5. The Means
5
The Means
I said in the introduction that this is not a how-to-get-it book. Much more is involved in following the Lord’s leading than a list of his methods. We need to know what is promised, what are the conditions of the promises, and what is God’s object. An understanding of those things will put us in a position to discern his will in a particular situation.
How, then, does God go about showing us what we are to do?
Supernatural Means
Visible Signs
We think first of cloud, fire, and a star. Visible phenomena were the means of showing people in the Bible where God wanted them to go. The pillar of cloud and fire never left the children of Israel. Most of us, when we are searching for guidance, envy them with all our hearts. Here was a visible, nondebatable sign: “by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them along the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, that they might travel by day and by night.” There it was, always in the sky, and they knew that the Lord was in it. No room was left for argument as to what they were meant to do. “Throughout all their journeys, whenever the cloud was taken up from over the tabernacle, the people of Israel would go onward; but if the cloud was not taken up, then they did not go onward till the day that it was taken up.” As simple as red and green lights.
Then there was the star of Bethlehem. No one is sure who those wise men or astrologers were, or how many of them there were, or how far they had traveled, but they knew enough about the stars to recognize a new one when it appeared, and somehow they knew what it signified. They called it “his star,” and they knew it heralded the birth of a King of the Jews. The star apparently moved. They had seen it in the east and it “went in front of them as they travelled until at last it shone immediately above the place where the little child lay. The sight of the star filled them with indescribable joy.” If we are ever tempted to wonder whether God can possibly communicate with people who seem to us remote and unlikely prospects, if we doubt his ability to choose a method to suit the individuals involved, if we think of world events as rather haphazard and of specific points in time and space as hardly worth his notice, it will do us good to remember those mysterious strangers and that star.
Audible Signs
Sometimes instead of a visible sign, God gave an audible one. The Philistines were arrayed against David in the valley of Rephaim. When David asked God’s permission to attack, he was told to wait until he heard “the sound of marching in the tops of the balsam trees.” That sound in that place could only be supernatural. There were many occasions when “the word of the Lord came”—a voice, clearly heard, clearly understood, clearly identified.
Angels
Then, of course, there were angels. A study of both the visible and the audible manifestations of angels in the stories of the Bible will probably surprise most of us, for they are not as rare as we usually think of them. The Christmas story alone includes five angelic visitations. The first time an angel came to a human being, according to the biblical record, it was to an outcast Egyptian servant woman, Hagar, who, the angel said, was to be the mother of Ishmael. Abraham had many encounters with angels. Lot, Jacob, Balaam, David, Elijah, Zechariah, Mary, Joseph, Peter, and Paul all met angels sent on particular errands from the Lord. They came quite unexpectedly (it was not that the man or woman to whom they came had been praying for a supernatural visitor, or even for guidance), and the message they brought was often a startling one, one that quite changed the program.
Philip, for example, was preaching the gospel in Samaritan villages when an angel arrived and said abruptly, “Get up and go south.” If Philip had not obeyed, he would have missed the opportunity to give the good news about Jesus to an important foreign official who “happened” to be traveling home to Ethiopia. (I am afraid some of my requests for guidance come out of a desire for something interesting and unusual such as an opportunity to speak to an important person, rather than for strength to do the ordinary duty, which in Philip’s case was preaching in those little villages. But his doing the duty made him eligible for the interesting and unusual opportunity he didn’t ask for.)
It was not only to men engaged in the Lord’s business that angels came. Lot does not give me the impression of a man working overtime for God. Yet he is called a “righteous” man, and when God was about to destroy Sodom, he sent angels to rescue Lot and his family. Lot took the angels’ warning seriously enough to tell his sons-in-law to get themselves and their wives out of the city. But when they received this suggestion with mild amusement, Lot dallied, taking the divine warning with a grain of salt. When a second urging failed to rouse him, the angels “seized him and his wife and his two daughters by the hand, the Lord being merciful to him, and they brought him forth and set him outside the city.” I would call this coercion, but it was a merciful coercion, and it lasted only up to a point. Lot was plunked down out of range of the brimstone, and from there he was on his own and told to run for his life. (God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility are illuminated in this story—Lot was first dragged, then had to run on his own two legs.)
Lot’s experience is very different from the picture of the green pastures, still waters, and gentle Shepherd. But the mercy of God shows itself in a thousand different ways, and he knows who it is he is dealing with. If it takes only a flicker of an eye for the servant who awaits his master’s bidding, God can give that. If it takes a rude yank to bring a man to his senses, God knows how to deliver that just as well.
Peter, chained in prison for preaching the gospel and fully expecting to be executed as James had been, was rescued by an angel. A light flashed, the angel gave the prisoner a poke and said, “Get up.” He led Peter past two sets of guards, through an iron gate, down one street, and then, like Lot, Peter was on his own. Only then did he realize he wasn’t dreaming.
My father, when he was a small boy, was climbing on an upper story of a house that was being built. He walked to the end of a board that he thought was nailed at the other end. It wasn’t. Slowly it began to tip. He knew he was doomed, but inexplicably the board began to tip the other way, as though a hand had pushed it down again. He always wondered whether it was an angel’s hand.
A blind man my father knew was about to step into what he thought was his cabin on board ship. It was in fact a hatchway, but he felt a hand on his chest pushing him back. He asked who was there. There was no answer. Was an angel sent to rescue him?
I have never forgotten hearing Dr. Virginia Blakeslee of Africa tell how angels delivered her from hostile people (I think she said they were cannibals). She did not know at the time what it was that drove them back as they charged into the clearing where her hut was. She only knew that as she was praying and they were dancing around the hut with their weapons in their hands, something made them flee. This happened on several different nights. Finally the leader of the group came to her in the daytime asking to be allowed to see the men who were guarding her. Bewildered, she said there was no one. The man searched her hut and, finding nothing, described to her the strong men with swords who had come out of her door as the cannibals danced.
G. K. Chesterton said that the most wonderful thing about miracles is that they do sometimes happen. There are certainly many things for which we have no explanation. Why should not God send his angels to do things for him in the twentieth century? Do centuries make any difference to the Eternal God?
