Guidance
GUIDANCE
Does God Guide Our Lives?
Psalms 25:9; 31:3; 32:8; 93:24; Isaiah 58:11
Every Christian should live a God-guided life. For if God is, God should be in everything that concerns us—directing, controlling, inspiring. The Christian who doesn’t know this sense of guidance is missing something vital. For, mind you, if you are not guided by God, you are guided by something else. Perhaps yourself. But we all know that to be self-managed is to be self-damaged. And we are not good enough, and we don’t know enough to guide our lives. God must guide them.
Victorious Living
(Week 36, Monday)
How Does God Guide Us?
Genesis 50:20; Isaiah 54:17; Romans 8:28; Philippians 1:12
God guides us in many ways, not one, but many. Among these are five outstanding ways: (1) circumstances, (2) enlightened Christian intelligence, (3) the spoken or written words of others, (4) an intimate group, (5) the Inner Voice.
Sometimes God guides by (1) circumstances, or shall we call them providences? Something opens before us, perhaps unexpectedly, just when we are in perplexity. That open door is matched against our perplexity, we walk through it, and find it has been God’s way.
Or God may close something before us, and that closing of the door proves to be God’s preventive guidance.
Victorious Living
(Week 36, Tuesday)
Guidance through Enlightened Intelligence
Acts 6:2-5; 1 Timothy 1:7; 2 Timothy 2:7; Hebrews 8:10
God guides through (2) enlightened Christian intelligence. The development of Christian discernment is a necessary part of Christian development. Hebrews 5:14 says, “But solid food is for adults—that is, for those who through constant practice have their spiritual faculties carefully trained to distinguish good from evil” (Weymouth).
God wants us to love God with the whole of our being, including our minds: “You shall love the Lord your God with . . . all your mind” (Matt 22:37). Any scheme of guidance that neglects the mind by underemphasis is, to that degree, not Christian. For the whole person is to be perfected.
God’s problem is how to guide us but not override us. For in the guidance, God must not merely make us do a certain thing; God must make us free, upstanding, discerning. I question any scheme of guidance that insists only or largely on the blank-sheet method; God is to write on it, as it were, what God wants us to do. Now I believe that God does guide us by the Inner Voice, but to make that the only method and to depend on that to dictate the minute details of our lives would be to weaken us.
Suppose a father or mother should undertake to dictate the minute things in the child’s life, asking only for implicit obedience, leaving little room for intelligent weighing of moral issues and free decision. Would that be guiding or overriding? Wouldn’t the child’s personality remain undeveloped? Moreover, if we ask for dictated guidance in every little thing, we shall be tempted to manufacture it if we don’t get it. This makes for unreality. No, we must not take one method alone and practically exclude others. God will guide our mental processes, if we are inwardly honest.
Victorious Living
(Week 36, Wednesday)
God’s Guidance through Others
1 Samuel 3:9; Acts 9:11-17; Philemon 5-17
Sometimes God guides us through (3) the written or spoken word of others. Some passage in a book becomes luminous and speaks directly to our need. It is the very voice of God to us. Some word in a sermon seems to have in it more than the word of the speaker; it is God speaking. Or it may be a quiet word with a friend that opens the door to the solution of a problem or relief from a grief.
Victorious Living
(Week 36, Thursday)
Guidance through a Group
Acts 13:1-3; 15:25-28
I cannot help but feel that God’s Spirit has been raising up these groups to meet particular needs. Not that I think that any one of them has the complete truth, but each does seem to have some particular phase of truth that is partly neglected by others. The difficulty comes when each becomes exclusive and self-righteous. Then the lilies that fester smell worse than common ordinary weeds.
But God is speaking to and guiding this generation through (4) intimate groups. God spoke to the first generation through groups. The fact is that Jesus formed a group movement when he and his disciples fellowshiped and worked together. It was out of that fellowship that the New Testament came.
Today God guides the individual through the closely knit fellowships of groups. Each individual needs the correction and sustenance of some such group. For the group checks up and tends to keep the individual guidance from going astray. So God often guides through a group.
