Until I read Decision Making and the Will of God, I would have never considered a significant aspect of my faith to be rooted in paganism. Yet, upon understanding the nature of God’s will and how it applies to my life, I can see how grave an error I was making, and that my walk was significantly neutered.
Divination is a major problem in Christianity among fundamentalist, bible-believing Christians. It is the practice of using normal and explainable objects, phenomena, circumstances and occurrences to understand and interpret the will of the gods (or in Christianity’s case – God).
Take, for example, this “method” for determining “God’s will in your life:”
…listen to that still small voice inside of you. The burden of the call upon your life will outweigh your ambitions which you have established. If the Lord wants you to do a specific work for Him, He will give you a burden for that work. Your heart will keep drawing you to that specific task or work. As the day draws closer for you to accomplish and know God’s will for your life, your burden will become heavier to accomplish it. If you run away from God’s will, you will always go back because the burden will not go away. The burden also has love attached. And, of course, when we pray for His will to be made known in our lives, He will tell us. As Psalm 143:10 says, “Teach me to do your will, for you are my God; may your good Spirit lead me on level ground.”
In other words, we are to use our feelings and impression to divine the will of God. But scripture warns us against this:
The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it? (Jeremiah 17:9 NKJ)
With a pagan world-view, it is much easier to see this error. If someone said that they believed the trees were speaking to them to not cut them down – they just felt a burden for the trees so strongly – we would accurately determine that such a person was insane. But if Christians substitute “God” (and that adds a lot of weight) then they can say something similar, such as, “I just feel led to be a pastor – I think God is telling me this is His will for my life.”
This problem has been minimized in individuals who actually read their bibles, and can see that there are clear biblical guidelines to determine these things. Again, using the example, if their “calling” to be a pastor is realized after meeting qualifications for that position in the Word, then the error is harmless (though it is still wrong). But an immature Christian, who might have less knowledge and wisdom regarding the Word, might very well miss the fact that he does not biblically qualified for his “calling” and just run on what his “burden of the call” is saying.
I personally, do not believe that God “calls” Christian in this way. I view things much more plainly – God has provided men with a very clear set of principles for living in the bible which must be taken literally and at face value. He has also given men the freedom to make godly choices within those parameters, including how to chose whether a ministry role is correct.
If I would like to go to Kenya to share the gospel, I need not wait until I have a “burden” overwhelming me, gradually getting stronger and stronger to go. Rather, I need to check my desires against what the bible commands, and if it is correct, to go with it. It is never wrong for a mature Christian to preach the gospel. God is not ever going to disprove of his commands being obeyed. In fact, I would argue that the “sacrifice” of waiting on one’s feelings of a calling, is a much more likely offence to God. Instead, we should be quick to obey.
Christians should beware the kind of cavalier mysticism that is currently being embraced as determining God’s will.
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I have some things to say, but no the time at the moment. However, I do believe this article was written by an INTJ!
(I read that book many years ago and basically agree with it. In fact, I think I’m the one who introduced it to ZFT.)
So no room for the leading of the Holy Spirit? Interesting.
I have to say I am in disagreement with some of the things in this article. I could show some scriptural reasons why, but I have done that before when Bryan wrote a review of this book. So let me come at it from the angle of personal experience. Yes, personal experiences in and of themselves are not sufficient evidence as a basis for understanding how to gauge the will of God. However, to the extent that these experiences are biblical insomuch that they reflect similar experiences as recorded in the book of Acts, they are quite valid.
From the time I became baptized in the Spirit of God, I can tell you that I have had an increasingly keen awareness of someone else within me. That someone, of course, is the Holy Ghost. While he has not always revealed to me every detail of every facet of my life, he has shown me many things about what I am to do in life. For me to deny this would be unthinkable.
At one point in my life, I had forgotten about going into the ministry. I simply didn’t want to. I went to church and did what I thought was sufficient for “Christian” duty, but was not intent on preaching the Gospel at all. But the One within me began to counsel me. He revealed to me that many people would suffer as a result of my disobedience. He had been merciful to me, sparing my life on many occasions, but the time came when I was faced to make a decision. One day while I went to get some breakfast, I experienced a vision. I saw into my own life and saw where I would die a tragic death sometime between my late 40′s and early 50′s if I did not obey the call. I understand that some people will think this is crazy. I really don’t care. I know what I saw and I know it wasn’t my own imagination or the devil that revealed this to me.
