25.1 Spirit Led
© 2018 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
Those who are led by the Spirit are sons of God (Romans 8:13).
There is an overwhelmingly powerful argument inside of most Christian thinking that asserts that to be “led by the Spirit” means to “hear,” whether by a separated God speaking to you or by what is written in the Bible or by what is instructed to you by one “over you in the Lord” and then to obey, with your own human person, that “command.” In this line of thinking, when you “obey” what you hear, then you are being “led” by the Spirit, and when you are not “hearing” and “obeying,” you are being led by your flesh.
There are only two results I have ever seen, either in me or in others, coming out of that definition of “being led by the Spirit.”
Failure or Arrogance. The first and most common result of “hear and obey” is failure, and with failure, the deep inner sense of falling short of God followed by the utter weariness of “trying again.” The second, less common result, however, is far worse. The second result is when a person imagines that they are anointed by God BECAUSE they are “obedient” and thus go around preaching a word of “hear and obey.” The terrible awfulness of this second result is the dishonesty out from which it comes, and its fruit is always arrogance, often hidden behind “anointing,” but always, in fact, the boasting of the flesh before God.
But “hear and obey” is old covenant only, a phrase not found in the New. Being led by the Spirit is something entirely different.
Laughing a Lot. My mornings writing Life and completing the Covenant text the last while have been punctuated regularly by joyous laughter welling up and bursting forth. Part of the reason is my doing the JSV translation. Not only do I love the Word God speaks, but I am discovering a gospel that, now uncovered, is gloriously powerful and wondrously real and complete.
But since returning from this trip, I have felt a weight inside of me. I still write, but I also feel “something wrong” inside. Here is the temptation of the evil one – to turn away from Jesus my ONLY life, utterly responsible for all that is me, and to attempt to figure out “what I did wrong.”
My “Problem.” The problem with holding to Jesus as the only life I am, my Savior, fully responsible for me, is that such a stance tends to force one into honesty. And here, standing fully in the light, not seeking any rightness of my own (or its Siamese identical twin, wrongness), I am able to see the source of my disquiet, something I could never have known before this life of union with Christ.
My “problem” is you, dear reader; that is, your face.
On my way home from Canada, I visited with a dear brother, Bill, who has been an enormous strength to me in my service of writing and who is committed to Christian Community. You see, I wanted to “lead” us together in the Spirit.
Into the Mud. In the early morning hours after my son and I arrived at Bill’s home, my time working with Covenant was, again, punctuated with joyous laughter. It was my intention to “lead” us together that day, in the Spirit (or so I imagined), towards believing God together for the establishment of a Christian Community. This is when the Lord Jesus stuck out His foot, so to speak, and dropped me (and Him together) face first into the mud, through something I ate for lunch that stripped all ability to “lead” from me. Yes, I continued to share Christ, but I think I was very dull and I think I talked too much to compensate for my mental incapacity.
Ridiculous Irony. You see, as ridiculous as it sounds, I still hold this secret desire to have you imagine me to be a “man of God,” even though I regularly prove that I am no such thing. How could all these endless words I write be “from God” if I am incapable of “leading” anyone “in the Spirit?” More than that, you can appreciate the immense irony of a man writing about “Christian Community” as if he knows something, even though he is utterly incapable even of gathering a local fellowship for his family worship time and who often thinks he doesn’t really want to, once again, try to get along with people.
Standing in the light has one salutary affect; it causes you to go silent about yourself before God.
A Different Meaning. After we arrived home, thinking I needed also to “lead” through a transition here, I found my older son, anointed and filled with the wisdom of God, doing the leading of me.
You have to understand that I have a long history of leaping out of the frying pan and into the fire and out of the fire right into the next frying pan. My life has been an endless series of bright ideas and adventurous enterprises always turning wrong and ending in public humiliation.
Please be assured, however, that my purpose is not to have anyone feel sorry for me, but rather, to place before us a different meaning, a gospel meaning, of being led by the Spirit.
Not Trusting in Ourselves. Here is the bottom line, undergirding any “definition” of being led by the Spirit. Indeed, we do not want you to be ignorant brothers, concerning our difficulties having happened in Asia, that excessively against our ability we were weighted down, so as even to despair in our desire to live. But we possessed inside ourselves the sentence of death that we should not be confidencing upon ourselves, but upon God, the One raising the dead, who from such a great death has delivered us, and will deliver us; you also joining together in help for our sakes by supplication, that out from many persons the gift into us of good speaking might be given for our sakes (2 Corinthians 1:8-11 – JSV).
We Just Wanted to Die. The line we need, in the New King James, is, “that we should not trust in ourselves but in God.” But the Greek word is actually the verb form of confidence, that is, “should not be confidencing in ourselves but in God.” More than that, this confidence is in a God who “raises the dead,” and is found inside of utter despair in ourselves.
Paul was saying, “It was so bad, we just wanted to die.”
“Hear and obey” is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; it leads only to either a false confidence in self or a lack of confidence in God. “Hear and believe (in Jesus your only life)” is the tree of life; it leads to no confidencing in ourselves, but in God.
Face Against Face. Being led by the Spirit cannot be any form of human achievement.
And truly, even though my intention in this session is to set forth the biggest practical realities for Christian Community, yet we are also back to the one thing that will destroy community AND one another. And that one thing is face against face, my perception of your perception of me, rooted in my desire for you to think me “superior.” That is, “I am right. I must be right BECAUSE I am the one ‘being led by the Spirit.’”
