10. Guarded and Guided by the Holy Spirit
10
Guarded and Guided by the Holy Spirit
Come, gracious Spirit, heavenly Dove,
With light and comfort from above;
Be thou our guardian, thou our guide,
O’er every thought and step preside.
Simon Browne (1680–1732)
As pearls start to be formed when a bit of grit gets inside mollusk shells, so this book has grown out of the concern we feel for the many—we find that there are many—who have hang-ups about guidance and who fear irrevocable spiritual loss should they get their guidance wrong. In hope of helping we have tried to establish at least the following truths.
First, God’s guidance is a promised part of his covenant care for his own adopted children.
Second, if like silly sheep we wander off track in our decision making and commitments, God, who is our heavenly Shepherd and Triune Lord, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, pledged to love us forever and bring us to glory, will take action to restore us to the fullness of life, hope, and fellowship, as we knew it before.
Third, God guides us by means of the Bible’s teaching, the exercise of wisdom, and the counsel of fellow believers, plus insights and ideals sparked within us by the examples of faithful folk past and present, and supremely by the virtues shown in the way that the Lord Jesus lived.
Fourth, when it comes to making a long-term, life-shaping decision, God calls us to wait on him with prayerful thought and thoughtful prayer until he settles our minds and hearts on a particular commitment, positive or negative, as the way he wants us to go and gives us inner peace at the prospect.
Elsewhere, under the heading “A Biblical Approach to Guidance” in an earlier book, J. I. had already written along the same lines as follows:
In both those summary statements and in the present book up to this point, there remains a gap waiting to be filled. In foregoing pages, we have spoken at length of the Triune God as our guardian and our guide, and we have focused attention on both the Father and the Lord Jesus, whom we know as the Good Shepherd. But we have not yet highlighted the ministry of the Holy Spirit in guarding and guiding us. That is what we must now do, for the Spirit’s ministry here is vital.
Introducing the Holy Spirit
The Holy Spirit shaped creation; he gave revelation and caused the Bible to be written; he renews hearts and transforms lives; he assures Christians of their eternal salvation, and he equips them to serve the Savior to whom he unites them. You will note that we are saying “he,” not “it.” The Spirit who in the Old Testament represents himself as merely a divine force, potent but not personal, appears in the New Testament as a Helper and Counselor who speaks and teaches, who can be grieved and lied to, and who intercedes passionately for Christians on a regular basis. These things could only be said of a person, one who is as truly personal as are the Father and the Son.
The Spirit is the Third Person within the unity of the Godhead; that is why he is called “Holy,” as the Father and the Son are (see John 6:69; 17:11). “Holy” is the Bible word that points to the God-ness of God, to all that sets him apart from, and above, and sometimes against us, to all the greatness and purity, all the awesomeness and occasional fearsomeness, with which the Triune Yahweh confronts us. Holiness has been described as the attribute of all God’s attributes, the distinctive quality of all that God is and does. So the church’s habit of referring to God as “the Holy Trinity” is natural, right, and proper. Now the Holy Spirit is the executive agent of the holy Father and the holy Son in all the ongoing divine works of providence and grace. And as the Scriptures associate divine love primarily with the Father and the Son, so they associate divine power primarily with the Spirit. They link the Spirit particularly with the output of divine energy and movement, change and transformation.
It was Augustine who articulated what the New Testament everywhere implies, namely, that in all the acts of God all three persons of the Trinity are involved, expressing their unity in what we might call combined operations. And the New Testament reveals that in all these united activities there is a set pattern serving a single purpose, namely, the Father’s resolve to glorify the Son, first in creation and then in redemption, “that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father” (John 5:23). So, in the order of creation, “all things were created through him and for him. . . . And in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:16–17). And in the order of redemption, the incarnate Son, living, dying, rising, and reigning, is eternally the mediating means of all the blessings, first to last, that make up our salvation and constitute the church. “He is the head of the body, the church. He is . . . the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent” (v. 18).