Dreams and Visions
Another method God has often used to guide men is dreams and visions. Since Freud interpreted dreams as coming from the depths of man’s subconscious, signifying his fears, anxieties, and suppressed desires, we have almost forgotten the possibility that God might take over the subconscious long enough to show a man something he might not see while conscious. In simpler times men assumed that dreams showed not the darkness of their own hearts but the light they needed. The Indians of Ecuador believe this, and their witch doctors drink herbs that produce visions (we would prefer to call them hallucinations, I suppose) of great importance. After drinking the “ghost vine,” a witch doctor in Arajuno, the station manned by Ed McCully, saw that Ed had been killed. Several days later the vision was confirmed. Word reached Arajuno that Ed had been speared to death by Aucas.
But this is a book about the guidance of God. Can the hallucinations of a jungle witch doctor have anything to do with this? I don’t know. As to whether Almighty God could have reason for letting a man like that in on classified information, I have no idea. What we do know is that the subconscious mind is one channel by which man receives messages, whether they come from television, drugs, demons, or (as they often did in the Bible accounts) from God.
Jacob saw angels and a ladder in his dream and was assured of God’s presence and the promise of great progeny. Joseph had prophetic dreams he would have done well to keep to himself, since they sent his brothers into paroxysms of jealousy. Gideon found out what he ought to do through another man’s dream. (And it was only by chance that he overheard the man telling it. Do God’s methods sometimes strike us as whimsical or careless?)
The irascible king Nebuchadnezzar had a dream which worried him very much, but he required that his wise men tell him both the dream and its interpretation. It was an exile from Judah named Daniel who got the answer—and he got it through a dream of his own. “No wise men, enchanters, magicians, or astrologers can show to the king the mystery which the king has asked,” Daniel said, “but there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries. . . . But as for me, not because of any wisdom that I have more than all the living has this mystery been revealed to me. . . .” Daniel did not doubt that God was the giver of his dream.
Paul had a vision one night in Troas of a man beseeching him to come over into Macedonia. He and his companions set sail immediately, “concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.” Another time, while praying in the temple, he fell into a trance and saw the Lord telling him to get out of Jerusalem. It looks as though Paul was used to taking his dreams seriously.
Prophets
Guidance came to God’s people also through prophets. These were men of widely differing temperaments and personalities who were inspired—in-breathed—by the Spirit of God. How often we read this artless introduction in the Old Testament: “The word of the Lord came to me saying. . . .” We are not told how the word came, or how they knew it was the Lord who spoke, but it came, and they knew who was speaking, and they put down what he said.
When Jehoshaphat, the king of Judah, was going to join his counterpart, Ahab king of Israel, in war, he wanted to find the will of the Lord for a battle decision. So Ahab called together four hundred prophets. “Attack,” they said. But Jehoshaphat wasn’t satisfied. He felt he needed the advice of one more. Micaiah was brought and prophesied defeat. For that, Ahab promptly put Micaiah in prison on bread and water. Micaiah was right, but it wasn’t what the king wanted to hear.
Jeremiah was dropped into a pit of slime for prophesying things that were too discouraging. It is understandable that the job of a prophet has never been a particularly coveted one. The word of the Lord is likely to inconvenience us.
The word of the Lord got in the way of Balaam. He was so bent on doing his own will that it took the ass he was riding on to see the angel of the Lord blocking the road and to speak in a voice that got his attention. Whatever our categories for the means God may use to get through to us, they had better include donkeys.
Years ago I heard Gladys Aylward, called in her biography The Small Woman, tell how she was once in desperate need of money, traveling through the mountains of China. The party came to a tunnel that the muleteer refused to pass through because it was known to be inhabited by demons. Finally he agreed to go through, but only on one condition: that she would make enough noise to frighten the demons. Miss Aylward sang hymns at the top of her voice (and I know she had a very big voice for such a little person). When they got to the other end, she heard the sound of wind in the leaves, and in the sound of the wind there was a voice. The voice of a demon, of course, thought the muleteer, and he sank to his knees in terror.
“It’s nothing to do with you!” cried Gladys Aylward. “This is my God, speaking to me!” And she told us what God had to say: “Ye have not, because ye ask not.” It was only then that she realized she had not once prayed for the money she needed. A woman of faith and prayer, she had been so preoccupied with other things that she had entirely forgotten the simplest solution to her need. The story ends with the money being provided in nearly as supernatural a way as the voice had come to her.
These examples are enough to illustrate what we would call the supernatural means. They may seem to us to have been used only in far-off times or faraway places, but this may be only because we ourselves are living, like the prodigal son, in a far country, trying to forget all about the Father’s house. It is much more in keeping with Christian faith and with Christian intelligence to acknowledge the possibility of miracles anywhere, anytime.
But there is one thing we ought to notice about these miracles. When God guided by means of the pillar of cloud and fire, by the star of Bethlehem, by visitations of angels, by the word coming through visions and dreams and prophets and even through an insulted donkey, in most cases these were not signs that had been asked for. And when they were asked for, as in the case of Jehoshaphat and Ahab, they were not accepted.
Supernatural phenomena were given at the discretion of the divine wisdom. It is not for us to ask that God will guide us in some miraculous way. If, in his wisdom, he knows that such means are what we need, he will surely give them, as he gave one to Miss Aylward in the extremity of her need. But it is significant that the word she heard in the wind was a Scripture verse. It took an audible voice to remind her of it, but it was one she knew by heart.
I have never heard any voices or seen any visions from heaven, but I have been reminded “out of the blue” on more occasions than I can count, of some word from the Bible that exactly suited my need. At other times the word has been given through the reading for that day—the part of the Bible I had come to in regular reading, or the psalm for the day according to the church calendar, or the verses in the little book called Daily Light, which is nothing more than a selection of Scripture arranged for each day of the year.
When a shortwave radio message told me many years ago that my husband and four friends were missing in the jungle, the words of Isaiah 43:1–3 came to me almost as if they had been spoken aloud, but they were words I had memorized years before: “Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine. When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee. For I am the Lord thy God.” These old words came with a power and an insistence that convinced me they came from God, and with them came the faith to believe they were true. However the word comes to our attention, if it is God’s truth for us at the time, we are given that assurance.
