It is difficult to filter everything down to one question, but at least initially, my intent is to examine everything I am learning to see how it relates to the question: "what does God want me to do?" That can be narrowed down by adding a qualifier to the end, like: "-with the time (or resources or relationships or freedom) he has given me," to make it more applicable to certain individual topics.
Now this question presupposes the existence of God, which I am okay with, because any examination needs some known variables. At this point, I have no question in my mind that God exists, as the source of everything we know in the physical universe. I have investigated the alternatives, and I see no other reasonable explanation for complexity of life and the world we live in. So if there is an all powerful and knowing entity out there, should that affect the way I life my life? The answer to that is clearly "yes," but the specifics of "how?" are much less obvious. That all depends on what we think God wants, which hinges on who we believe God is.
There are many different perspectives on who God is, and I have personal experience with a number of those perspectives. I was initially raised in a Catholic church and school, finished elementary school at a Calvary Chapel, eventually went to a Lutheran University, attended a non-denominational church in LA, work at a Baptist camp, and participate in a charismatic bible study group. That diversity should illustrate the challenge I am facing in sorting through all of the different perspectives that I am trying to reconcile and discern the truth from. Each of these different groups has their own idea of who God is, and therefore a different idea of what exactly He wants us to do. The primary issue this presents is that many of these ideas of who God is and what he wants are mutually exclusive, and exist in direct conflict with one another.
How do we determine which of these ideas is true, with any level of confidence or certainty? One place to start is to compare them to the Bible. While that may be difficult to objectively prove, all of these groups agree that the Bible is the divinely inspired word of God. If we assume that to be true as the first step in our examination of them, and compare the other details of what they teach to what is found in the Bible, we can determine which ideas are most biblically consistent. This should cast doubt on any ideas or doctrines that aren't very consistent with the Bible as a whole, outside of the context of the individual part that they are based on.
In any complex math question, every time you lock a variable, you remove one dimension from the answer. An equation with one variable can be answered as a single value or answer, two variables can be visualized on a flat surface, three in depth space, four with motion, etc. Answers with fewer dimensions are usually simpler to visualize and easier to solve. By locking the values for the existence of God and the validity of the Bible as Yes and True respectively, we simplify the question that we are trying to solve, and make it easier to visualize the answer. Once we have a solid understanding of that instance, we still have the opportunity to unlock those other variables in the future, to explore how they affect the results we come to.
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