Week 37 Sunday
Week 37 Sunday
Be Silent to God
Isaiah 30:20-21; Jeremiah 1:4-10; Acts 15:28; 16:6-10
We saw last week that if we were not living God-directed lives, the reason was that we were either untrained or unwilling.
We must be trained to listen, to learn, to obey. First to listen. Many of us talk fast in the presence of God, afraid that if we keep quiet God will say something unpleasant to us. We must learn to listen, to live in the passive voice. A pastor arose in one of our Ashrams and said, “God is showing me that I must shift the emphasis of my life from talking to taking.” He was learning receptivity.
One translator interprets the command, “Be still, and know that I am God,” this way: “Be silent to God and he will mold you.” Be silent to God and God will make and mold you to become the instrument of divine purposes. An almighty Will will reinforce your weak will, but only when that weak will is aligned to the purposes of that almighty Will. An all-wise Mind will brood over your mind, awakening it, stimulating it, and making it creative. An all-embracing Love will quicken your love into world sensitivity until “He hath set the world into [your] heart” (Eccl. 3:11 KJV).
God has three things in mind in reference to us: purpose, plan, and person. God has a purpose to make you the best that you can be. God has a plan that embodies that purpose. God has a plan for every life. The next step is for you to be the person for carrying out that purpose and that plan. In the silence you listen for the unfolding of that purpose and that plan. You literally become the plan and purpose of God, an embodied thought of God, the word made flesh.
When someone listened to a man of God speaking, he looked up and then and there decided he would make his life a miracle. He became a miracle.
A piece of wire disconnected is one thing, but a piece of wire attached to a dynamo and an engine is quite another thing. Alone, you are one thing; attached to God’s purposes, you are quite another thing.
O God, alone I am a dead wire, but attached to you I am throbbing with energy and glowing with light. Make my connection with you sure, so that I shall not periodically go dead and lightless. May I maintain the spiritual glow because I’ve maintained the connection. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 37 Monday
The Pattern in the Mount
Exodus 34:29-30; 40:33-34; Acts 26:19
We saw that we must be trained and willing if we are to be guided. We must be willing to be guided of God, not merely now and then, but as a life proposition. You cannot get light in a crisis unless you are willing to get light in the continuous. God must not be called in to get you out of scrapes in which you have entangled yourself by continuous self-will.
A Swedish literary woman wanted God to tell her what the next step in her career was to be. At length, in a surge of abandon that broke through all her reserves, she seemed to hear God saying, “How could you expect me to speak when you have gagged me so long?” Don’t gag God in the continuous and expect God to speak in the crisis.
In the beginning of guidance, then, make a decision that decides all decisions down the line: the decision that the will of God is first, last, and always in your life. Nail that down. Let there be no loophole of exceptions. Make it absolute.
The plan of your life may be unfolded in a moment of sudden insight, or it may be a gradual unfoldment. The gradual unfoldment may be the highest form of guidance. “The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord” (Ps. 3:23 KJV)—every two and a half feet. “Thy word is a lamp to my feet” (Ps. 119:105). Note “to my feet”: just enough light by which the next step can be taken and then the next. That puts adventure into life and a moment-by-moment trust. There is a surprise around every corner.
But the life guidance may be a sudden insight. One day, as a young man, I placed a letter on a chair and knelt before it. The answer to that letter would determine my lifework. The Inner Voice said, “It’s India.” I arose and said, “Then, it’s India.” That clear moment was real and has held me steady amid low moments of discouragement about the details in India.
The Inner Voice brings inner unity.
O God, help me build according to the pattern I see in the moment, in the moment when your voice is clear and I am receptive and responsive. I cannot live on a surmise, but on a summons; not on a guess, but on a goal. I await your bidding and your blessing. Amen.
Week 37 Tuesday
The Seven Ways of God’s Guidance
Psalms 25:9; 32:8; 73:24; Isaiah 58:11
If guidance gives to life a sense of mission and the sense of accountability every moment, then how does God guide us?
I suppose the great problem to God is how to guide us and not override us. God must guide us and develop us as persons at the same time. To lead us and at the same time produce initiative in us is a task worthy of divine wisdom. That task is the problem of every thinking parent. Many parents are benevolent tyrants, snuffing out initiative and personality. Guidance must be such that each person is guided into a free, self-choosing, creative personality.