Victorious Living
(Week 36, Friday)
Guidance through the Inner Voice
Matthew 13:11; Luke 10:21; 12:12; John 16:13-15; Acts 16:7-8
By the (6) Inner Voice, I do not mean the voice of conscience, for the Inner Voice gives guidance, not merely where a matter of right and wrong is involved as in conscience, but where one is taking life directions, deciding perplexities, and where one is bidden to take up tasks and assume responsibilities. The Inner Voice is not contradictory to an enlightened conscience, but is in addition to it and beyond it. It is the Spirit of God speaking to one directly and authentically.
Victorious Living
(Week 36, Saturday)
Guidance Then and Now
Exodus 33:13-15; Psalm 25:5, 9; Isaiah 30:21; 40:11; Acts 8:31
God will not guide us in one way only but in many ways. Perhaps the highest guidance is in the verse, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us”—we were thinking God’s thoughts and coming to the same conclusions. That is cooperative spiritual living.
Victorious Living
(Week 37, Sundy)
Are We Circumstance-Directed?
Matthew 5:43-48; 1 Corinthians 15:33; Galatians 2:11-12
We come now to the matter of guidance. If life is to be at its best we must have the sense of instrumentation, of carrying out purposes not our own, of fulfilling a Will that is ultimate. We must “regain the sense of being led,” as one pastor urges. Without that sense of being led, life hangs at loose ends, lacks goal and dynamic to move on to that goal.
If we lose the sense of being led, we become victims of our circumstances. . . . A great many people simply throw their minds into neutral and go where circumstances push them. They have no sense of being led.
Or they allow other people’s actions to determine their conduct. They are circumstance-directed instead of Christ-directed. Jesus warned us against allowing others to determine our conduct. “If people slap you on your right cheek,”—don’t use their weapons; keep your own—“turn the left cheek to them as well” (Matt 5:39 CEB). The best revenge you can have on enemies is not to be like them.
Abundant Living
(Week 36, Tuesday)
Isaiah 30:20-21; Jeremiah 1:4-10; Acts 15:28; 16:6-10
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.
Abundant Living
(Week 37, Sunday)
The Sevens Ways of God’s Guidance
Psalms 25:9; 32:8; 73:24; Isaiah 58:11
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.
Abundant Living
(Week 37, Tuesday)
God Guides through Opening Opportunities
Acts 16:9-10; 1 Corinthians 16:8-9
God guides through opening opportunities and needs. You are now a Christian, and “a Christian is one who cares.” As you get into closer touch with Christ, you will “care” more and more for everybody, everywhere. You will now see needs not hitherto seen. Your sympathetic imagination will be quickened. You will project yourself into other people’s situations, and you will see and feel from their standpoint. . . . You will be guided to see needs to which the unguided are blind or obtuse. The Spirit will create “a concern” where others are unconcerned.
The Way
(Week 41, Wednesday)
Acts 8:29-31
To cultivate the guidance of the Spirit by the inner voice, one must learn the art of lowly listening. And when the inner voice speaks, test it by the other methods of guidance. In general, it will be in harmony with the other ways. For God does not speak with contradictory voices. God will not speak one thing through the revelation in Christ and another thing through the inner voice. They will morally coincide.
And don’t get discouraged if occasionally guidance turns out wrong. Go back and examine to see where the wires were crossed so that the wrong message got through. As a friend put it, “I cannot always trust my own guidance, but I can always trust my Guide.” Don’t lose faith in God if guidance goes wrong; lose faith in your method of guidance and reexamine it.
But if we are honest, basically honest, the guidance will seldom go wrong. Then tune yourself to hear God’s voice, the voice of the God who speaks.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 22, Friday)
Corrected by Group Guidance
Acts 13: 2-3
Individual guidance has to be corrected by group guidance. If individual guidance is uncorrected and unchecked by group guidance, it may go off on a tangent and get tangled up in its own subjective states.
Every religious leader needs a group in which to subject himself or herself to a group discipline. For many years as an evangelist, I had no group discipline. I was telling others what to do, but no one told me what to do. I was the poorer for it. Then I found the discipline of an Ashram group, where we pledge to one another not to have inward criticism that we do not bring up. If there is no outward criticism, then we know there is no inward criticism. There is a relaxed fellowship.