This is supremely clear in the book of Revelation, where, whatever else is of uncertain interpretation, the designated glory of Jesus Christ as the church’s Savior, Lord, Mediator, and Lover is perfectly explicit (see 1:5–7, 13–18; chaps. 2–3; 5:5–14; chap. 7; 14:1–5; 19:6–16, 21:22–22:5, 12–13, 16, 20–21). It is the Father’s will that the Son be “highly exalted” and bear “the name [Lord] that is above every name” (Phil. 2:9–10). So it belongs to the eternal plan that Jesus Christ should fill the horizon of his people’s thought about what is ultimately real and ultimately important and ultimately authoritative for shaping their lives. It was within the frame of this divine purpose that the exalted Lord poured out the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, following his ascension, so that the Spirit might begin the enhanced ministry that he had pictured and promised before his passion. It will be helpful to glance at this ministry now, as it is set before us in its universal aspect, applying to all Christians, in the pages of the Gospel of John. (John, who clearly has a special interest in the Spirit’s ministry, also reports words of Jesus about the Spirit that apply specifically to the apostles, but these we leave aside for the moment.) Here are the key passages:
The Spirit descended on Jesus at his baptism in the visible form of a dove fluttering down and settling on him. One purpose of this anointing, if that is the right word for it, was to mark Jesus as the one who would in due course baptize with the Spirit (that is, initiate people into Holy Spirit life). The Spirit-bearer would thus become the Spirit-giver (John 1:32–33).
The Spirit brings people into the kingdom of God by a work in them that Jesus described as being born again (i.e., born anew, or perhaps born from above), in a manner that involves faith in Jesus himself as the God-given Savior (3:3–15).
The Spirit in people’s lives will generate true worship of the Father (real worship that accords with God’s truth), so making them into the kind of worshippers that the Father seeks (4:23–24).
The Spirit will so work in those who came to Christ for the quenching of spiritual thirst that “rivers of living water” will flow out of their heart. Here we have a clear allusion to Ezekiel 47:1–12, the Christian being pictured as a temple in which God dwells, and in this image a clear portrayal of overflowing joy, peace, hope, and love. This would become a matter of personal experience, John explains, only after Jesus had been glorified (7:37–39; see 17:5).
The Spirit will be given by the Father and the Son to Christ’s disciples to live within them as their Helper-Counselor-Supporter-Comforter-Encourager (no one English word renders the full meaning of paraklētos in the Greek). The Spirit will stay with them permanently, and through his coming Christ and the Father will also come to indwell them permanently (14:16–17, 23).
The Spirit’s ministry will be consistently and exclusively Christ-centered. “He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you” (16:14). He will call attention to Christ, not to himself. It is the Spirit’s way to keep out of our direct view, like a shy child hiding behind a door. Think of his ministry as floodlight ministry: the floodlight, hid in a niche in the wall, is trained on what the observer is meant to see while remaining itself out of sight. Or think of it this way: Christ stands before us, addressing us, calling us to himself, while the Spirit stands behind us shining his light over our shoulder so that we see Christ and know him to be real, and at the same time the Spirit whispers into the ear of our heart his own echo of the words that Christ speaks to us: Do you hear him saying, “Come to me . . . learn from me . . . you will find rest . . .”? Go to him; he is saying these things to you. This is the formula, not only for personal conversion, but for our entire Christian life. Recognizing, approaching, trusting, loving, adoring, and serving the Lord Jesus is the essence of that life. Jesus Christ, not the Spirit, is our constant focus; but it is precisely through the Spirit that we are enabled to focus on him.
We may multiply the illustrations. The Spirit, as we said, is the floodlight, or the searchlight, picking out and illuminating the Lord Jesus for us; also, he is the contact lens that enables us to see him clearly; also he is the matchmaker, drawing us close to Christ for a permanent union; also, he is the intercom, making communication between Christ and us a reality of our experience; also, he is the spiritual pacemaker, implanted to ensure heart-healthy functioning in love to Christ; and with all this he is the channel through which Christ pours his life and power into us for worship, sanctity, and service. But in all that he does he keeps himself out of sight. When he works in us, Christ, not the Spirit, is the center of attention. “Spiritual” experiences that lead away from Christ, or bypass him, are not from the Holy Spirit at all.
At the heart of Christ’s farewell discourse, with explicit teaching about the Spirit flanking it on both sides, stands the Savior’s wonderful parable, or analogy, of himself as the vine and Christians as its branches, needing to “abide” (stay steady, stay put) in him if any fruit of divine life is to appear in their lives. There is no more vivid picture of union and communion between disciples and their Lord anywhere in Scripture. It is not said explicitly that this is the heart of life in the Spirit, but the implication is clear.
The Spirit will bring about conviction in the world—that is, among unbelievers—concerning sin, righteousness, and judgment. He will make people realize that their unbelief in Christ is a supreme sin, proving them to be lost souls until they change. He will make them realize that Jesus Christ, whom many thought to be a sinner, a heretic, and a criminal, meriting the crucifixion he suffered, was in every way righteous, as his return to the Father’s fellowship in glory shows. And the Spirit will make them realize that the process of divine judgment on sin has now begun, starting with the devil, who through the cross followed by the resurrection was decisively overthrown (16:8–11).