To do this, God will guide in many ways, awakening the personality to aliveness and alertness of mind and spirit to God’s hidden leadings. God’s leadings should be sufficiently obvious to be found, but not so obvious as to do away with the necessity of thought and discriminating insight. They must be “an open secret,” open, yet sufficiently secret to make us dig.
God will guide us in one or more or all of these ways:
(1) God gives general guidance through the character and person of Christ. Christ lets us know what God is like, and therefore, what we must be like.
(2) God guides us through the collective experience of the church, the corporate wisdom gathered through the ages.
(3) God guides us through the counsel of good people.
(4) God guides through opening providences, matching us against some opening opportunity or need.
(5) God guides through natural law and its discoveries through science.
(6) God guides through a heightened moral intelligence and insight; we become personalities who are capable of exercising sound moral judgments.
(7) God guides us through the direct voice of the Spirit within us; God speaks to us in unmistakable terms in the depths of our being.
The probabilities are that God will guide us in more than one of these ways, lest one method narrow us.
Gracious Lord, my being within me is atingle to find out your way and be led into it. For I know that your way is really my way—the way I am made in my inner structure to obey. So help me seek your way with my whole being and without reservations. For I know that your hand is my health. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 37 Wednesday
General Guidance through the Revelation in Christ
John 13:15; 14:6-9; 1 Peter 2:21
We now look at those seven ways of guidance in a little more detail. (1) God gives general guidance through the character and person of Christ. Christ has revealed to us the nature of God, has shown us what God is like; the Lord has lifted up into bold relief the laws that underlie our moral universe, and the laws that underlie our own spiritual, intellectual, and physical beings. In short, God has revealed to us the nature of Reality. Then Christ is our “general guidance.” If we want to live according to the nature of Reality, then we must live according to Christ.
A Muslim might say you cannot get guidance from Christ. Jesus was not married, so he can give no guidance to the married. But there are two ways to be an example: One is to live in every possible situation and then to show everybody how to live in that particular situation—married people how to live as married people, mechanics how to live as mechanics, and so forth. This type of guidance is obviously impossible. The other way to be an example is to live in such a way that one’s life in a particular situation is lived on universal principles, so that the spirit of these principles can be applied anywhere. Jesus took the latter method. There is no situation conceivable where his spirit is not the norm for that situation. He is the universal conscience of humanity.
When you have this general guidance in Christ, there is no use to ask for specific guidance that is covered by this general guidance. Often we ask for specific guidance because we are unwilling to take the general guidance in Christ. Ask the question in any situation, “What is the Christlike thing to do?” If you do it, you will not go wrong. There is no use trying to prevail upon God to approve of any act or attitude that is other than Christlike. God cannot act or advise against the divine nature, for God is Christlike.
Think of having guidance along the line of the Christlike!
O God, I see I am predestined to be conformed to the image of your Son, for the nature of reality is Christlike, and if I live according to it I will come out there. What a destiny awaits me! Help me be willing to be thus predestined, for I would live. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 37 Thursday
Guidance through Collective Experience
Matthew 18:17, 20; Acts 13:1-3; Ephesians 3:10
We come to the second method through which God guides us. (2) God guides us through the collective experience of the church, the corporate wisdom gathered through the ages. The importance of this method is seen when we realize that the great Roman Catholic Church makes this the sole instrument of guidance to the individual. We cannot accept it as the sole method, but certainly as one of the chief methods. The accumulated experiences of the ages are at the disposal of the individual.
The church has been the mother of my spirit; and just as a child turns to his or her mother for guidance in crises, so I can turn to the church for direction. The pastor is the mouthpiece of that collective wisdom. Pastors should therefore not seek to be novel, but to interpret the wisdom of the ages to the people before them. A dean of girls says that problem children come from three causes: (1) poverty; (2) broken homes; (3) a lack of attending church or Sunday school.
(3) God guides us through the counsel of good people. As we look back across the years, we find that a word here, a phrase there, a conversation yonder with a friend, has lifted horizons, untangled snarled-up situations, and has sent us on our way rejoicing, with clarified minds and purposes. Counseling is no longer a hit-and-miss affair; it is becoming an art and a science. The minister who cannot combine public utterance with private counsel is “out” as a safe guide to people. The Asians have a saying that you don’t drop eye medicine from a third-story window into a person’s eye. Guidance must be intimate and personal and confidential. Counseling is a heavy responsibility. “Should I marry this man?” asked a girl after describing him. When I told her I thought not, she replied, “There, that settles it. I promised God last night that I would take your answer for his answer.” I held my breath. What a responsibility!