Paul’s conclusion was that any gift of good speaking he might possess came to him from the precious believers in Jesus who supported him.
Trust. Being led by the Spirit has three parts. The first part is utter trust and the second part is overwhelming confidence. We could say, “faith,” but “faith” is often too large of a word.
The trust part is the utter certainty inside that God IS utterly with me, IS directing my every step inside His love, IS my only energeia, IS my will and my thought, IS my only life. But trust goes even deeper than that. Trust is my utter surrender to God, to His assertion that my stupidity and failure, my misery and conceit belongs entirely to Him and not to me at all. That God is 100% responsible for me. I have never known a greater surrender nor a deeper trust than that.
Confidence. Trust goes deep and ever deeper, but confidence goes wide and ever more bold.
You see, we are “led” by the Spirit, but we do not “follow” the Spirit. The reason for that difference is that the Spirit is rivers flowing in all directions at once. He that believes in Me, out of his belly will flow rivers of living water. The Spirit is ALWAYS ahead of us, always working, always preparing our way for us, always opening or closing doors, always.
For God ALWAYS leads us in triumph, in the celebration of completion already fulfilled.
Always in Triumph. Grace [thanks] to God, always leading us in the triumphal procession inside of Christ, and the aroma of His knowledge being made visible through us in every place (2 Corinthians 2:14). Paul is mixing metaphors, as in “smell made visible,” but that aroma is the Spirit flowing in all directions out from us.
And so I declare by faith against all human judgment that I am absolutely confident that I am led by the Spirit in every step I take regardless, that the Spirit is ALWAYS flowing out from me to bless and to heal and to give life. I am CONFIDENT that God always leads me, and I am even more CONFIDENT that God always leads me in triumph.
Confusion. But those first two parts of being led by the Spirit are the easy parts. Community, Church, being face to face with you, requires the hard part of being led by the Spirit. The hardest part of being led by the Spirit for each one of us is that you ARE. I cannot be confident that God is always leading me except I also be confident that God is always leading you.
And this is the most confusing thing in the universe. Symmorphy, God’s will being one together with my will and my will one together with God’s will, while seemingly impossible, still, it does make sense, since it’s my will we are talking about. But many wills, all going in different directions? Yeah, right!
When You Oppose Me. When you oppose me, are you being led by the Spirit? I am well acquainted, life-long, with confusion. This is absolutely confusing. And this is why most “leaders” in the church will, in the end, reject faith and impose law. How can we be “one” in Christ unless you are doing what I say?
You see, when Bill served me a dish containing a vegetable oil to which I am allergic, I wanted to blame him for “stripping from me my one chance to be the leader in the Spirit.” Joy may come now, but in the moment of press, can I see Jesus, even through Bill’s “mistake,” laughingly saving me from the foolishness of being the one being “directed by” the Spirit?
Carry Your Cross. Let me define “carry your cross.” For me to “carry my cross” is for me to believe always, with all confidence, that you ARE always led by the Spirit even, and especially when things are going entirely and confusingly “out of my control.”
We could simplify that even more; for me to “carry my cross” is for me to believe in Jesus.
But let’s put that same confidence into Community, into the cacophony of so many differing opinions and ideas, contentions and arguments, inside our incredible human capacity to be insensitive and thoughtless towards one another, even while being assured of our own “rightness.” My brothers and sisters, you ARE being led entirely and only by the Holy Spirit.
Lowliness of Mind. What does that proclamation of utter faith then produce inside of me? And we could call such faith “blind faith,” for nothing in human reason could ever accept such a ridiculous proposition. It produces in me now something I never knew of myself, and that is, lowliness of mind, even to seeing others as better than myself.
But there is another name for such a mind. It’s called “being just like God.” When I am confident that you ARE being led by the Spirit and ALWAYS in triumph, I am thinking highly of you. I am just like God, Father and I together.
The Formula. You see what has happened in this lesson? There is a human reasoning that says, “Okay, Yordy, give us the formula for how we are to ‘follow’ the Spirit, so we can run around being ‘sons of God.’” And that reasoning sounds very reasonable to me.
Well, here’s the “formula.” My confidence that I am always being led by the Spirit MEANS that I am also confident that you are being led by the Spirit, even when you go contrary to me MEANS that I see you as better than myself MEANS that I am just like God, Father and I together, MEANS that I have NO control over anything MEANS that I am being led by the Spirit.
Honor One Another. I wanted to use this lesson to underline this requirement regarding Christian Community.
Everything you read in this course is meant as a guideline only. Yes, you will find much wisdom in these pages, giving good answer to most real problems and issues you will face. But neither I nor this text are your guide. Your own heart is your guide, Jesus through you, as you walk together honoring one another. I may say “this way,” and you might decide to do it that way instead. You are always being led by the Spirit. And you are always being led by the Spirit together.
Be confident; honor one another; believe in Jesus.
You Empower Me. And that is the bottom line. To be led by the Spirit is to honor one another regardless of any cost, regardless of how things “turn out.” And that is Paul’s point in 2 Corinthians 1.
I am not some “great man of God.” If I am able to write anything, that ability does not come from me, but from you. Because you read my scribblings and hear Jesus revealing Himself to you through them, it is you who empower me to continue writing good things. I am able to write by one reason only; because you, dear reader, believe in Jesus.
God ALWAYS leads us in triumph.