Finally, the Spirit will give disciples the understanding, insight, and power that they need to make true application of the gospel message to the persons to whom they proclaim it, just as Jesus had done before them (20:22–23). Peter’s insight into the spiritual state of Simon the sorcerer, and his initial declaration of nonforgiveness for Simon’s spiritual lapse (Acts 8:20–23), is an example of the spiritual discernment that is promised here.
Paul’s presentation of the Spirit’s manifold ministries to Christ’s individual disciples covers illumination and the gift of spiritual understanding, new creation through incorporation into the risen Christ, assurance of present salvation, sustained jubilation, moral transformation in holiness and righteousness toward the fullness of the image of Christ, the ninefold fruit of the Spirit building up a change of character, gifting for service in and through the church, and the maintenance of invigorating hope of final glory. (A study of these elements in the Spirit’s ministry as Paul lays it out would have to include Romans 5:5; 7:1–6; chap. 8; 14:17 and 15:13; 1 Cor. 2:9–15; 3:16; 6:11; chap. 12 with 2 Cor. 3:14–4:6; Gal. 3:1–13; cf. 4:29, 4:4–6, and 5:15–26; Eph. 1:13–14; cf. 4:30, and 5:18–21, with much beside.) Paul’s Christ-centeredness and his view of the Spirit as the means of blessing from and fellowship with Christ, rather than as the focus of attention in himself, fully matches what is in the Gospel of John. All other New Testament references to the Spirit do in fact maintain this perspective as well.
What, now, should we say about the Holy Spirit’s ministry with regard to guidance?
Guided by the Holy Spirit?
Here we see ourselves as having to navigate between two extremes, which we label as the superspiritual and the subspiritual respectively. Let us explain. The superspiritual is a mindset that marks out some very devoted believers. Rightly and passionately, they want all their actions to be in line with the will of God, but wrongly, as we think, they look for a distinctive, identifiable nudge from the Holy Spirit to assure them of the rightness of every decision they make and believe that until they have experienced such a nudge they have not received guidance. The most common account of the nudging is of a sense that some thought in one’s mind is specially significant; people express this sense by saying, “God spoke to me,” and think it is this nudging that Paul refers to when he speaks of Christians as “led by the Spirit” (Rom. 8:14; Gal. 5:18). No matter how clear, therefore, the indicators of the best course of action are—no matter, that is, how unanimous are the pointers from Scripture, the dictates of wisdom, the verdicts of friends and advisors, and the corporate judgment of the church regarding the appropriate move to make—they hang back when they should be moving forward, since they are sure that no firm guidance is ever given without the nudge. On the other hand, however, when they have received what they take to be the divine nudge, they are prepared to break ranks and move out into left field, ignoring contrary urgings from Christian colleagues. Their readiness thus to be eccentric can make them hard to work with, despite the dedication and goodwill that their lives display. Not for one moment would we deny that people sometimes receive clear nudges from God about what they should do or not do, but we see these as exceptional and as ordinarily given only within the frame of seeking guidance for action by the standard means that we have described; and we see this attitude of always looking for nudges as opening the door to three mistakes.
First mistake: undervaluing God’s gift of reason, whereby he has equipped us to work out from Scripture, through wisdom in fellowship, what is the best and most that we can do in his service for his glory. When rational reflection, thorough and tested, has shown us the right path, God always means us to act on it without waiting for anything more.
Second mistake: overvaluing the grace of patiently waiting. Granted, God does sometimes keep us waiting for certainty on how to move, and waiting on him patiently at such times is a discipline we must learn to practice. But inappropriate inaction—doing nothing when our situation requires us to do something—will not glorify God, for lagging behind him is as much a lapse as running ahead of him. Inappropriate inaction, however, is likely to result if we make it our habit to wait for nudges from God every time before we act.
Third mistake: programming the Holy Spirit, limiting his freedom by specifying in advance what we expect him to do and then waiting for him to do it. Those who follow this procedure certainly believe themselves to be exalting the Holy Spirit, but they are actually doing just the reverse—hobbling him, as we might say, rather than honoring him.