There is a second thing to notice about the extraordinary means. They came in the ordinary course of events. People were going about their usual business when God broke in in a special way. The supernatural occurred in conjunction with the natural.
Natural Means
Duty
We are going along in life, doing the usual things, when suddenly we come up against a thing we are not sure about. We need guidance. The temptation is to stop everything and ask for a sign. Once in a while this is the thing to do. Gideon did it when he put out his fleece, asking that on the first night it should be wet with dew while the ground around remained dry and that the opposite should happen on the second night. But far more often we find God leading men while they are doing what they normally are supposed to do. David was taking care of sheep, the boy Samuel was serving in the temple, Matthew was collecting taxes, when the Lord called them.
“Do the next thing” is one of the best pieces of advice I have ever had. It works in any kind of situation and is especially helpful when we don’t know what to do. What if we don’t even know what the “next thing” is? We can find something. Some duty lies on our doorstep. The rule is do it. The doing of that thing may open our eyes to the next.
I feel a little wistful now and then that God leaves so much up to me. The exercise of the intelligence is taxing. Couldn’t I just shut my eyes and ask for a vision? This was not how it happened with Paul or the others. When Paul saw the vision of the man from Macedonia, he had been traveling. In ancient times, travel must surely have been at least as wearing as it is today. Paul and Timothy had done the walking and the talking and the sailing and negotiating and searching and bargaining for passage, food, and lodging their journey required. They were, I imagine, bone weary. They had gone to bed, I hope, somewhere. Whether Paul had gone to sleep or was lying staring into the darkness of some drafty, noisy inn we don’t know. But God was with him there, his Companion in the normal course of life, and in the way God himself chose, he issued instructions for the next move.
Timing
It is reasonable to expect that God will use whatever means may be appropriate at the time. The time I refer to is God’s time, not ours. We will know when we need to know, not before.
When I review “all the way which the Lord my God hath led me”—those segments of the way I can remember because they seemed to me significant—I realize that nearly all of my trouble with finding out the will of God came because I wanted it too soon. I like to plan. I like to have things mapped out well in advance, and uncertainty of any sort puts me on edge. Perhaps it is for this very reason God has often asked me to wait until the last minute, right up to what looked like the screaming edge, before I found out what he wanted me to do. My acceptance of his timing was a rigorous exercise in trust. I was tempted to charge the Lord with negligence and inattention, like the disciples in the boat in a storm. They toiled frantically until the situation became impossible, and then instead of asking for Jesus’s help they yelled, “Master, don’t you care that we’re drowning?” They weren’t perishing, they were panicking. It was not too late. Jesus got up and merely spoke to the wind and sea.
On that other occasion, many centuries earlier, when the power of God to command water was what was needed to lead his people, the priests of Israel actually had to get their feet wet before God did anything. Why does he put us to this kind of test? Probably to give us the chance to make a conscious act of faith, often a specific, physical act, a move of some kind toward him. “And when . . . the feet of the priests bearing the ark were dipped in the brink of the water . . . the waters coming down from above stood and rose up in a heap. . . .”
One of my most crucial decisions concerned my going to a tribe of Indians called Aucas. This tribe had killed my husband and four other men, and the idea of a woman attempting to do what they couldn’t do was preposterous. However, not seeing how I could evade it, I put my life on the line, praying only, “Lord, here I am. If you want me to go, you’ll have to make a way.” For once, I had no suggestions to offer as to how he might make it. In fact, I felt pretty sure he wouldn’t. But at night I would wake and think about it: what on earth I would do if a chance came to make contact with the tribe, and how serious a matter it was because it was not just my own life that would have to be considered but also that of my small daughter, and what kind of God would ask a mother to do such a thing? My mind would go round and round these questions and in and out until it was a hopeless tangle. I would always ask desperately to be shown God’s will, but he never showed it to me until the time came. And when it came, it was as clear as the sunlight. What to do was all mapped out for me exactly, and I had a matter of minutes to make up my mind to do it.
Sometimes, though, we are in a quandary because we have already been shown what we ought to do and we are not satisfied with it. We are saying, “Lord, when are you going to tell me?” and the truth is that he has told us.
Moses, having been told plainly that God would not permit him to cross the Jordan, asked again if he might. “Let it suffice you; speak no more to me of this matter,” the Lord said. “You shall not go over this Jordan.” Our difficulty, like Moses’s, is that we can’t accept what has been told us. But there is no use praying any more about it.
Sometimes the word comes very slowly. In Psalm 112:4 (RSV) we read, “Light rises in the darkness for the upright.” It might be a gradual thing, imperceptible at first as the coming of the dawn, but long before we see it, the cock crows and there are stirrings. There is no question at all that the dawn will come. We have only to wait.
When a woman named Ruth sought the advice of her mother-in-law, Naomi, as to what the next step should be in relation to her kinsman Boaz, the answer Naomi gave her is one that has given me great comfort in puzzling situations: “Sit still, my daughter, until thou know how the matter will fall.”
Habakkuk was one of those reluctant Old Testament prophets who saw things he had no desire to see and was therefore bound to speak God’s message about them to the people. But it was not by any means an easy thing to sort out of these horrors what he ought to say. “I will take my stand to watch,” he wrote, “and station myself on the tower, and look forth to see what he will say to me, and what I will answer concerning my complaint. And the Lord answered me: ‘Write the vision; make it plain upon tablets, so he may run who reads it. For still the vision awaits its time; it hastens to the end—it will not lie. If it seem slow, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay. Behold, he whose soul is not upright in him shall fail, but the righteous shall live by his faith.’”
God Calls Us by Name
It is said that the sweetest sound in any language is the sound of one’s own name. People who engage in public relations know the importance of using a person’s name. Whether we call people by name at all and what name we use are deeply significant and are often a dead giveaway of our attitude toward a person. We have, for example, a clue to the kind of relationship that exists in a marriage when we hear the partners call each other “sweetheart” or “mommy” and “daddy.” And what of the mental postures revealed by calling a man “Dr. Smith,” plain “Smith,” “Bill,” or “old what’s-his-name”?
In an airport, most of us pay little attention to the announcements coming over the public address system, precisely because it is only the public that is being addressed. But if we hear our own name, we come to life very quickly.
