Who Leads You?
How can you know what leads you? How do you know whether you are being led by the Spirit of God or being led by the influence of the world or people in your environment? How can you tell the difference between what appears good and what is God? There is so much noise in the world today. How do you discern what God is speaking? Does it matter to you?
You know that verse that says eyes haven’t seen and ears haven’t heard the things that God prepares for those who love Him? Did you know that later in that same verse the Bible tells us that God reveals those very things to us through His Spirit, but our natural selves cannot recognize what God reveals to us because to us they are “foolishness.”
“Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love him. But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God… Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God… But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”
1 Corinthians 2:9-14, NKJV.
1 Corinthians Ch. 2 makes it clear that it is possible to know the secret things God has prepared for us but we are incapable of recognizing them if we are only operating out of ourselves. The supernatural, awe-inspiring things that God works in our lives and in our worlds appear foolish to us unless we discern them through His Spirit.
So raises the question, what are you willing to do to hear from God? What are you willing to silence? Do you have a practice in your life where you intentionally shut out any influences that have the potential of distorting, or altogether silencing, the voice of God in your life? If not, I encourage you to begin thinking about how you can cultivate this time. It is so important to hear from Him and know that you have heard from Him. It is when you come out of this intentional place that you are able to discern God’s steps for you and it is out of this place that you develop the faith to take those steps. This intentional place also matures you spiritually so that you are not easily deceived by the many influences in the world today that sound good but are not God.
We have to pray to perceive through the lens of the Holy Spirit because otherwise we are not seeing correctly. Without the perspective of God’s Spirit we cannot know, understand, or even recognize what is happening in our lives accurately. Without the accurate picture, how do we ever become who He called us to be? Without the accurate picture, how do we ever receive all the things He has for us?