The subspiritual extreme, by contrast, is a mindset that has been described in para-trinitarian terms as faith in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Scriptures. It is more common than its superspiritual opposite, partly because of the rationalistic defensiveness that has marked so much popular theology in North America for more than a century; partly because so many of its exponents have constantly before their eyes the danger, as they see it, of losing rational control and lapsing into the superspiritual eccentricity of which we have spoken above; and partly, we think, because Satan dupes us into thinking that faithful Christianity is entirely a matter of believing and doing what Scripture says. What, you ask, is wrong with that? Well, it forgets that basic to the question of what we are called to do is the question of what, in terms of godly character and communion with the Father and the Son, we are called to be. As Dallas Willard observes: “An obsession merely with doing all God commands may be the very thing that rules out being the kind of person that he calls us to be” When Bible-believers grow impervious to the insight that being is foundational to doing, the subspiritual mindset regularly results.
In Decision Making and the Will of God (Portland: Multnomah, 1980), Garry Friesen put forward, in place of the idea of guidance by immediate “impressions” or by arresting circumstances, a Bible-based “wisdom” model for determining the will of God with regard to school, marriage, career and all other significant choices, much in line with what we have been affirming in this book so far. But it has been reported that “many . . . came away from his presentation with a great disquiet, a disquiet that arises from a tone that implicitly denies that existential dynamic of the Spirit in the life of the believer and substitutes instead a formula (albeit a thoroughly biblical formula) for determining legitimate options in any situation.” And Friesen’s book was once roundly critiqued in J. I.’s hearing as a fine statement of the “Deist doctrine of guidance”—a doctrine, that is, that denies, ignores, or otherwise leaves out of account all direct action of God the Holy Spirit in the deep Christian heart and consciousness. It has to be admitted that Friesen’s book, however salutary in other ways, does appear overall as an example of this subspiritual mindset in action.
The subspiritual mindset is not prayerless, as the above comments might seem to suggest; but it treats what we have said up to now about obeying Scripture, seeking wisdom, and taking advice as if it were the whole story about guidance, and it is not. Treating it as so, and thus overlooking the full reality of the Holy Spirit’s ministry in guidance, opens the door to three mistakes matching those made by the superspiritual mindset, as follows.
First mistake: overvaluing God’s gift of reason. Reasoning, as we have been trying at length to show, is truly essential to the discerning of God’s will, but it is not the only thing that is essential. Human beings are not to be thought of as reasoning and performing machines, like robots and Mr. Spock. That, however, is how the subspiritual outlook in effect regards them, as also did the Pharisees of old, and as do many superficial secular systems of thought of our day. But the Bible shows that human beings are to be understood fundamentally in terms of hearts (i.e., inner selves) that by nature are willfully blind and deaf to God and in terms of deep-rooted, almost instinctive, attitudinal hostility to God, which attitude, directly or indirectly, will express itself in all our thinking about life-agenda and relationships. This is the syndrome that Christians ever since Augustine have labeled “original sin.”
And then, we must further understand that when the Holy Spirit changes and renews the heart by instilling in us a recognition of Christ’s reality and by uniting us to him in his risen life, our way of thinking is at once altered. Instead of active alienation from and defiance of God, what comes from our hearts is grateful love to God, and a desire to praise and please him. Yet the sinful dynamics of our fallen makeup still operate within us, and incessantly pull against the God-trusting, God-loving, God-serving disposition and motivation that the Spirit has implanted. The result? Paul indicates it when he tells the Galatians: “The desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do” (Gal. 5:17). Sometimes our knowledge of what we should do is overwhelmed by desire not to do it but to do something else; and again and again we do the right thing in a sluggish, resentful, apathetic, self-pitying, self-absorbed, or self-seeking spirit with hearts that have no deep concern about either the glory of God or the good of others. This happens, not because godly motivation was never there, but because the down-drag of sin in our system has, for the time being, swamped it. We constantly need, therefore, to be asking God to enable us to do the right things in the right way (with love and hope and zeal for God), and only the Holy Spirit who indwells us can bring that about. When, however, all attention is centered on doing the things that Christian reason, informed by the Scriptures, directs us to do, and the question, how we do it (that is, with what attitude and motivation, in what frame of heart) is ignored, as if performance is all that matters, then it can safely be said that reason is being overvalued.