I once took a little dog through a course in obedience school. One of the lessons he had to learn was to respond only to my voice. There were forty-nine other dogs and their masters in the circle, and commands were given by more than one person at a time, so each dog had to distinguish, out of all the noise, the one voice that called to him.
Sheep, too, know the voice of the shepherd and will not follow a stranger. “He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out,” John tells us. The Shepherd of our souls issues a personal call, in recognition of our individuality.
When Mary went to the garden tomb on the first Easter morning, she did not know the Lord right away. She took him to be the gardener until he spoke her name. That brought recognition. Instantly she responded, “Master!” (And we know by those two forms of address, “Mary” and “Master,” something important about their relationship.)
In Isaiah we read, “Thus saith the Lord that created thee, . . . I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine.”
How shall we hear that call? Is it likely that we shall actually hear a voice speaking our name? We cannot deny that some have. Paul was stopped in his tracks on the road to Damascus by a light and a voice. John, on the island of Patmos, saw a vision and heard a voice. The boy Samuel was awakened from sleep in the temple by the Lord’s voice calling his name. Elijah heard a voice even though it was still and small. Some in our own day have heard voices, we are told, but I am not one of them. There has never come to me anything audible. But I have found that the Lord knows how to call us. (Strange that I should be surprised at that!) He knows the best way to get our attention, and if we are ready to listen or to be shown, we will hear or see whatever it is he has chosen as his means.
A dear old Scottish lady whom I used to call my “Canadian mom” told me several years after her husband’s death how she had realized ways she might have been a better wife to him. She said to the Lord then, “Why didn’t you show me, Lord?” He answered, “Ah, but you weren’t ready to be shown!”
I loved that story because it showed me her humility (such a godly lady, not ready to be shown?) and the depth of her desire to do the will of God. But it also delighted me to know that the Lord had spoken to her in a Scottish accent.
A friend of my husband told him how God had answered his prayer for a new secretary. A young woman called him on the telephone, and as she was talking, the story went, “The Holy Spirit said to me as plain as I’m talking to you now, ‘That’s her!’”
Maybe the Lord makes mistakes in grammar. Why should it matter? The point is that he speaks our language. This was astonishing to the Quichua Indians. Could they really pray in Quichua instead of Spanish? Yes. God understood them. And there came a day when he spoke to them in Quichua. We began to translate the Bible, and then for the first time some of them woke up and said, “God speaks to me!”
“The sheep follow him: for they know his voice.”
It is possible of course, because we are human, to be mistaken. I may think I have heard his voice when I haven’t, but he is still my Shepherd and will call me back.
There are moments in our lives (and how we wish there were many more of them) when we are given certainty that outshines everything else. An old German hymn writer (my copy of the hymn gives only the initials “T. S. M.”) described this certainty:
No other voice than Thine has ever spoken,
O Lord, to me—
No other words but Thine the stillness broken
Of life’s lone sea.
There openeth the spirit’s silent chamber
No other hand—
No other lips can speak the language tender,
Speech of the Fatherland.
For others speak to one the eye beholdeth,
Who veils the soul within—
Some know not all the joy, and all the sorrow,
And none know all the sin.
They speak to one they love, it may be blindly,
Or hate, as it may be,
They speak but to the shadow, the illusion:
Thou speakest Lord, to me.
On looking back we can tell, I think, that although many other voices called and confused us and perhaps convinced us for a time, they never broke the stillness of that inner sea, never really reached the “spirit’s silent chamber.”
It is a temptation for us, as it was for my dog in obedience school, to look around to see what others are doing. Simon Peter had this trouble, too, when, after that wonderful breakfast on the beach cooked by the resurrected Lord, Jesus asked him to follow him. “Lord, what about this man?” Peter wanted to know. “What is that to you?” Jesus answered. “You follow me.” Most of us will have all we can handle if we do that. We had better not get sidetracked wondering what kind of progress others are making.
Human Agents
We have considered in an earlier chapter how God guides his people always in relationship to one another, like a flock. This is perhaps one of the most important things to remember when we are looking for personal guidance. We ought to look first of all to those with whom we have some special relationship.
The divine order is hierarchy. There are different levels of being, and different positions in human relations that are Godgiven and cannot safely be ignored. The Bible uses the figures of father-son, king-subject, master-slave, teacher-pupil, and husband-wife to illustrate spiritual principles. We are told to be subject to one another. We must obey civil authorities (Jesus paid his taxes), wives must be subject to their husbands, children are to obey their parents in the Lord. We need to be sure we are obeying the rules in these matters before we start seeking some more mystical guidance. The chances are very good that the will of God for a student in an institution, for example, is obedience to the authority of that institution. The will of God for a wife may be simply the cheerful doing of what her husband would like to do.
There are exceptions. “To obey God rather than men” is an overworked verse. We ought to have reached a high plane of spiritual perception before we invoke that one. Most of us will have a hard enough time rendering to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s before we are spiritually competent to start handing over to God what is normally Caesar’s. Jesus had some biting words for the Pharisees who encouraged men to give to God what properly belonged to their parents. In this they were “making void the word of God.”
God works always with perfect wisdom, always with perfect love, and nearly always in conjunction with human means. He led the people of Israel, but he gave them a human leader. He revealed himself to Moses directly, gave his instructions directly to him, but also used other intermediaries to lead Moses. “Now go, lead the people to the place of which I have spoken to you,” God said; “behold, my angel shall go before you.” God, the angel, the man, the people—this was the order by which the guidance came, and the people in their turn were chosen to bear the name of the Most High so that the rest of the world might see him in them. My obedience to God may be the means of leading someone else.
“Thy way was through the sea, thy path through the great waters; yet thy footprints were unseen. Thou didst lead thy people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron.” There are always the invisible ways (who can see a path through the water?), but there are the visible ways, such as these two human beings. “He chose David his servant, and took him from the sheepfolds; from tending the ewes that had young he brought him to be the shepherd of Jacob his people, of Israel his inheritance. With upright heart he tended them, and guided them with skillful hand.” Those skillful hands were human hands, hands that had learned to do a human job. God used them to do a harder job, but not one unrelated to what they were accustomed to. This brings us to what may well be another indication of God’s will.
