Guidance

By Fred Pruitt

A brother wrote me recently asking about guidance. I paraphrase: How do we know which decision to make in important life situations? This path or that path? Can we be cavalier about it, knowing “que sera sera, whatever will be will be?” Alternatively, do we just ask the Lord to tell us by some means which is the best choice? On the other hand, do we just trust that God has given us these desires and just walk in faith that we are walking as God leads?

Here is the reply:

Do you see that God has brought you through your whole life, including the times you made life-altering decisions before you may have known Him? I don’t know your history, but I can think of some in my life, that changed my whole direction.

One was choosing the US Air Force Academy over other universities I could have attended. We went to church in those days, but it was an impersonal thing with me, and I don’t recall ever once asking God about the right thing to choose. I just wanted it, pursued it, jumped through all the hoops I needed to, and by God’s grace (luck of the draw?), they chose me. I went there and had a lifetime’s worth of experiences in a short 6 months, but then I lost my zeal to be there and decided out of my own desire to resign, and go back to my home town of Rome, GA. I never asked the Lord about that. According to our theology, I was a container of error in those days, and I was. But as Romans 6 says, I was free in my unrighteousness.

Coming back home, within a few months I met a Rome girl, senior in high school but she hung out with college guys, and we are still together today. I didn’t ask God if I should marry her. By the time we did that, I was a Zen Buddhist, very serious, and believed in no personal God. I wrote the ceremony, very mystical, very hippie, and since coming to Christ only a few months after that, not one time ever have I thought we should be re-married under Christ.

So do you see my point? My point is, that God was leading and guiding us even in our lost days. What else can we say? However the devil beat us up in those days, it was for the redemption of the world through Christ! Then as we walked as “just ourselves,” from hindsight, I can look at all those life experiences stretching back now for me almost 60 years, and say, “Yes, Lord, it was You forming my life from my mother’s womb, and even more than that, from eternity we were chosen to bring forth Your works, and this path You have taken me on has from the first moment been the path to get here now, and You have been a perfect guide and leader even in my unconsciousness.”

How much more clearly can we see the certainty of His guidance (after all, He is us) in our current moment, if we can see that He led us even in Egypt when we did not know Him (though He knew us)? Though it might take a wilderness for us to really get it, what we see when we cross the Jordan into the Promise is that He has kept us, walked in us, thought in us, used our sometimes even sinful desires as pathways to Him. What angst then could there be of a future?

Then we can only testify to what the song says:

“Great is thy faithfulness,
All I have needed thy hand hath provided,
Great is thy faithfulness,
Lord unto me.”

Yes, we always angst over seemingly important life’s direction decisions, as God would have it, because we are unsure. However, the fact is we can be inwardly sure and certain, because now it IS up to us to just make up our minds which choice we want and live from that moment on by faith that we have heard the Word in us, “This is the way, walk ye in it!”

Therefore, be in angst, make your decision, and realize it is not just “que sera sera, whatever will be will be,” but rather, “Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, and afterward receive me to glory; whom have I in heaven but thee, and there is none upon the earth I desire beside thee, my heart and my flesh faileth, but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion forever.” (Ps 73: 24-26)

This is where it is solidified in us that we ARE HE! This is our royal choice — “The king’s heart is in the hand of the LORD, as the rivers of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will.” (Prov 21:1)

You are that king!

Blessings,

fred

Advertisement