The Leading of God

You ask me how you can discern between the leadings of God within you and your natural thoughts and ideas. Unfortunately, there is no positive way of knowing! If there were, your transformation would become easier, assuming your intentions are pure. You must walk with God with a total sense of abandonment and uncertainty. You must risk making mistakes which are unavoidable when you start out in this inward way. Let me also say that if you are looking for some, great divine revelation for matters which your own reason and common sense can figure out, you set yourself up to be deceived.

The believer must act simply and without certainty, being assured that what is good comes from God, and what is not comes from self. You will grow purer as the activity of self diminishes. Mistakes will happen less and less. You will more readily sense within you that which is of God. This is because you are becoming more and more an instrument for the indwelling Lord to use, so the self gets in the way less and less. Your Lord within you, with all His wisdom, is able to speak to pressing matters. He is established more deeply within you as you give yourself wholly to Him. "When they bring you before magistrates and kings, etc., it shall be given you in that hour what you shall speak."

Because God leads you in this way - a moment at a time - it allows you to be free and unattached, always ready for the slightest breath of the Holy Spirit within. This breath in you is like a gentle breeze and not a whirlwind that shakes the earth. Do not try to anticipate what God will communicate to you, nor try to know His will before you need to know it. After years of experience in this matter, it is my observation that God only makes known His will to you when He wants you to act upon it.

If you, wholly submitted to God, begin to do something that is not the will of God, you will feel a slight drawing back within yourself. You should then stop at once. If you feel no such warning, then go ahead and act, simply in faith.

A mother watches over her child as it walks; but if the child should start to go astray, she will call it back. This gentle calling in your soul is just like the mother calling her child away from danger.

(Jeanne Guyon)