Gifts and Abilities
David’s experience had prepared him, in heart and in hands, to do the thing God chose him for. When I am looking for the right direction, I ought to take into account what experience I have had, what gifts or propensities are mine, and what the direction of my life heretofore seems to have prepared me for.
“What is that in your hand?” the Lord said to Moses. Moses was objecting to the heavy responsibility God was laying on his shoulders and hoped he might get out of it by pointing to the uselessness of speaking to people who were not going to believe him. The thing he had in his hand at the moment, which happened to be a rod, was the thing God made use of to work a miracle. It turned into a snake. Then God used the hand itself for another miracle.
It is a scriptural principle that the divine energy acts upon the stuff of this world. Jesus had the servants fill the stone jars that happened to be standing there when he made wine from water at the marriage in Cana. He used a boy’s lunch, instead of starting from nothing, to feed five thousand people. His own spittle and the dirt at his feet were the remedies for a blind man’s eyes. Common things taken into the divine hands accomplished eternal purposes.
The nature of the thing in question is obviously important. Jesus did not use mud and spittle to make wine, or a boy’s lunch for a poultice. He does not by any means disregard the sort of person we are when he calls us to do his will. He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust. He knows the weaknesses and strengths, the tastes and fears and prejudices and ignorance and experience of each of us. What he wants to make of us, if we are willing to be made over, is sure to bear a relationship to what we are when we first come to him. It is within his power to transform. It is for us to submit to the transformation.
If we have a narrowly circumscribed view of what constitutes God’s work, we will be like the head that says to the foot, “I don’t need you.” Paul explains the wonderful diversity of the Body of Christ through this vivid analogy of the human body with its varied parts. “God works through different men in different ways, but it is the same God who achieves his purposes through them all.”
“Try to have a sane estimate of your capabilities by the light of the faith that God has given to you all.”
A particular pattern of what we ourselves expect the will of God to fall into may prevent us from seeing what is quite evident to those outside our situation. We are not always good judges of our own capabilities. Our estimate may be far from sane. “The light of the faith God has given to you all” is important, for in order to see anything by this light, we are required to take our place in the company of other Christians.
I have said earlier that God often isolates a man in order to reveal himself. It is when alone that a man most clearly recognizes God for who he is. But it is in relationship with his fellow men that he comes to know himself. Seeking the will of God as though it had nothing to do with anybody else leads to all kinds of distortions.
What is in my hand? What is my function in the Body of Christ? Have I something to give? Can I see a place where it is needed now? These questions will help me to know what I ought to do.
Desires
What I like and don’t like is a part of my nature. I am only too conscious of this when I am asking God to show me what to do. If I like privacy, he might want me in crowds. If I love the fleshpots of a civilized life, he may ask me to be a pioneer missionary. I hear others talking excitedly about “the things the Lord is doing” in this or that place, and when I search my heart I find it is filled with the hope that he won’t do anything like that here.
We can all think of a few things we are afraid of. One thing I have feared ever since I first asked God to accomplish his whole will in my life is my own desires. But I have come to see them in a little different light than I used to. For a long time, I took the view that whatever I might want to do could not possibly be what God wanted me to do. That seemed unarguable. I am a sinner, my desires are sinful, “there is no health in us,” and that’s that. I went on the Manichean assumption that I am always and necessarily bent on evil, so it ought to be a relatively simple matter to figure out that the will of God was whatever I didn’t want to do. (I heard a man on television say that everything he really wanted was too expensive, too fattening, or illegal.)
A better understanding of Scripture has shown me that even I, chief of miserable offenders that I know myself to be, may now and then actually want what God wants. This is likely to be the case more and more as I practice obedience, but it can also be a very simple and natural thing. “Thou knowest me right well; my frame was not hidden from thee, when I was being made in secret, intricately wrought in the depths of the earth.” That frame, spoiled by sin as it is, still has something to do with what God will finally make of me, and if the process of being made into his image has been begun in me by faith, my real wants are becoming more like his.
The psalmist said, “My heart speaketh to me for God.” If that heart has been given to God, why shouldn’t God use it as his speaker? Even the heart of the king, we are told, is in the hand of the Lord.
“If a pagan asks you to dinner,” wrote that severely disciplined saint, Paul, “and you want to go, feel free to eat whatever is set before you.” Imagine! “If you want to, if you feel like going, go.” That shocked me at first. An invitation to a pagan feast would be the sort of thing I would not have dreamed of accepting without praying long and earnestly. God might want me to go, all right, but not—heaven forbid—because it would be fun. He might want me to go for some exalted reason such as to “witness” to those present (which—heaven help me—would not be fun). So I would have had to inquire very carefully in order to separate my own desires from his. Paul took the whole thing very casually. It could happen any day and, like crossing the street, it might be dangerous. But Paul was writing to Christians, and he assumes that if they went, they went with God. It was nothing to pray and fast over.
There were occasions when Paul attempted to do things he wanted to do but was “prevented by the Holy Spirit.” He does not mention special guidance in the decision to do the thing—it was what he wanted to do, so he decided to do it—but he certainly had special guidance to stop, and it came in time, before he strayed off the path of righteousness. It is, we may properly say, natural to trust God to do this for us once we have made up our minds to follow, and we need not be forever halting and backing up, paralyzed by fear of our own desires.
Our human desire is never more powerfully felt than when we are in love. The experience overwhelmed me, and I did not see how it would be possible at all to know God’s will in such a tempest. John Greenleaf Whittier’s hymn helped me greatly then:
Breathe through the heats of our desire
Thy coolness and Thy balm;
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small Voice of calm!
As we have observed so many times in this book, the Lord who loves us knows how to do this.
Our Own Frame of Reference
God leads me, I believe, within my own frame of reference. What I am, where I am, how I got there, all have a great deal to do with what my frame of reference is. God can be counted on to choose the right avenue of approach.
Consider, for example, the vast differences between the frames of reference of Rahab, the harlot, David, the handsome young keeper of sheep, Esther, the loveliest woman in a heathen king’s harem, and a tax collector named Matthew. What of a redheaded monk in Germany, a noblewoman in the court of Louis XIV, a Russian pilgrim seeking in the forests and steppes the meaning of the Jesus Prayer, a Bible Belt farmwife, a Japanese university student, a Jewish psychiatrist, or a Long Island Episcopalian?
