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Confidence in God’s readiness to teach those who desire to obey underlies all Psalm 119.
It is impossible to doubt that guidance is a reality intended for, and promised to, every child of God.
Earnest Christians seeking guidance often go wrong. Why
their notion of the nature and method of divine guidance is distorted.
Their basic mistake is to think of guidance as essentially inward prompting by the Holy Spirit, apart from the written Word.
This idea,
is a seed-bed in which all forms of fanaticism and folly can grow.
because they shape our lives so decisively and mean so much for joy or sorrow, we think a lot about “vocational choices,” and it is right that we should.
Two features about divine guidance in the case of “vocational choices” are distinctive. Both follow from the nature of the situation itself.
First, these problems cannot be resolved by a direct application of biblical teaching.
Second, just because Scripture cannot decide one’s choice directly, the factor of God-given prompting and inclination, whereby one is drawn to commit oneself to one set of responsibilities rather than another and finds one’s mind settled in peace as one contemplates them, becomes decisive,
The idea of a life in which the inward voice of the Spirit decides and directs everything sounds most attractive,
but in practice this quest for superspirituality leads only to frantic bewilderment or lunacy.
Hannah Whitall Smith, that shrewd and commonsensical Quaker lady, saw much of this, and wrote of it instructi...
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What conduct of this sort shows is failure to grasp that the fundamental mode whereby our rational Creator guides his rational creatures is by rational understanding and application of his written Word.
the true way to honor the Holy Spirit as our guide is to honor the holy Scriptures through which he guides us.
The fundamental guidance
which God gives to shape ou...
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is not a matter of inward promptings apart from the Word but of the pressure on our consciences of the portrayal of God’s character and will in the Word, which the
Spirit enlightens us to understand and apply to ourselves.
Be it noted that the reference to being “led by the Spirit” in Romans 8:14 relates not to inward “voices” or any such experience, but to mortifying
known sin and not living after the flesh!
Only within the limits of this guidance does God prompt us inwardly in matters o...
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The Spirit leads within the limits which the Word sets, not beyond them.
First, unwillingness to think.
God made us thinking beings, and he guides our minds as in his presence we think things out—not
Second, unwillingness to think ahead and weigh the long-term consequences of alternative courses of action.
Third, unwillingness to take advice.
Fourth, unwillingness to suspect oneself.
The joy and general sense of well-being that often
goes with being “in love” can easily silence conscience and inhibit critical thinking.
We need to ask ourselves why we “feel” a particular course to be right,
we shall be wise to lay the case before someone else whose judgment we trust, to give a verdict on our reasons.
We can never distrust ourselves too much.
Fifth, unwillingness to discount personal magnetism.
Outstanding people are not,
necessarily wrong, but they are not necessarily right, either!
Sixth, unwillingness to wait.
He is not in such a hurry as we are, and it is not his way to give more light on the future than we need for action in the present, or to guide us more than one step at a time.
When action is needed, light will come.
Is their own present experience of the rough side of life
a sign from God
that they are themselves like Jonah, off track, following the path of self-will ra...
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Trouble should always be treated as a call to consider one’s ways.
But trouble is not necessarily a sign of being
off track ...
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God’s guidance regularly leads to upsets and distresses which one would otherwise have escaped.
look at the life of the Lord Jesus himself. No human life has ever been so completely guided by God, and no human being has ever qualified so comprehensively for the description “a man of sorrows.”
the Christian’s guided life may appear as a waste—as
Nor does God always tell us the why and wherefore of the frustrations and losses which are part and parcel of the guided life.