But the group life is not for mere correction; it is for contribution as well. If we don’t get group correction, we don’t get group contribution. In the give-and-take of a group, it is often more take than give. . . .
God guides through the group, and guides especially. The group not only corrects you; it contributes to you as well. The partial idea is filled out by the idea of another. The sparks that fly from the clash of thought upon thought illuminate a subject, and you.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 43, Monday)
God’s Problem: To Guide but Not Override
Psalms 25:9, 12, 15
Many individuals, though Christian, know little about God’s guidance. Hence they have little sense of accountability to God and little sense of God’s guidance in their lives. Hence their impact upon life is feeble. Only people who have a sense of mission and who are under God’s guidance accomplish things.
How does God guide us? God’s problem, I suppose, is to guide us and not override us; to guide us, but not too much. For God must guide us and create initiative in us at one and the same time. This is not easy. . . .
Jesus said to his disciples, “Why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?” (Luke 12:57 KJV). He wanted them to be morally capable of judging for themselves. So the dictation method of guidance is out, the method that dictates what we are to do for the day. The parent who did that for the child, dictating every least thing he or she should do for the day, would weaken the child.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 40, Tuesday)
The Widow’s Mite
Mark 12:41-44
We are dealing with the mastery of perfectionism. We have seen that the way to overcome perfectionism is to be willing to do the next thing at hand and do it well. This passage expresses that attitude: “Do whatever you would like to do, because God is with you” (1 Sam 10:7 CEB). In other words, don’t wait for special guidance to do special things; but do the thing at hand and do it in God’s name, for God is with you. For whatever you do, you’ll do it under divine guidance; for God is with you, guiding you to do the little things in a big way.
Mastery
(Week 49, Wednesday)
We Don’t Begin with God, but Jesus
1 Timothy 6:13-16
I was with a group, obviously sincere and dedicated, but in their services they read an essay on religion and then added what they desired from their own thinking. Hence they got their spiritual guidance from the thoughts of others—the essays they read—and from their own sharing of thoughts with one another. It was weak at the place of God’s self-revelation in Jesus, and hence weakness at the place of God.
Christian Maturity
(Week 7, Sunday)
The Paralysis of Looking at the Stars
We are thinking about the power from on high that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. We fastened on astrology as that power that can separate us, and does. When people lose the guidance of God, they will turn to anything for guidance. Of all the things, people turn to for guidance, astrology is the most devastating, for it means that moral considerations have been abandoned, and the position of the stars decides. . . . Any nation or any individual who adopts that method of guidance will decay, has already decayed. Yet we are told that five million people in America decide their daily lives on the basis of astrology. The newspapers that publish these daily charts are contributing to this moral and intellectual decay. . . .
The stars, which the love of God has made can separate us from that love if we make the stars our guide instead of letting the Creator revealed in Christ guide us. It is the sin of idolatry. It is paganism, pure and simple.
In Christ
(Week 10, Monday)
Damning Others Instead of Rescuing the Damned
Jude 19-21
Any movement that suggests guidance from God without reference to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is bypassing the Incarnation. Apart from Jesus we know little about God and what we know is wrong. You see the Father in the Son, or you don’t see God. You substitute your ideas of God for God’s revelation, and thus make yourself and your ideas the mediator. “There is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim 2:5). You don’t go directly to God if you bypass Jesus; you substitute yourself and your ideas as the mediator. That, says John, is antichrist.
Perhaps the most serious tendency, because it is the most widespread, is the tendency of the emphasis of finding guidance from God within. If you do not have the corrective of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, you are liable to listen to the voice of the subconscious and call it God’s guidance.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 32, Tuesday)
Luke 3:1-3
The church [at Antioch] was sufficiently united so the group as a group could get collective guidance. “While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them’” (Acts 13:2). Here was a group so attuned to God and so attuned to one another that the Holy Spirit could give them a united guidance. We would have thrown it open to debate, then have taken a vote, and the majority would have ruled. This would have left a disgruntled minority. But their method of guidance was different, they desired to come a common mind—and did—under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. “It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15:28); that was the classic phrase that characterized the early church.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 35, Friday)