I grew up in a middle-class fundamentalist family in Philadelphia. Family prayers, Sunday school and church, table talk about God and Christian people and Christian work were very much a part of the fabric of my life. It hardly occurred to me that God needed to meet different people in different ways, or that his truth could take forms that would be unrecognizable to me. I saw a certain kind of Christianity in operation, and to me that was what it meant to be a Christian. It took a while for my imagination to go to work to apply that vision to people in other categories such as those listed above, but in the meantime God met me where I was. When I began to learn of the wideness of his mercy, my faith began to grow, and I saw that salvation was a scheme of infinitely vaster dimensions than I had dreamed. And here I had been worrying about whether I would recognize the voice! Rahab heard him, Luther heard him, so did Karl Stern, a Bavarian Jew who tells of his conversion to Christianity in a beautiful book, Pillar of Fire.
My frame of reference included, for example, the notion that every decision ought to be confirmed by some specific Scripture verse, gotten in some special way. I prayed for this and often received it. Someone is sure to point out here that it is possible to find a Scripture verse for anything one wants to do (“Let . . . the filthy still be filthy,” for example), so it hardly constitutes the guidance of God in a given instance. I agree. But the experience I am talking about is that of a girl who had set her heart to obey. That has to make a difference. God makes concessions, if I may call them that, to the thing I think I need, if the request is not a presumptuous one.
There are many Christians in the world to whom it would not even occur that God would speak as I thought he did to me, directly. Their frame of reference would include a church and a confessor and spiritual exercises I never heard of. They would expect God to instruct them only through those media. There are those who see visions and dream dreams and listen for the divine call through those. There are some who take the view that they must simply muddle through and hope God will be nice to them.
Whatever our views, they are probably too narrow. Our God is, as J. B. Phillips has said, too small. But the wonderful thing is that God is willing to start there. He can lead us into what the psalmist calls large and even wealthy places.
Circumstances
Once upon a time some donkeys got loose and wandered off from where they were supposed to be. It was this apparently haphazard incident that opened the way for the anointing of the first king of Israel.
“Now the asses of Kish, Saul’s father, were lost.” The young Saul’s having to hunt for them brought him face-to-face with Samuel, the man of God. The timing was perfect—how did the donkeys know when to get lost, how did Saul arrive just as Samuel had come to the city to make a sacrifice (for Saul had nearly turned back home at one point)?—and the man of God had been informed on the previous day what to expect: “Tomorrow about this time I will send to you a man.” Saul was not conscious of having been divinely sent. He was only looking for those wretched animals of his father.
Circumstances are without question a part of God’s will. “We know that to those who love God, who are called according to his plan, everything that happens fits into a pattern for good.” This is a sweeping statement. But if God is in control of the big things, he has to be in control of the little things. He “pulls strings through circumstances,” Jim Elliot wrote. It is a normal assumption of faith that he will use circumstances to nudge me in the right direction.
But we have to use our heads. I hope that, in studying the divine principles, we have not forgotten the importance of the human principle of common sense. The intelligence we have is a gift from God; the circumstances in which we find ourselves he controls. Obviously we have to bring our intelligence as well as our faith to bear on those circumstances.
“I will instruct you and teach you the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you. Be not like a horse or a mule, without understanding, which must be curbed with bit and bridle.”
It is possible to become quite mulish in our stubborn insistence on a particular means of guidance so that we miss entirely the signs that are all around us. If we are “without understanding,” God may have to impose some uncomfortable “bit” or “bridle” to bring us into line. How much more pleasant things are for all of us, if we will only use our heads.
If a pipe bursts, even the most pious among us is unlikely to drop to his knees to pray about calling the plumber. He calls the plumber first. Any praying can be done later. But in situations that, for particular personal reasons have become highly charged with the idea of “the will of God,” the action to be taken may be just as obvious as calling the plumber, but we hesitate to take it. “Lean not unto thine own understanding,” we read in Proverbs. Might it not be a kind of worldliness to follow common sense? The first clause of the verse is, “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart,” which is a Hebrew parallelism, another way of saying, “Lean not unto thine own understanding.” They come to the same thing. A full trust protects us from our own misconceptions.
I knew a girl in college who looked on circumstances as nothing more than the devil’s pitfalls. She felt she had to inquire of God before making her bed or helping her roommate with the cleaning. Once she had to borrow shampoo because, halfway to town to buy some, she received a divine directive to go back. This kind of piety is hard to live with, to say the least.
Our Lord himself, when he was on earth, took note of circumstances when he made decisions. He was no automaton, although he always did the things that pleased the Father. The Gospel accounts come to us quite unequivocally as human stories. We see in them Jesus the Man, the Son of man, walking, as we are meant to walk, by faith. Prophecy was fulfilled in what he did, but we cannot assume that he deliberately made decisions in order to fulfill it. “Now when he heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew into Galilee; and leaving Nazareth he went and dwelt in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, that what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled.” It was not until he heard that John had been arrested that he went to Galilee. The arrest was news to him. The news affected his plans. And what he did turned out to be, as Matthew wrote about it later, a fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy.
“Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them. . . .” Because of the great things he had done in Syria, the crowds came, and because the crowds came, he gave them that matchless sermon, a treasury of teaching preserved for us today as the Sermon on the Mount. One circumstance leads to another and another, and so God gives us his gifts.
When the disciples asked where Jesus wanted to eat the Passover, his directions included a man going about his ordinary business. Wouldn’t it have been just as easy, we may ask, for Jesus to have given directions straight to the house? But he chose to include a man who at that crucial moment would be carrying a water jar. The disciples were to follow him. He must have been a servant, for the house he went to was not his own. A householder also became part of the plot when the disciples had to ask him for the use of his room. These details are so matter-of-factly included that we hardly notice them until we go back over the story and ponder the fact that these were Jesus’s specific instructions. His divine knowledge acted on everyday circumstances—it did not bypass them.
