The Right Ideas About Guidance The Right Ideas About Guidance
To many Christians, guidance is a chronic problem. Why? Not because they doubt that divine guidance is a fact, but because they are sure it is a fact. They know that God can guide, and has promised to guide, every Christian believer. Books and friends and public speakers tell them how guidance has worked in the lives of others. Their fear, therefore, is not that no guidance should be available for them, but that they may miss the guidance God provides through some fault of there own. Christians have no doubt that God is able both to lead and to feed, as they ask. But they remain anxious, because they are not certain of their own receptiveness to the guidance God offers.
Earnest Christians seeking guidance often go wrong. Why is this? Often the reason is that their notion of the nature and method of divine guidance is distorted. They overlook the guidance that is ready at hand - specifically God's Word - and lay themselves open to all sorts of delusions. Their basic mistake is to think of guidance as essentially an inward prompting of the Holy Spirit, apart from the written Word of God.
One of the fundamentals we as Christians need to understand is that our rational Creator guides us - his rational creatures - through a rational understanding and application of his written Word. This mode of guidance is fundamental, both because it limits the area within which guidance is needed and given, and also because those who have attuned themselves to it, so that the basic attitudes are right, are likely to recognize guidance when it comes. While the Spirit is our guide, the true way to honor the Spirit is to honor the holy scriptures through which he guides us. This fundamental guidance which God gives to shape our lives - the instilling, that is, of the basic convictions, attitudes, ideas, value judgments, in terms of which we are to live, 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. We need to remember that the Spirit leads within the limits which the Word sets, not beyond them - as "He guides us in the paths of righteousness" ( Psalms 23:3) - but not anywhere else.
5:10:49 PM 
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