CHAPTER 1: THE LONG ROAD TO NOWHERE
1. Robert Wuthnow. After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty-and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2007).
2. Ibid., 11.
3. Christian Smith, “Get a Life: The Challenge of Emerging Adulthood,” Books & Culture, November/December 2007, 10.
CHAPTER 2: THE WILL OF GOD IN CHRISTIANESE
1. Ecumenical Creeds and Reformed Confessions (Grand Rapids: Faith Alive Christian Resources, 1988), Question and Answer 27.
2. Gerald Sittser, The Will of God as a Way of Life: Finding and Following the Will of God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), 17.
CHAPTER 3: DIRECTIONALLY CHALLENGED
1. I’m grateful to Doug Phillips, a Baptist pastor in Lansing, Michigan, and friend of mine, for bringing this verse and its application to my attention.
2. Bruce Waltke, Finding the Will of God: A Pagan Notion? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 15.
3. Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 9–10.
4. Ibid., 141.
CHAPTER 4: OUR MAGIC 8-BALL GOD
1. The first three problems are also covered by Gerald Sittser, The Will of God as a Way of Life (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), 18–24. Obviously, I have borrowed from his wisdom, and not the other way around.
2. In case you’re unfamiliar with the expression, college girls sometimes talk about “dating” Jesus as the reason why they can’t give the time of day to would-be suitors.
3. As quoted in Mark Chanski, Manly Dominion (Merrick, N.Y.: Calvary Press, 2004), 84.
4. John Eldredge, Walking With God: Talk to Him. Hear From Him. Really. (Nashville: Nelson, 2008).
5. This is not everything that needs to be said about the law and the Christian. We are in one sense not under law and in another sense still expected to obey its principles.
CHAPTER 5: A BETTER WAY?
1. See John Piper, The Purifying Power of Living by Faith in Future Grace (Sisters, Oreg.: Multnomah, 1998), 51–64.
2. Gerald Sittser, The Will of God as a Way of Life (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), 28.
CHAPTER 6: ORDINARY GUIDANCE AND SUPERNATURAL SURPRISES
1. My five statements are derived from, and in some places identical to the statements offered by Phillip D. Jensen and Tony Payne, Guidance and the Voice of God (Kingsford, NSW [Australia: Matthias], 1997), 63–81.
2. Bruce Waltke, Finding the Will of God: A Pagan Notion? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 18–19. Tim Challies makes the same point in his fine book, The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2007): “When we have ruled out what God has expressly forbidden, and when we have searched the Bible and prayed for wisdom, we are free to choose. This seems to be what is modeled for us in the New Testament. We do not find people desperately seeking God’s will through dreams or visions (though occasionally God saw fit to use such miraculous means), but we see people making decisions based on what seemed good or best or necessary” (116).
3. Ibid., 19.
4. Vern Sheridan Poythress, “Modern Spiritual Gifts as Analogous to Apostolic Gifts: Affirming Extraordinary Works of the Spirit Within Cessationist Theology,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 39, no. 1 (1996): 101.
5. Quoted in Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), 1041.
CHAPTER 7: TOOLS OF THE TRADE
1. The faux-story posted at www.larknews.com can be found in print in Joel Kilpatrick, A Field Guide to Evangelicals and Their Habitat (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2006), 16.
2. Thanks to my friend Jason Helopoulos, a fine young Presbyterian Church of America pastor in my area, for pointing out this illustration from the book of Jonah.
3. See Judges 6:36–40.
4. As quoted in Mark Chanski, Manly Dominion (Merrick, N.Y.: Calvary Press, 2004), 111.
5. “John Newton on Divine Guidance” in Guard Us, Guide Us: Divine Leading in Life’s Decisions by J. I. Packer and Carolyn Nystrom (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 244.
6. Ibid., 246.
CHAPTER 8: THE WAY OF WISDOM
1. Along these lines, I highly recommend the book by C. John Sommerville, How the News Makes Us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1999).
CHAPTER 9: WORK, WEDLOCK, AND GOD’S WILL
1. Robert Wuthnow, After the Baby Boomers (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2007), 22.
2. George Marsden, A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 44.
CHAPTER 10: THE END OF THE MATTER
1. Special thanks to my grandpa for allowing me to interview him and learn more of his story. I’m very grateful too for the fine piece of oral history, “The Life of Menser Vanden Heuvel,” which has been transcribed and bound by my aunt, Carol Vanden Heuvel Shaw.