When Abraham sent his servant back to his own country to find a wife for his son Isaac, the servant had misgivings as to whether he could accomplish so delicate a mission. Abraham reassured him. It would work because God had promised to give the land of Canaan to Abraham’s own descendants, and therefore God would send an angel to help him. (Having had several encounters with angels himself, Abraham assumed that this was the most likely means God would use to direct the servant.)
No angel appears in the story at all. The servant, in fact, set out on his errand in a thoroughly businesslike fashion, packing up ten camel-loads of presents. Nothing is said of his pausing for prayer until he came to the outskirts of the city of Nahor, where he stopped the camel train near the well and prayed for guidance. But his prayer was not one I would have thought of. Instead of asking God to point out to him, from among the women who would soon be coming to draw water, the one he had in mind for Isaac, he asked that the one he himself should pick might be the one.
It was an original and imaginative way of ascertaining the will of God. The servant, a man of faith like his master, was not bogged down with preconceived notions of how to ask and how not to ask. His prayer fit his own frame of reference quite well.
The first girl who came was a beautiful one, a virgin, a willing worker, and gracious. When the servant asked her for a drink she quickly let the jar down from her head onto her hand, gave him a drink, and then rushed back to draw water for all of his ten camels. (I have no idea how many jarfuls those beasts must have guzzled, but I am sure it meant a lot of hard work for the girl.) No wonder the servant suspected she was the one, but he had good sense and the patience of faith. “The man gazed at her in silence to learn whether the Lord had prospered his journey or not.”
When it turned out that she was indeed a descendant of the city father himself, and that the servant would be welcome in her father Bethuel’s house, the servant had his answer. His response was worship: “Blessed be the Lord, the God of my master Abraham, who has not forsaken his steadfast love and his faithfulness toward my master. As for me, the Lord has led me in the way to the house of my master’s kinsmen.” The King James Version says, “I being in the way, the Lord led me.”
No angel, no vision, no word was given. The man was doing his duty, using his head, keeping his eyes open, and trusting in the Lord.
There is no way for us mortals to sort out which of the events in the story of Abraham’s servant, or in our own story, are “providential,” which really mattered, and which did not. We accept by faith that all of them matter. If we try to trace what look to us like the significant events or turning points in any life, we will not go far before we find it was in the ordinary course that the extraordinary happened. It was where the man with the water jar went (and he went quite naturally and innocently, unaware of being followed or guided) that the Lord wanted his disciples to go. So it is that when we are least aware, goodness and mercy are still following us.
Advice from Friends
It is a good thing to talk over a decision with a friend. The times we find ourselves entirely alone in the making of a decision are rare. Nearly always there are others who will be affected by what we decide, and usually some of these can be consulted. A person who loves God and has had some experience in finding his will is the kind we should look for. I have been very lucky or, to use an old word that means the same thing, blessed, in having several friends of my own age who have helped me often. But I have been especially blessed through the advice of men and women much older than I. They see things I simply don’t see. They’ve been over roads I’ve never traveled. They have perspective I couldn’t possibly have.
E’en down to old age all My people shall prove
My boundless, eternal, unchangeable love.
Of course they are better equipped to know that love—they have seen it in operation much longer and in many more ways than I have.
It may be that you cannot find anyone who can advise you, but you can find someone who will pray with you. “If two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven.” I have seen this work. There is a special power in the union and communion of two or more agreed on asking for a single specific thing.
After Jesus had gone back up to heaven and the disciples were left alone for the first time, a decision had to be made as to who would take the place of the traitor Judas in the ministry of the apostles. Peter brought the matter to the attention of the believers who had gathered for prayer. Before they started praying, they nominated two. Then they prayed, “Lord, who knowest the hearts of all men, show which one of these two thou hast chosen. . . .” They took it “by faith.” They assumed that God was in the choice of the nominees to begin with. Now all that remained was for him to make clear which one it should be. They had exercised their responsibility. They expected him to exercise his. They did not look for a shaft of light to strike the right man or a halo to appear around his head. They resorted to the method any man on the street would have thought of: they cast lots. (We would be more likely to cast votes today, but would we as readily accept the winner as God’s choice?) The lot fell on Matthias, and he was enrolled with the other eleven. The whole process strikes me as orderly and sensible, which is what I would expect God’s way to be.
It is natural to ask advice. It is also natural that friends whose advice we have not asked may offer advice because they genuinely care about our welfare. As Christians, members one of another, subject to one another, we cannot blithely ignore the carefully considered counsel of our friends.
But then they may be wrong. In Acts 20 and 21 we find the story of Paul on his way to Jerusalem. He had resolved, we learn in chapter 19, in the Spirit, to go to Jerusalem. He was fully aware of how dangerous this might be for him, and the riot he caused in Ephesus would have been enough to discourage a man of lesser determination. But he had made up his mind, and in the first part of the twentieth chapter the words “determined,” “he had arranged,” “intending,” “Paul had decided,” and “he was hastening to be at Jerusalem” make it clear how thoroughly he had decided. He said, “I am going to Jerusalem bound in the Spirit.” His own safety was not a consideration. He was interested in one thing: “if only I may accomplish my course and the ministry which I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God.”
When Paul stopped at Tyre, the Christians in that city were alarmed to learn where he was going, and “through the Spirit they told Paul not to go on to Jerusalem.” His resolve to go there had been made “in the Spirit.” The Christians’ warning not to go was also made through that same Spirit. It looks like a strange contradiction.
This story came to my attention when I, too, had made the decision I referred to earlier as one of my most difficult. It alarmed some who were closest to me and whose opinions I respected. There had been a long period of prayer and preparation for this move, and when it seemed that the time had come, I wrote to my family and a few close friends about it, not actually asking their advice but simply stating my intention. Their response was immediate and almost unanimous: Please don’t go. Of course I was confused by this. Was I to conclude that my own leading had been mistaken? Should I take their advice? Could God possibly have shown me one way and them another?