Second mistake: undervaluing the grace of faithful waiting. Once reason is entrusted with working out from Scripture what we should believe and do, it craves closure and assumes its own competence to achieve it. In the realm of belief, reason does not doubt the propriety of putting God in a box of which reason knows the dimensions. In the realm of behavior, reason does not hesitate to reduce life to the meticulous following out of rigid Bible-based rules, just as the Pharisees did before us. In theology, this is reason losing sight of the mystery of the incomprehensibility of God, the fact that God is greater than we can grasp, and that our knowledge about him and of him is only partial, never complete. In ethics (morality and spirituality) this is reason losing sight of the fact that sometimes God’s word of guidance to us is that we should mark time, stay as we are, go on as we are going, and wait for God to change the situation before we attempt anything new. Christian reason, which knows itself called to be enterprising for God, is not of itself able to receive such guidance. Only the Holy Spirit can communicate it. He does this, as we indicated earlier, simply by withholding inner peace in relation to whatever plans of action we had in view.
We saw God doing a version of this in relation to Paul’s plans on his second missionary journey, when the Spirit held him back from evangelizing Asia Minor as he had intended (Acts 16:6–7). On the team’s first night in Troas, as it seems, Paul received his vision of the man from Macedonia calling on him for help, and that removed all uncertainty as to where they were to go; but doubtless the evening before, at the end of the road they had been following, Paul and his colleagues had stood on the shore at Troas looking out to sea and wondering what God had in store for them, since all they were sure of was that he had not allowed them to leave that road at any particular point on their outward journey. Had they not been sensitive to the Spirit’s restraining ministry, however, they would have missed their guidance entirely, and in following their own good plan (evangelizing more of Asia Minor was indeed a good plan), they would have jeopardized God’s better plan, namely, evangelism and church-planting in Europe. Readiness to honor God by restraint, when the Holy Spirit nudges us into restraint, rather than barrel ahead with our own rational plans, is an aspect of spiritual life to which subspiritual rationalism is more often than not a stranger, and which it will in fact find it very hard to tune into.
We spoke above of God giving negative guidance (“not that; that is not the way”) by a withholding of inner peace, and this calls for fuller comment before we go further. Inner peace is a supremely precious blessing, as appears from what Jesus and Paul said about it. Jesus, in his farewell discourse to his disciples, representatives of all the disciples that were to be, declared: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. . . . I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 14:27; 16:33). Paul told the Philippians that if they bring all their needs to God in thankful prayer, “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 4:7). All of Paul’s letters without exception, and Peter’s two letters, and John’s second and third letters along with Revelation—all of these documents begin by wishing the recipients grace and peace from God; the bracketing of peace with grace, which no one doubts is a great and wonderful reality, indicates that peace is a great and wonderful reality too, and this indeed is true.
Peace is a gift from the Father and the Son through the Spirit to all disciples who are seeking to live as such, pursuing a holiness modeled on Christ’s, practicing faithfulness to their Lord in all things, observing the tried-and-true joy formula (Jesus first, Others second, Yourself last), and giving credibility to their uncompromising witness by their uncompromised life. The gift is precisely a sense that all is well: my life is on track, my Lord is present with me to protect and help me, my guilt is gone, my hope of heaven is sure, and nothing can separate me from the love of God in Christ. The gift is self-evidencing in one’s consciousness, just as is the existence of Christ himself. It is the subjective awareness of an objective reality, in this instance, a reconciled relationship with God. When we have it we know that we have it, and this knowledge brings constant contentment and quiet exhilaration. When anxiety, grief, and distress invade the heart, the peace remains, as the frame within which these traumas are processed.
Withdrawal of God’s peace is thus a sign to us that some aspect of our walk with God is not as it should be, and planning to act in a way that would take one out of God’s will is a case in point. Withholding peace is one of God’s ways of signaling that some rethinking is in order and some adjustment needs to be made.
Third mistake: restricting the Holy Spirit. As the superspiritual mindset limited the Holy Spirit by programming him, requiring him always to act in the same way when he guides our decision making, so the subspiritual mindset limits him by effectively reducing his ministry first to the inspiring of Scripture and then to the interpreting of it, in the sense of showing the flow of the story and the instructions in the biblical books—a level of interpretation that non-Christians also can reach. Our point though is that the subspiritual mindset fails to see any need of his direct help to discern how revealed truth bears on our lives, by leading us into heartfelt worship of the God whom we know as real through humbling encounter and by leading us into heartfelt service of fellow beings whom by loving sympathy we see to be needy. Neglecting the need for the Spirit’s power to bring about the encounter and the sympathy tends to result in a shallow spirituality of prickly lovelessness.
A fully biblical account of the Holy Spirit’s ministry to the children of God will take us on beyond these restrictions (of the superspiritual mindset and the subspiritual mindset) and highlight how very much we owe to the Holy Spirit as we seek at every point to discern and do what will best please our heavenly Father. Such an account, in outline, we offer in our next section.
