Spirit of God is stirring in your heart and drawing you towards a deeper relationship and reliance on Him. You can be excited about your life. You can look forward to the future. You can confidently move forward in the direction you are going, knowing you are walking with God and in His will—not because I say so—but because your heavenly Father says so.

I’m going to walk through eight keys for finding and knowing God’s will for you, or said another way, eight steps for receiving God’s clear direction for your life. But before I do that I want to start out with the end in mind. 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 sums up how to have the passionate and excited posture I’m exhorting you to have in your life:

“Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. Do not quench the Spirit. Do not treat prophecies with contempt but test them all; hold on to what is good, reject every kind of evil. May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.” (NIV)

1. Worship and Give Thanks

This is the way we should begin any interaction with God—thanking Him for all He has done in our lives up to this point. The great thing about Thanksgiving and praise is that they are ALWAYS possible, no matter what our present circumstances may be, because what He’s already done for us can’t change. Jesus taught us to pray in Matthew 6, and started with worship:

“This, then, is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name…’”

And David said in Psalm 100:

“Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth. Worship the Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful songs.  Know that the Lord is God. It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name. For the Lord is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations.”

Notice the joyful posture David exhorts us to have as we come to God—and how he says that we enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise. Thanksgiving and praise is your ticket into the presence of God, or said another way, it’s a key to the door. Now nothing prevents you from coming to God, and the shed blood of Jesus Christ was all that was needed to rip the veil and allow all of us entry into his presence—but a joyful posture connects your heart to His. If you ever feel disconnected with God, just begin thanking and praising Him for who He is and what He’s already done. Neither of those things can change.

2. Pray the will of God

In Matthew 6:10, after Jesus tells us to start our prayers with worship, He continues with, “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

So where is God’s will always being done? In heaven, right? If you were in heaven right now, would God’s will be happening in your life? Of course! It’s safe to say that everyone experiencing the glory of heaven right now wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

Not only is His will being done there, but we also know that His will is good at all times, because we know that in heaven there is no sin, sorrow or loss. It stands to reason then that God’s will is always good on earth as well—for those that are called according to His purposes (Romans 8:28). That’s you if you have made Jesus Lord of your life.

But we’re not in heaven yet, and we live in a fallen world where bad things happen. So the best thing we can do, according to Jesus, is declare God’s will in heaven to be done on earth. His good, pleasing and perfect will. Will God’s will be done ultimately in the earth and in His grand scheme no matter what? Absolutely. But we get to choose whether or not we will align with that will or rebel against it, because God has given us the choice to declare His will in our lives or not. There’s an understood submission here—in other words, in order to pray God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven, it means we are submitting to His will, no matter what that is.

I believe this is where we miss it a lot—myself included. I’ve prayed “Your Kingdom come, Your will be done” thousands of times. But if the truth was known and my heart was actually revealed, many times I’ve actually meant, “my own will be done, on earth as I’d like to see it happen.” In those times my heart has overruled my mouth in seeing the outworking of God’s will, although I’m certain that many times God has worked out His will for me anyway, by His grace.

To step back for a moment—this is why praise and thanksgiving is so significant as a starting point for finding God’s will and direction—because it requires submission and humbling ourselves before Him. Once we have effectively done that, we can declare His will be done in faith and know that it’s going to happen.

3. Ask God to examine your motives

Ask yourself this question: What do I want out of life? Really. Be honest with yourself. If you got what you so often pray for, what would you do with it?James 4:1-10 gives us a great answer to why many of our prayers don’t get answered, or said another way, why we often struggle so hard to find and follow God’s will for our lives:

“What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you think Scripture says without reason that he jealously longs for the spirit he has caused to dwell in us?  But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says: ‘God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.’ Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.  Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.”

You might think that this contradicts what we said about having a joyful posture, but it doesn’t. If we are proud, we must first submit, and that may require us to get off our high horse and repent of our pride. If we have wrong motives, expecting to be blessed but then living worldly, greedy lives, then we need to repent of that too. Once we do, we are set free to rejoice in His will being done.

Wrong motives trip us up more than we realize. Remember, God can see the future, and He is the only one that truly knows our hearts, even better than we do. We need to routinely ask Him to examine our hearts and reveal to us anything that’s residing there that’s not of Him.

4. Ask for specifics and clarity

Philippians 4:4-7 says, “Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

I don’t believe God would exhort us to make our requests known unto Him if He didn’t intend to answer them specifically. He may have to change our hearts so that we begin to ask for the right things (see number 3), but He expects us to pray specifically. When we pray specifically and He answers specifically, our faith grows. When we pray generically I believe it’s harder to see God move, because we haven’t put our faith out there in relationship to a specific need. Remember that His motivation for answering our prayers is to that He will get the glory. When we pray specifically and He does specific things in answer to those prayers, we can in turn give specific praise to Him.

