A. God does not have an "individual will" for each person.
B. One need only be concerned about staying within God's moral will, as revealed in scripture.
C. Within God's moral will, one is expected (even commanded) to use wisdom.
D. A wise, morally valid choice is all God ever expects from us.
E. God has never directed people by feelings and impressions. When God has directed, His voice was loud and clear.
F. God will use our wise, morally valid choices (and even our unwise, immoral choices) to serve His purposes.
G. There is no need to fret about whether we are in, or not in, the "center of God's will."
Do you agree with this view?
I am personally open to the first four points (with some reservations about the first), and have no difficulty with the last two.
I am not prepared to affirm point E, namely, that "God has never directed people by feelings and impressions. When God has directed, His voice was loud and clear." It does not seem possible to claim that "God never..." did any particular thing, unless it would clearly be contrary to His character to do any such thing.
I agree that most (if not all) of the specific guidance to individuals of which we read in scripture probably came in forms less subjective than mere inner impressions. The relatively few cases recorded seem to involve unmistakable phenomena, like visions from heaven, angelic visitors, audible voices from a burning bush or from a pillar of cloud, etc. But I must include the
caveat that we are never really told how the prophets received many of their "burdens" from God. Some saw visions, but others may not have. How, exactly, is an oracle "felt" or "received" from God? Might it not come as a "strong inner impression" upon the mind or spirit of the prophet? I don't know the answer, and I doubt if the author of the above propositions can know for sure, either.
On the other hand, the Bible asserts that all who are the children of God are led by the Holy Spirit (Romans 8:14), and we do not have, in scripture, record of the guidance given to every Christian individual. It seems safe to include, under the rubric of
divine guidance, such subjective phenomena as the conviction of the Holy Spirit, the timely remembrance of a relevant scripture, a lack of "inner peace" about some contemplated action, and even a strong inner urge or suggestion to do some specific thing which would not be dictated by the general moral code, but which, after we have done it, proves to have been orchestrated by God to accomplish a very specific and necessary result (which seemingly would not have been accomplished had we done something else). I think, for example, of the strong urge felt from childhood by Hudson Taylor moving him to go to China as a medical missionary.
Of course, we might suggest that God could have used him as mightily in some other country, but we cannot be sure that God did not specifically design him for the precise work he was to do among those particular people at that time. A call to the mission field is seldom generic. Paul and Barnabas received a specific call by name to launch upon their missionary activities (Acts 13:1ff). We also know that Paul was once contemplating missionary work in Asia and in Bithynia, but
the Spirit forbade him to go to those places, and specifically directed him to go to Greece instead (Acts 16:6-10). What form this "forbidding" may have taken, we are not told. It may have been a mere lack of inner peace, for all we can say. In any case, it suggests that God had a particular mission field (and not a different one) in mind for Paul and his companions at that time.
Therefore, "if someone says to you 'the Lord is leading me to ..." I can not decide, except on a case-by-case basis, whether this is "a valid revelation from God, misplaced piety, self-justification, an attempt to manipulate you, or something else." In the course of a Christian's lifetime, all of these might be encountered at one time or another.
Having affirmed that inner personal guidance is a phenomenon too scriptural to be ruled-out, I would here register my own misgivings about those who seem to continually hear inner "voices"—which they take to be from God—telling them what to do at every moment of the day. I will not rule this out in every instance, but it does not seem to have a precedent in the lives of the apostles or the prophets, and may arise instead from some mental disorder. It undeniably has its parallels in the experiences of contemporary serial killers and the demon possessed.
Moving on, Point #A may be true ("God does not have an 'individual will' for each person"), if that means that, at any given moment of a given day, God might not have a preference about which good works a person might perform—though I am not entirely comfortable with the wording of the proposition. It may be that God is content to have most Christians fall into a "default mode" of doing, much of the time, only what most good people do—e.g., marry, raise families, make honest livings, be available to serve and support others inside and outside the church, and financially support those who have "more special callings" to full-time ministry and missionary ventures. Every army has its special forces as well as its regular troops. However, it would be going too far to say that God would not, from time to time, have special missions or special instructions even for these "regular" Christians to perform. After all,
every Christian has some gift from God (1 Peter 4:10-11), and it seems that God's specific choice of gifting also implies an intended function related to that gift. That particular function might well qualify as a "personal calling." If so, then every Christian has one.