Led by the Holy Spirit
Twice Paul speaks of being “led” by the Holy Spirit, and the phrase has passed into evangelical jargon: believers say they are being “led by the Spirit” whenever they feel a strong sense of obligation to act in a particular way. But in neither place is Paul talking about being drawn to a specific decision or policy; both times, his theme is overall life-quality, as a sign that one has passed from spiritual death into spiritual life. “If you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law”—hopelessly and helplessly under condemnation for one’s unpaid debt of obedience (Gal. 5:18); “all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God”—adopted children who are heirs of glory with Christ (Rom. 8:14).
It is true that the English Standard Version, like most versions, renders Luke 4:1–2: “And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, . . . was led by the Spirit in the wilderness for forty days being tempted by the devil.” But note (1) that the Greek verb agō, used by both Paul and Luke, is a general term for inducing movement as such, rather than a specific term for any one mode of effecting that movement; (2) that here it is used in the imperfect tense (or aspect) meaning that for the forty-day period Jesus was kept on the move; and (3) that the phrase rendered “by the Spirit” is literally “in [en] the Spirit,” and should be understood as meaning that Jesus was kept at a constant level of high spiritual awareness rather than that the Spirit directly prompted each move from one place to another. (Had Luke wanted to highlight the Spirit’s direct prompting, he would have used a different Greek construction, hupō with the genitive, as he does in 2:26.)
The upshot is that in all three cases, being “led by the Spirit” is a phrase that points to living in the Spirit as a personal fact, rather than to particular experiences of guidance, in whatever form.
Here, now, is a quick overview of factors involved in the Spirit-led Christian life.
New birth. The new birth, or regeneration, of a fallen and sinful human being is a work of the same divine power that created the universe, that creates new life in the womb, and that raised Jesus from the dead. In essence, it is the Holy Spirit bestowing a new heart, one that spontaneously expresses itself in faith, hope, and love God-ward, in joy that now one knows God savingly, and in overflowing compassion to all around. When Jesus faulted Nicodemus for being “the teacher of Israel”—that is, a supposed Bible expert—yet not understanding what he was saying about being born “of water and the Spirit,” (John 3:5, 10), he surely had in mind Ezekiel 36:25–27: “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleanness. . . . I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes. . . .” The New Testament is explicit that from Pentecost on the Spirit effects this cleansing renovation by uniting us to the risen Christ, co-resurrecting us “with” and “in” him (Eph. 2:6; see the whole passage, 1:15–2:10; and Rom. 6:3–11; and Col. 2:11–14). Thereafter the Spirit indwells us (1 Cor. 6:19) as God’s seal of ownership (Eph. 1:13–14; 4:30; 2 Cor. 1:21–22), producing in us the fruit of Christlike character (Gal. 5:22–23). So we are not what we were; we are irrevocably changed; we are new creations in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17).
New life. Out of the renewed heart comes “the desires of the Spirit” (Gal. 5:17), matching—indeed, reproducing—the desires that demonstrably drove the Lord Jesus himself: namely, the complex desire to love and serve and please and honor and exalt and glorify his Father, who loves and magnifies his Son. The desire that increasingly drives Christians is to serve and please and exalt the Father and the Son together. The Spirit further instills in us the instinct to commune with the Father and the Son in prayer and prays passionately for us, within us, even when our own power to pray fails (see Rom. 8:15–16, 26; Gal. 4:4–6). Increasingly we become aware that our deepest ambition and longing now is for the closest possible union and communion with Christ, both here and hereafter (Phil. 3:7–14, cf. 1:21). Repeatedly, new insights are given us, making this inbred goal clearer and more vivid to us (Phil. 3:15; cf. 2 Cor. 2:6–16). By these means, “we all . . . beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18). Meantime, knowing ourselves to be “created in Christ Jesus for good works” (Eph. 2:10), we labor “to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share” (1 Tim. 6:18), thus fulfilling and expressing our new identity as children of God. So we are not living as once we did; the irrevocable change within us continues; our character is being rebuilt in Christ.
New conflict. Spirit-led life involves conflict in two directions. To start with, there is the outward battle against evil permeating the world, infecting the church, and insinuating spiritual decay into our own lives. This is the spiritual warfare dealt with in Ephesians 6:10–18, where Paul calls on Christians to “be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might” (v. 10) and to put on the whole armor of God, including the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God (v. 17). Clearly it is the Spirit throughout who enables us for this contention.
