A Reflection of White Light

(Excerpted from God’s Guidance: A Slow and Certain Light, Chapter 5, “The Means”)

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….

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….

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 the horse or mule, without understanding, which must be curbed with a 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 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.