Knowing God's Will

A critically important question arose on Easter as we were serving communion to a shut-in who was entertaining two dark-suited visitors from another church, and whom, since they made no move to leave, we invited to share the Lord’s supper with us. In the ensuing discussion this question arose: How we are to know for sure presicely what God’s will is? Our visitors answered promptly that if you ask him, He’ll tell you, and then you know—without a shadow of a doubt. Intrigued by such certainty, I posed this scenario: Person A, a devout believer whose Lord and Savior is Jesus, KNOWS that a certain course of action is the will of the Lord. Person B, a similarly devout believer whose Lord and Savior is Jesus, KNOWS that a certain course of action is the will of the Lord. The problem is that these two courses of action are diametrically opposed to one another. The question is, who’s right?
I asked this in several ways, and the answer always came back that when you know, you KNOW. They did not entertain the possibility that anyone else could be right, that they could be wrong, or that either a compromise or another approach entirely might be God’s will. They missed the point entirely. They knew that they knew with no possibility of any other opinion. And EACH of them believed that was true for himself alone! And that seriously disturbs me, because that’s the basis of much of the distress in our churches today.