God could have. I found that the two things might both be included in his plan. The warnings of friends were a test of the validity of my call. I was forced to sit down again, weigh all the evidence, count the cost, note the risks, and take them all to God in prayer. He knew my side of the question; he knew their side as well. Like Hezekiah, I spread the letters of my friends before him and waited for some further word. I knew I could not act without regard for others. My awareness of God’s will for me, far from making me deaf to godly advice, made me listen the more carefully and wait with greater patience and quietness for the final signal. (This, I might add, was no easy matter for me. I felt as though I were being held in with bit and bridle, and I champed.) But at last the signal was given. An approach to the Auca tribe was suddenly opened to me.
Paul continued his journey despite the advice of the Christians in Tyre. When he got to Caesarea, a prophet named Agabus told him quite plainly that he would be imprisoned in Jerusalem. Shouldn’t Paul have taken this as God’s message that he ought to change his plans? His traveling companions and the Caesarean Christians, hearing the prophecy, begged him not to go on. But Paul rebuked them for crying and breaking his heart. He was ready for prison if it came to that, even for death, and his orders were clear. When the Christians saw that nothing would change his mind they stopped crying and said, “The will of the Lord be done.” So to Jerusalem Paul went and was arrested as predicted.
We can hardly help speculating as to what might have happened if he had heeded the warnings. We may wonder if Paul was in fact mistaken, and those who warned him were really the voice of God, which he ignored. (Questions like this came to my mind, naturally, when my husband was killed doing what he thought God had called him to do.) We only know it was to Paul’s own master he had to answer, and it was Paul who wrote of that wonderful “pattern for good” toward which all things work when we love God. What we know of Paul would convince us he acted in faith, and what we know of God helps us to believe that verse. Everything works for good. Those who had warned him might well have said, “We told you so,” but their faith may later have enabled them to believe that even his imprisonment would work for good.
It is not, however, as though God allows us to see what may look to us like “good reasons” for his letting things turn out as they did. Sometimes, of course, he does. But we must beware of insisting on some “justification” or vindication that satisfies us. God has never promised any such vindication here in this life. He is under no obligation whatever to explain himself. He did not answer Job’s questions. He does not answer all of ours. It is faith and faith alone that can believe things fit into a pattern for good. The human evidence points in the other direction.
For some, the death of five men at the hands of Auca Indians was “justified” by the salvation of some of the Aucas. What could we say, then, of the thousands of Indians (the Aucas numbered only a few hundred) in the tribes with whom the men had been working before their attempt to reach the Auca tribe? Such attempts to figure out why things happen, to allay our own fears and shore up our crumbling defenses, are not the response of faith. Where reasons are given, we don’t need faith. Where only darkness surrounds us, we have no means for seeing except by faith.
There was no human explanation offered me for my husband’s death that adequately covered the data. Nothing satisfied me except the absolute conviction that God was in perfect control. It did not look as though he was. It looked like chaos. Faith alone enabled me to believe in that pattern for good.
There was a time when Paul had no advice from anybody. After (we are not told how long after) his stunning conversion on the road to Damascus, “I did not confer with flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me” (I am surprised that he felt no need to consult even men qualified as apostles), “but I went away into Arabia.” Not a word is written of what he did there. We only know that he had no conferences with anybody.
But Paul was a special case. He had special experiences (his conversion, his calling), he did some special things in special ways, and most of us would assume from the start that we cannot imitate him. He went up to Jerusalem by revelation. He does not explain what this means, but it must have been something special.
Let us not forget, however, that to God each of us is a special case. There is no category labeled “Miscellaneous.” The God who guided the great apostle in his great work is the God who carries lambs in his arms.
If thou but suffer God to guide thee,
And hope in Him through all thy ways,
He’ll do thee good, whate’er betide thee,
And bear thee through the evil days.
Who trusts in God’s unchanging love
Builds on the Rock that naught can move.
Georg Neumark
(trans. Catherine Winkworth)
The Harder of Two Things
Sometimes we have narrowed down the possibilities to two, but there seems no way to choose one of them. “How long will you go limping with two different opinions?” Elijah asked the people of Israel. “If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.” The people had been thrown into confusion by Ahab the king, and Elijah was sent to straighten them out. It was a question as to which god was the true one. Clearly it had to be one or the other. Elijah the prophet and truth-teller was not really welcome, for he would clarify the issues and force the people to a choice.
But such clarification and pressure is exactly what is needed where there is confusion, and it is exactly what the word of God does. It strips away whatever is irrelevant and dispenses with the side issues, “piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are open and laid bare to the eyes of him with whom we have to do.”
Most of us avoid crises when we can. It is far more comfortable to sit in the back row than to stand up and be counted. It is less demanding to fade into the crowd, stay in the shade, move at our accustomed pace. To take up the cross and follow, to walk in the light, to climb “the steep ascent of heaven” are not options that have a strong popular appeal.
But we are speaking of those who actually want to do the will of God. What we are concerned with now is the business of choice when both alternatives seem equally moral.
Choose the harder of the two ways. If you have eliminated all other possibilities and there still seem to be two that might please God, choose the more difficult one. “The way is hard, that leads to life,” Jesus said, so it is likely that he is asking us to will against our will.
But what if he isn’t asking that? The more sincerely we seek the will of God, the more fearful we will be that we may miss it. If it made little difference to us, obviously we would not worry very much about it, so there ought to be a measure of reassurance for us in the very fact of our fear. Jesus is in the boat with us, no matter how wild the storm is, and he is at peace. He commands us not to be afraid.
The supreme example outside that of our Lord himself, of a man willing against his own will, in obedience to God, is Abraham. He was asked to sacrifice Isaac, his only son—and this, in the face of all God’s promises about descendants. Abraham was to tie the boy down on top of a pile of kindling on an altar. This he did (with what anguish we can only imagine), and only then, when with the knife poised he had triumphantly passed the hardest test of faith, did God show him that his son’s death was not finally required.
David was willing to undertake a staggering project, the building of a temple for God. God did not allow him to build it but was pleased with him for wanting to. “You did well that it was in your heart,” God told him.
When Paul, Silas, and Timothy were traveling together as missionaries in Asia Minor, “they attempted to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them.” We could wish Luke had told us exactly how the Spirit of Jesus stopped them, but it is enough for us to know that the men who were bent on obedience to God had made, in the integrity of their hearts (we may believe), a wrong decision and that God reversed it.
“And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, ‘This is the way, walk in it,’ when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left.”