Also, there is the inward battle against indwelling sin, the anti-God syndrome that once ruled us, that now, though dethroned, is still not destroyed, and that operates within us almost as a devilish second self, distracting us from obedience and dragging us down into flesh-focused self-indulgence, which it deceives us into not seeing what it is and not calling by its proper name, that is, sin. So we find in ourselves the state of things that Paul describes in himself: “I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members” (Rom. 7:21–23). What we are called to do here is, on the one hand, to mortify sin wherever it raises its head in our lives (Rom. 8:13; Col. 3:5; ESV renders “put to death” both times) and with that, on the other hand, to vivify, cultivate, and strengthen the gracious, Christlike habits that constitute the fruit of the Spirit and are the evidence of our being new creatures in Christ. The discipline of mortification begins with what Jesus said to the dozing disciples in Gethsemane: “Watch [keep alert] and pray that you may not enter into temptation” (Matt. 26:41). The discipline of vivification begins with noting how Scripture portrays godliness and moral excellence both in Christ and in others and thinking out before God what it will mean to follow their examples, as the Spirit within you is urging you to do.
So, though we live joyfully in the peace of God when we are Spirit-led, we do not live peacefully in every sense; instead, we find ourselves having to maintain a two-way conflict that will continue as long as life lasts.
New tasks. The church, says Paul, is the body of Christ, in which, as in a human body, every part has a job to do; and the Holy Spirit gives gifts for service to all Christians so that each may play a full role in the body’s life (1 Cor. 12:4–7; cf. 1 Peter 4:10–11). There are gifts of instructive speech, and gifts of straightforward practical helpfulness, and each Christian is tasked with finding, developing, and responsibly using whatever gift or gifts the Spirit has given. Then there is home life in the family, and workplace life, and the life of citizenship and public involvement, all to be lived for God’s glory in the power and through the resources that the Holy Spirit supplies. Loving service marks the Spirit-led life at every point. All aspects of the Spirit-led life are universal. No Christian is exempt from anything to which we have referred in the above paragraphs.
Nudged by the Spirit?
What then, in positive terms should we say to those who believe, partly because of what they have been told and partly on the basis of their own past experience, that guidance by divine nudge is frequently God’s way of indicating to us what we should do? Simply this, we think:
First, it is not for us to make rules for God or to deny that he made his will known this way when someone testifies that he did. We recognize that God sovereignly may renew today any of the modes of communication that he used in Bible times—visions, dreams, voices, inner promptings, whatever.
Second, this kind of guidance is most likely to be authentic and healthy when it comes at a time when one is not looking for it but is seeking to discern God’s will by the methods described in the foregoing chapters. Then the peace of God in the heart finally confirms the rightness of the thinking.
Third, if we are looking for a kind of spiritual experience that God himself, teaching us in Scripture, has not told us to look for, Satan, who is very good at imitating genuine spiritual experience, may fool us again and again by giving us his version of what we are looking for and will thereby lead us astray.
Fourth, while it is always important to check our conclusions as to what God wants us to do by consulting wise folk in the church, it is supremely important to do this when we believe we have received guidance by unusual means. Sin and Satan operate by deceit and the corrupting of good judgment, which makes lone rangers in this matter of direct guidance more than ordinarily vulnerable. If the wise folk agree in giving us reasons to doubt whether our experience really was God revealing his will to us, we should doubt it too.
Fifth, direct guidance will never breach biblical boundaries or cut across biblical directives. Inner urgings to do either of these things most certainly do not come from God.
A Gracious, Willing Guest
We began our survey of the truth about guidance by highlighting Psalm 23 as the biblical classic on the subject. We set ourselves to understand its picture of faithful shepherding and reminded ourselves that to get its full message to us we should view it within the full New Testament frame of spiritual reality that the Old Testament order foreshadowed. As we started to do this, the psalm opened up to us as a source of tremendous reassurance and confidence for all the people of God at all times.
