True Guidance

We need to comprehend the true way by which God leads man, and the relationship between man’s will and the will of God.

The obedience of the Christian to God ought to be unconditional. When his spiritual life reaches the summit his will shall be perfectly one with God’s. This does not imply, however, that he has no more volition of his own. It is still there; only the fleshly control of it is gone. God always requires man’s volition to cooperate with Him in fulfilling His will. By beholding the example of our Lord Jesus we can be assured that the volition of anyone fully united with God is still very much with him. “I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me”; “not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me”; “nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done” (John 5.30, 6.38; Luke 22.42). Here do we see the Lord Jesus Who, though one with the Father, yet possesses His Own personal will apart from that of the Father. He has His Own will but neither seeks nor does that will. The implication is obvious that all who truly are united with God should place their will alongside His. They should not annihilate their organ of volition.

In true guidance the Christian is not obligated to obey God mechanically; instead he must execute God’s will actively. God takes no pleasure in demanding His own to follow blindly; He wants them to do His will in full and conscious exercise of their total beings. A lazy person would like God to act for him so that he can simply follow passively. But God does not desire His child to be lazy. He wishes him to prepare his members actively and obey actively after he has spent time in examining the will of God. Wherefore in the practice of obedience the believer goes through the following steps: (a) willingness to do God’s will (John 7.17); (b) revelation of that will to his intuition by the Holy Spirit (Eph. 5.17) ; (c) strengthening by God to will His will (Phil. 2.13) ; and (d) strengthening by God to do His will (Phil. 2.13). God never substitutes Himself for the believer in carrying out His will; consequently, upon knowing the will of God he must will to do it and then draw upon the power of the Holy Spirit to work it out.

Why must the Christian. draw on the power of the Holy Spirit? Because standing alone his will is very weak. How true are those words of Paul: “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it” (Rom. 7.18). One must be strengthened by the Holy Spirit in the inner man before he can practically obey God. Hence God first works in us to will and then works in us to work for His good pleasure (Phil. 2.13).

God reveals His will in our spirit’s intuition and there supplies strength to us both to will and to work out His will when our volition is united to Him. He demands that we be one with Him, but He never uses our will for us. The purpose of God’s creation and redemption is to give man a perfectly free volition. Through the salvation accomplished by the Lord Jesus on the cross we Christians now can choose freely to do the will of God. All the charges in the New Testament concerning life and godliness are to be either chosen or rejected as we so wish and will. Such charges would mean nothing if God were to annihilate the operation of our volition.

A spiritual Christian is one who has full authority to exercise his own volition. He always should choose God’s will and reject Satan’s. While at times he is uncertain whether something is from God or from the devil, yet he is able to choose or reject. He can declare: Even though I know not if this is of God or of Satan, yet I choose what is God’s and reject what is Satan’s. He may continue to be uninformed but he can continue to maintain the attitude of wanting what is God’s and rejecting what is the devil’s. A child of God ought to exercise this right of choosing or rejecting in all respects. It does not matter too much if he is unaware, as long as he decides to choose the will of God. He may say: whenever I know what God’s mind is, I shall do it; I always choose God’s will and reject Satan’s. This attitude affords the Spirit of God opportunity to work in him until his will against the devil daily grows stronger and Satan daily loses his influence in him. In this way God secures another faithful servant in the midst of a rebellious world. By persistently maintaining the attitude of rejecting the enemy’s will and continually beseeching God to prove what is of Him, the believer begins before long to appreciate the great effectiveness of such an attitude of will in spiritual life.