Wednesday: The Mastery of Guidance
WEEK 35
WEDNESDAY
THE MASTERY OF GUIDANCE
Isaiah 26:7-9
We come now to another mastery in the Acts—the mastery of guidance.
Guidance is at once the most precarious and the most precious thing in the Christian life. I say precarious, for you can go wrong following “guidance.” Some do. A pastor’s life was a wreck, his credentials surrendered and his home life broken, because he followed “guidance,” a wrong relationship with a woman. He got his wires crossed, mistaking the voice of his sex emotions for the voice of God. “I thought I was following the guidance of God,” he said as he viewed the ruins. While there are casualties now and then in guidance, and its direction and fruit must be carefully watched and scrutinized, nevertheless the casualties of living unguided lives are infinitely greater. The wreckage of not living by God’s guidance is so vast that we scarcely notice it, for it is commonplace. All the troubles and wreckages in the world have one root: not living under God’s guidance. So the occasional wreck that takes place in mistaking God’s guidance should not scare us away from the infinite possibilities of life under God’s guidance.
God has a plan for every life. When God made you, God made you different. God has not made anyone like you and never will again. God destroyed the pattern. You are unique and have a unique contribution to make. You are important in the scheme of things. The one supreme business of life is to find God’s plan for your life and live it. Having a life plan from God gives you a backbone upon which all the bones of your life are fastened, all cohering in the central plan that holds them all together in meaning and purpose. Most people go through life spineless and disjointed. No central plan organizes their lives and directs them toward a single goal. They live a hand-to-mouth existence of opportunism. Hence they leave nothing but a blur. They live aimlessly and then stumble into the arms of death, and it is all over tragedy.
O Lord, teach me to know your will for my life and then teach me to work it out with all my ransomed being, giving the utmost for the highest. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: When God guides, God provides—provides everything for carrying out that guidance.