A conversation that the young Toyohiko Kagawa had with a teacher started on his way a youth who has become a world asset.
Gracious Lord, I thank you for those who have come into my life with kindly word and deep insight. Help me this day to be the agent of your mind to some other person. Help me speak the word that will lift the darkness for some fumbling soul. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 37 Friday
God Guides through Opening Providences and the Natural Order
1 Corinthians 2:9; 12:8; 2 Corinthians 2:12; Revelation 3:8
We come to the next step in guidance: (4) God guides through opening providences, matching us against some opening opportunity or need. A little poor boy of the streets of London sidled up to a doctor and said, “Do youse want to see where wese live?” He took the doctor by the hand and led him into alleyways where boys slept in boxes and under steps, huddled together to keep one another warm. Before morning that doctor, Thomas John Barnardo, knew he belonged to those boys, and went out and set up Dr. Barnardo’s Homes, through which thousands of boys have been blessed. God’s guidance was the opening of the doctor’s eyes to see a need. If God lets you see a need, the seeing of it is God’s invitation for you to meet that need.
(5) God guides through natural law and its discoveries through science. We have a primary faith in revelation and a secondary faith in science. But in a sense science is revelation: God speaking to us through the natural order. That natural order is God’s order. It is dependable because God is dependable. God works by law and order rather than by whim and notion and fancy. There was a time when we tried to put God in the unexplained gaps in nature; we said God must be there, for these gaps are mysterious and unexplainable. But when science began to fill up these gaps, God was pushed out. To have relegated God to those gaps was a mistake, for God reveals the divine self in the very law and order and the explainable facts of nature, and not merely in the unexplainable and the mysterious. The law and order express God far more than the unexplainable and mysterious. For this very law and order is of God. God is in it, is the author of it, works through it, but is not straitjacketed by it. For this law and order is full of surprises and of freedoms. A closed system of nature is now unscientific. God guides through science. Accept that fact. To expect to be guided by the revelations of science makes you open-minded to life around you as well as to life above you.
O God, whose will is wrought into the natural order, and who, by that very order disciplines us to lawful, orderly living, help us accept and rejoice in that discipline. For your disciplines are our freedoms. Help us accept your laws, which have become our liberties. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 37 Saturday
Guidance through Moral Intelligence and the Inner Voice
Luke 12:57; Romans 8:14; Ephesians 1:17-18; Hebrews 5:14
Our next step in guidance is: (6) God guides through a heightened moral intelligence and insight; we become personalities who are capable of exercising sound moral judgments. This is the usual and perhaps the most dependable form of guidance. I should think it would be the form that God most delights in. It is certainly the form discerning parents delight in, when they see their children no longer leaning parasitically on them, but capable of exercising sound moral judgments of their own. That is the sign of a free personality. The Parent God must love that. Jesus loved it: “And why don’t you judge for yourselves what is right?” (Luke 12:57 CEB). Fellowship with Christ stimulates and heightens our moral insights and judgments. He is the maker of persons.
(7) God guides us through the direct voice of the Spirit within us. I am surprised that this method of guidance is looked on by so many church leaders as something strange and occult. That it is capable of being abused is not to be denied. Thoughts may arise from our subconscious that we mistake for the Voice of the Spirit. Any suggestion that speaks to us must be tested, particularly as to whether or not it fits in with the guidance we receive through the person and teaching of Christ. If the guidance is not in thorough accord with that, then suspect it and reject it. And don’t depend on the Inner Voice as the usual method of guidance, for if we do, we may be tempted to manufacture guidance through our own desires when no Inner Voice comes. The guidance of the Inner Voice comes, at least to me, when none of the other steps in guidance can meet my particular need. I need a special word for that special crisis. Then the Inner Voice speaks. And it is distinguishable as something self-authenticating and authoritative. When a voice rises from my subconscious, it argues with me. The Voice doesn’t argue; it is self-authenticating.
O God, you guide us through conscience—and yet beyond conscience, when choosing is not a question of right and wrong, but perhaps of good and best. Help me to be sensitive to that Inner Voice. And help me obey at any cost. For your leadings are your enablings. In Jesus’ name. Amen.