One of the most difficult things for a believer to learn, in my opinion, is how to separate our own thoughts and desires from those of the Holy Spirit. Many Christians are downright glib about saying things like, “The Lord told me this,” or “The Lord laid this on my heart,” when really they mean to say they have a strong conviction of their own about it. Now, it’s entirely possible that the thought or conviction they are speaking of really did come from the Lord, and I would not say such things never do. But I will say that some people make that claim all too easily. I knew a woman once, many years ago, who told me that the first time she laid eyes on the man that was to be her husband, that the Lord “told her” she was to marry him. All sorts of alarms went off in my head, because I wasn’t so sure myself that they should have been together, but at that point, they were already married, and she was speaking of the past. But they didn’t last more than a few years, and when they broke up, she was just as convinced that was the Lord’s will as well. Clearly, she was utterly mistaken in at least one of those cases, and probably both.
But I have a more personal example. When I was a teenager, I decided that the Lord was calling me to full-time ministry. I thought about it, I prayed about it, and I came to the conclusion He wanted me to be a pastor. I shifted my high school studies away from the sciences and math courses that I most excelled in, and graduated a year early (handily short-circuiting several scholarship opportunities while I was at it). I applied to a Bible college, and was accepted. When asked how I was going to pay for it, I said, “I’m trusting the Lord for that,” and I was lauded for my “faith” and encouraged. But a week before admissions, I had to call the school and cancel. The money never came, and I hadn’t a dollar to spare for it. So, I then concluded the Lord meant me to work for a year first. The pattern repeated itself – the time came, the money did not, and I had to cancel my enrollment again. I was barely making enough money to pay bills, let alone put myself through college.
I was bitterly disappointed, and my faith was shaken. I slipped into a funk that went on a few years. I was now sharing an apartment with a friend, and things were starting to look up financially, so I prayed again about full-time ministry. This time, I concluded I was going to go into missions. I had spent a few summers in the past working for Child Evangelism Fellowship and a Christian camp, and I realized I wasn’t really cut out for preaching on corners and such, so I determined I’d go on the field as a pilot for Mission Aviation Fellowship. I started taking flying lessons, and was about half way to the first milestone of getting a private pilot’s license when my roommate announced he was getting married. That was the end of spare cash for lessons, and another idea had to be set aside.
It was about this time that I was absolutely forced to consider that God didn’t want for me what I thought He wanted. After all, if it was His desire for me to be in full-time ministry, wouldn’t He have provided for it? I was feeling rather bitter about my failures so far, to be honest, and spent a lot of time seeking His will about it. When the answer came, it was a shock to me, and a blow; it was as if God said, “What if I want you serving me out in the world?”
It took me decades to understand why. You see, I grew up in a sheltered, almost cloistered environment. It was never that God wanted me in full-time ministry – it was that I was afraid of stepping out into the cruel and ugly world, and I wanted to stay in a sheltered Christian environment. In other words, it was what I wanted, not what God wanted. But I put a good Christian face on my desires, and expected God to make them happen. On the other hand, God wanted me to grow in ways I never would have pursued on my own, and He pretty much had to force me to do it.
The Bible verse that springs to mind when I think of this is I John 4:1 – “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world.” Many people will only apply what this verse says to social trends and cultural issues. But how do social trends and cultural issues start, and how do they propagate? They do both in people hearts … they start as ideas, they grow into convictions, right or wrong, and they get spread to those who are either already of like mind or are convinced to be of like mind. That’s how spiritual influences work, in the hearts of individuals (Pro. 4:24). They are intangible, and manifest as thoughts. But we can’t always tell where those thoughts came from. If it’s a horrible thought, we don’t usually think it came from God, we blame ourselves for it. But it may have come from some malign spirit, not from ourselves at all. In an ironic twist, when a “good” thought comes to us, we don’t like to think it came from our self, we want to say it came from God. The truth is, though, thoughts come from all three places, God, Satan, and our own selves. And if we are to walk in the Spirit of God, we have to learn to tell the difference.
There are some tools God has given us to master that kind of discernment, and none of them are quick and easy to learn.
First of all, we have to be very familiar with what the Word of God says. It was said of the Bereans, that when Paul came to them with teachings they weren’t familiar with, they “searched the Scriptures daily,” to see if they were true. That is neither a trivial nor a simple undertaking. It takes years to become familiar enough with Scripture to get an immediate sense of what accords with it, and what does not. In the meanwhile, you have to depend on others who know Scripture better than you do, and this presents another problem – what if the person you are depending on doesn’t know the Bible as well as you thought they did? The answer to that is you can never settle for letting other people do the learning for you. You have to learn yourself, you have to be able to question what you think you already know, and constantly be able to re-evaluate what you already know with what you learn. In other words, you have to grow in your knowledge of Scripture, and you have to keep growing in it, or you are eventually going to settle into a false sense of it that will lead you into error.
Secondly, we have to spend time in prayer. By that, I do not mean having a monolog with God, where we spill all our ideas before him, and never take the time to consider what He may be giving back. We have to learn to be quiet in His presence (I Kings 19:12-13). We have to be steadfast in prayer, and never stop doing it (I Thess. 5:17). But mostly, we have to listen. God has promised us wisdom (James 1:5), and knowledge to live a life that pleases Him (Col. 1:9-12). We aren’t going to get either if we don’t take the time to learn from Him.
Third, we need to be able to bounce our ideas off of other believers, learn their opinions on what we say, and evaluate whether we have gotten it right or not. It’s far too easy to isolate oneself, and creep into an error that we cannot see without someone else pointing it out (Pro. 27:17). This is also important, though not exactly on topic, for encouragement and generally helping each other out in living the Christian life (Heb. 10:25). I cannot begin to state the times I thought I had a brilliant idea, and my wife shot it down, helping me to see what I overlooked. But, like the rest, there is a possibility of danger in this as well. If any time someone shares an idea with fellow believers and gets shot down for it, or has it condescendingly set aside, an opportunity for growth has been short-circuited. There is a way to correct someone gently, and one must never assume it is always the other person that needs correction. Sometimes it’s you.
The bottom line is we have to be able to discern not only what we believe, but why we believe it. We have to be able to identify where our thoughts come from, and whether they are from God, from ourselves, or from someone else. And to do that, we need to know who God is, and what He is like, so we can properly test those thoughts. It isn’t enough that an idea feels right, it has to be right, to the best of our ability to evaluate it … and we have to continually upgrade that ability. It’s an ongoing process that won’t be finished until we are face-to-face with our Savior, and until then, some things will always be murky (I Cor. 13:12). So, knowing that, we need to commit ourselves to the learning. We need to practice letting go of self, and letting Him guide us. Then, knowing Him, we can distinguish what His voice is among all the noises of our daily lives. Then will we be able to walk in the Spirit and be guided by Him.