The psalm teaches us to see ourselves as sheep who belong to, and are shepherded by, Yahweh, the LORD, the God of grace, who has covenanted with us his people and who always keeps his promises, and his covenant commitment means that his caring for us, his giving to us, and his rejoicing over us, will never end. And one aspect of the loving care that marks his ministry to us is giving us guidance. “He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake” (v. 3)—that is, to display the praiseworthiness of his love and power here and now in a way that will evoke endless praise for the glory of his grace in thus conveying us to our eternal home. “Paths of righteousness” is a phrase carrying the thought of a journey of which every step in retrospect is seen to have been right—right for us, for others, and for God; right in terms of God’s standards and intentions; right in its response to every situation and circumstance through which the shepherd brought us; right in handling each obstacle that the shepherd helped us to surmount; right in terms of every short-term frustration and disappointment becoming a source of long-term maturity, humility, strength, and triumph; and right in terms of our experience bringing benefit to others, and enabling us to show the depth of our loyalty to the God who loves us. “He leads me” are words pointing to the certainty that God will always reveal his will for my forward steps, so that I shall always know how to be faithful to him, even when I am totally puzzled and discouraged about everything else. The verse is a wonderful promise, wonderfully phrased.
As New Testament Christians, we know that Israel’s covenant God is in truth tripersonal. He is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, three distinct persons living together in love within the unity of a single divine reality consisting of a single divine life and energy. We know too that the second person, the Son, who two millennia ago became man in the land of Israel for our salvation, announced himself as the Good Shepherd, the shepherd of God’s people par excellence, and echoed Psalm 23 directly in describing his own shepherding ministry (John 10:1–16). We have offered some thoughts on the shepherding work of both the Father and the Son. We have yet, however, to relate the multiple services that the Spirit renders us in David’s picture of shepherding by God. But that we propose to do now, as we draw this chapter and this book to a close.
Some verses of a somewhat sugary nineteenth-century hymn on the Spirit’s ministry that was much sung in J. I.’s youth will set us on our way.
Our blest Redeemer, ere He breathed
His tender last farewell,
A Guide, a Comforter, bequeathed
With us to dwell.
He came sweet influence to impart,
A gracious, willing Guest,
Where He can find one humble heart
Wherein to rest.
And His that gentle voice we hear,
Soft as the breath of even,
That checks each fault, that calms each fear,
And speaks of heaven.
And every virtue we possess,
And every conquest won,
And every thought of holiness
Are His alone.
What part, now, does the Holy Spirit play in the shepherding ministry of the holy Three?
The first thing to say is that though the ministry of the Spirit toward us is distinctive to him, his work is always done in union and communion with the Father and the Son, and we must keep this fact constantly in view as we analyze it. The Father and the Son were together in sending the Spirit on his Pentecost mission to the world (see John 14:16, 26; 15:26; 16:7; Acts 2:33; cf. Gal. 4:6), and the implication is that they were together also in sending the Spirit into the lives of each person who has ever received him—including ourselves who write this and you who read it.
It follows that when the Spirit works in human hearts to bring them to faith and repentance, when he renews those hearts so that faith and repentance are exercised, and when he indwells them thereafter for character transformation, he acts as the agent of the Father and the Son. Indeed, both the Father and the Son indwell Christian hearts through the Spirit’s agency there (John 14:23; Col. 1:27). Those in whom the Spirit thus works become members of Christ’s flock, conscious of his calling them by name and knowing them personally as he leads them to their place of pasture (John 10:3–4, 9).
By means that (let us admit it) we never fully grasp, since they involve the hidden depths of our hearts, the Spirit makes Christ in the power of his cross and resurrection indisputably real to us, and induces in us a full-hearted commitment of faith and hope in him and love toward him; and the Spirit sustains this commitment at times when our commitment is becoming temporarily blurred and unsteady through muddle in our minds or temptations in our hearts. Thus he fulfills his role as Helper and Comforter.
All the processes of mind and heart, all the thinking and all the praying through which divine guidance is discerned through Scripture, wisdom, and help from fellow believers, as we have sought to spell out, are prompted and sustained by the Spirit. So are the peace-laden resonatings in the heart that correct false steps, motivate renewed resolves, and fix our attention once more on the Lord Jesus when our gaze is beginning to wander. We have already seen that the Father and the Son are committed to bring back to the flock any sheep that are inclined to stray or have actually done so; what we are speaking of now is the Spirit’s share in that ministry.
Finally, the Spirit both prompts and energizes all the good works, all the acts of obedience, all the fruit of Christlike behavior, all the witnessing and all the ministry, that become part of each Christian’s life. All these things, as the hymn said, “are His alone.”
Thus the God who is Three-in-One, the they who are he, “leads me”—and you, and all believers with us—“in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.” Thus the Holy Spirit joins with the Father to further the glory of the Good Shepherd. Thus the Holy Spirit, while keeping out of sight, exerts the full power of creation to achieve the fullness of new creation in every believer’s life and to bring to each one a full perception of the guidance of God.
Praise to the Father; praise to the Son; praise to the Holy Spirit. Amen.