Lead, Guide,and Direct: What is This?

Part One    Part Two    Part Three 

True or not, whatever Christianity you grew up with had a lot of influence on what you believe and practice.  I wasn't taught much to anything on biblical prayer.  From my memory, it wasn't very good -- a lot of "be with me," "bless so-and-so and bless so-and-so," "help this person or that person," and "lead, guide, and direct."  People are usually sensitive about having their prayers criticized.  It's a good environment for a church to have prayers up for analysis.  I believe a main reason for group prayer is to agree on the will of God.  Agreement also assumes some disagreement.

Nonetheless, my focus here is on "lead, guide, and direct."  What does someone expect as an answer to that prayer?  If someone wants God to lead him, guide him, and direct him, and maybe the varied parts of that little cliche are just synonyms, how does God do that?  People say that it happens in answer to that prayer, but I never received instruction on that.  It was assumed that God just did it, that someone was guided, led, and directed without explanation.  Has anyone every explained it to you?

I decided to look up whether "lead, guide, and direct" was used in a book in the 19th century.  Total, 15 times.  I was surprised it was any, but one of the times it was a Latter Day Saint book.  Once used in the 18th century.

Besides my doing this series on this subject, something got my attention this week when a hard-copy of a publication came by snail mail.  This is a regular mailing.  In it, the author talked about the direction of the Holy Spirit.  He said it a few times in the article.  That is not unusual to read from someone in fundamentalism or evangelicalism in my lifetime.   I've often heard a sentence, such as, "We need to rely on the direction of the Holy Spirit."

The words "direction of the Holy Spirit" I found four times in books in the 19th century.  One of them was from the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ.  You don't get the exact words anywhere, but you can read the direction of the Holy Spirit in the Bible.  In a book called An Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, Thomas Hartwell Horne wrote:

Maintaining that the apostles were under the infallible direction of the Holy Spirit as to every religious sentiment contained in their writings, secures the same advantages as would result from supposing that every word and letter was dictated to them by his influences, without being liable to those objections which might be made against that view of the subject.

That's right.  One of the other four were quoting Horne.  The one other quote was strange, speaking about the Holy Spirit directing the priests in the tabernacle and temple, written in 1880 by Dougan Clark, a Quaker.

If you go back to the 17th century, of the only five times we read "direction of the Holy Spirit," one is from Jonathan Edwards in his Treatise on the Religious Affections, where he said that the Psalms "were by the direction of the Holy Spirit penned for the use of the church of God in its public worship."  This is identical to Horne's usage.  Samuel Mather, son of Cotton Mather, in 1723 also writes "that not so much as one sentence is to be found in it, which was not inserted by the special direction of the Holy Spirit."

Edwards, Horne, and Mather talk about the Holy Spirit directing the human authors in the writing of scripture.  By extension, the Holy Spirit directs someone's life who obeys scripture.  This is how the Holy Spirit works -- through the Word of God.  The Holy Spirit is not still talking to people or giving them impressions or sensations.  Scripture is sufficient.

Believers, true, genuine Christians are led by the Spirit of God, and not their flesh.  Believers are led by the Spirit.  The New Testament doesn't tell believers to be led by the Holy Spirit.  It says that they are.  You can tell that they are by the way the Holy Spirit manifests Himself in their lives.

Just because scripture uses the terminology, led by the Spirit, doesn't mean that the Holy Spirit still talks to people.  That isn't how He directs.  He directs through the already completed Word of God.  Believers who "let the Word of Christ dwell in them richly" (Col 3:16) are "filled with the Spirit" (Eph 5:18).

It's not good to replace what the Bible teaches about the Holy Spirit with something made up by a man.  The Holy Spirit isn't directing that.  You're not more spiritual because you've got something mysterious, which is impossible to confirm.  People might think you have something, because they think they should.  Nobody can question these things without --ironically -- questions of his love, his desire for unity, and the power of God in his life.