5. Renew your mind

Romans 12:2 says, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.”

To me, this verse proves that we can know God’s will.

But notice there is something required of us in order for that to happen. We must have renewed minds, and we must not be conformed to the world.

This is big. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in our culture and find ourselves living lives that don’t look any different than the pattern the world lives. We can justify our behaviors all day long, saying we are sinners saved by grace (which is true), but there comes a point where we have submitted ourselves so much and so often to unrighteousness that we can no longer test and approve God’s perfect will. At that point we have become blinded by our sin, and this can even happen to believers. Remember that the book of Romans was a letter written to Roman Christians.

So how we can we know which of our behaviors are conforming us to the world? By renewing our minds. How do we renew our minds? But reading, memorizing, and meditating on the Word of God. Psalm 1:1-3 describes the blessing that results from a mind filled with God Word:

“Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, but whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night. That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither—whatever they do prospers.”

6. Wait until you hear

One of the hardest things to do when seeking God’s direction is to wait on Him. It’s hard because we are by nature impatient, as patience is a fruit of the spirit. That said, we have to get away from thinking that waiting is negative. I said in step 5 above that we renew our minds by memorizing and meditating on the Word of God, so that we can know His perfect will. But waiting also provides renewal—because it renews our strength. Isaiah 40:31 says,

“But those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; They shall mount up with wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary, They shall walk and not faint.” (NKJV)

In the waiting we can relax, knowing that God isn’t going to leave us without direction. If we can remember that He’s got this…then waiting becomes an opportunity to gain spiritual strength and maybe even rest. If we put our requests before Him and choose not to be anxious, then His supernatural peace is promised to us:

“And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:7)

7. Ask for confirmation

Once you begin hearing God speak, ask for confirmation. Gideon did it, because what God asked him to do was a daunting task. He needed assurance that God was actually leading him to deliver Israel from their enemy. I will pick up the story below in Judges 6:36-40:

“Gideon said to God, ‘If you will save Israel by my hand as you have promised—look, I will place a wool fleece on the threshing floor. If there is dew only on the fleece and all the ground is dry, then I will know that you will save Israel by my hand, as you said.’ And that is what happened. Gideon rose early the next day; he squeezed the fleece and wrung out the dew—a bowlful of water. Then Gideon said to God, ‘Do not be angry with me. Let me make just one more request. Allow me one more test with the fleece, but this time make the fleece dry and let the ground be covered with dew.’ That night God did so. Only the fleece was dry; all the ground was covered with dew.”

Not only did Gideon ask for one confirmation…he asked for a second confirmation. And this was after the angel of the Lord had visited him and burned up the meal he prepared for him right before his eyes. So this was actually confirmation number 2 and 3.

Asking for confirmation is simply asking God to teach us His paths so we can confidently know what He is leading us to do. A good teacher never tires of repeated questions from a student who is seeking to understand things better. God is no different. He is the ultimate good Teacher. In Psalm 25:4-5 David says, “Show me your ways, Lord, teach me your paths. Guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long.” Remember, however, that God rarely gives us the full picture. He usually leads us one step at a time, so that all we have to do is take one step at a time. With consistent obedience those steps add up to miles of travel in Him.

8. Seek counsel

Proverbs 18:4 in the Amplified version says, “…the fountain of skillful and godly Wisdom is like a gushing stream [sparkling, fresh, pure, and life-giving].”

It can never hurt to seek counsel, if the counsel is coming from Godly people who seek God first themselves. One caveat here is to seek counsel from multiple sources, and if you can, from differing age groups. Generationally we tend to think alike with those that are the same age as we are. If you can get counsel from someone who has been there, done that (general somebody who is at least a generation older than you), in addition to some piers, then you will likely be on solid ground. Again, if any counsel you get is ever contradictory to what God’s word says, throw it out.

I hope these steps are helpful to you. I’d like to hear what the Lord is doing and saying in your life as you seek His will and direction, so please leave a comment below if you something encouraging to share.

I’ll end with this: Start with thanksgiving and praise, end with thanksgiving in praise, and in the middle, be still and know that He is God. It’s there that you will hear His still small voice.

Lance Borden is the lead author at FireyFurnaceFaith.com. Make a comment below or contact him directly at lance@goandmarket.com.