I realize that many Christians have not been exposed to the revelation gifts of the Spirit – the word of wisdom, word of knowledge, and discerning of spirits – but I have. If I told you I had not, I would be a liar. The Lord has shown me some things that I will do, and he has shown me some things others are to do. I rarely tell them about what I see and I don’t see things about everyone, but I do see some things – and others have seen things about me. I’ve had people tell me things they have seen that there is no way they would have known them except by the Holy Spirit. I know there are other spirits and other voices, but the Holy Spirit always glorifies Jesus and leads us into all truth. In this, the Spirit of Truth and the spirit of error are easily discerned.
There is some truth in that people overemphasize personal knowledge of the will of God. But that error is most usually associated with a worldview that does not take into account the Great Commission and the concept of the body of Christ functioning as a complete unit. Rather these excesses are individualistic. Essentially this is the result of superimposing the concept of individual achievement on a Christian worldview; the two don’t mix. One is predicated on self-exaltation which leads to humiliation; the other is rooted in humility which leads to godly exaltation.
Another excess in determining the individual will of God is the result of well meaning and zealous yet ignorant people. Their heart is in the right place, but they just lack sufficient knowledge in things pertaining to the Holy Spirit and his role in their lives. They often think God is responsible for telling what to do every waking hour of the day. And their excuse for not doing what they should be doing is that they didn’t “feel led”.
Darius,
No one ever said that. I did say that we should ignore the leading of our feelings. I hope that you don’t have “feelings” and “the Holy Spirit” confused.
How does a Christian differentiate the two? That is my question.
Chris,
I really am not saying I disagree with points in your experience. I am not saying that we should not obey authoritative revelation from God – I have had such revelation myself as well. I am saying that impressions and feelings are merely that – impressions and feelings. They are not authoritative instruments for divining the will of God. However, believers have much more freedom than they think. Sharing the gospel, doing good works, helping the needy are not things for which we need to wait for divine approval. We have the freedom to do those things which Christ has commanded us. God is not trying to micromanage us through mysticism.
“Chris,
I really am not saying I disagree with points in your experience. I am not saying that we should not obey authoritative revelation from God – I have had such revelation myself as well. I am saying that impressions and feelings are merely that – impressions and feelings. They are not authoritative instruments for divining the will of God.”
I guess there is a lot of room for interpretation when we use the words “feeling” and “impression”. But if I were to describe to you how certain gifts of the Spirit operate, I might use the word “impression” to describe it. Someone else might use the word “feeling”. For instance, how do the gifts of tongues and interpretation of tongues work? There is an inward knowing or impression in one’s spirit that there is something that needs to be spoken out. When that is spoken, someone else has an interpretation of that by way of a similar inward spiritual perception.
The word of knowledge often works much the same way. I saw this in demonstration just yesterday, and with supreme accuracy. In our small congregation, my pastor described in detail a certain medical condition someone was experiencing. He described it to a T. The lady came forward to have hands laid upon her for healing, acknowledging that he had precisely described her condition, which involved difficulty swallowing among other things.
Maybe the word “impression” is insufficient to describe operations of the Spirit, but I would be hard-pressed to find a better word. It can be difficult to describe these things. Unless you’ve experienced it, it is impossible for someone to relay this spiritual reality in intellectual terms. It would be like trying to speak to someone in a language that was foreign to them.
Colin said, “In other words, we are to use our feelings and impression to divine the will of God. But scripture warns us against this:
The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it? (Jeremiah 17:9 NKJ)”
I disagree with your one-to-one correspondence of “heart” to feelings–after all, the mind can be pretty deceitful, too, I think you would agree.
I don’t think it is right to equate using one’s feelings to paganism. For one thing, feelings are not what paganism is about and for another, you seem to have the opinion that feelings are not a legitimate way to know anything, and may even go so far as to regard feelings as a hindrance rather than a God-given gift.
That’s why I made the remark about INTJ–a strong T (thinking) person views all of life’s decisions in an intellectual way (I’m a T also, but not a very strong one). Whereas an F (feeling) person views life’s decisions in an emotional way. Does God approve of only T people? No, he expects T’s to use their heads (and to a less extent their emotions) and F’s to use their emotions (and to a lesser extent their minds) to think and feel about what he reveals to them in scripture primarily, and through people/circumstances/impressions secondarily.
Chris (and Thain as I think this addresses both responses),
A feeling that falls within the biblical guidelines is just fine, and, in fact, an essential aspect of body ministry. However, a feeling that is either misinterpreted as the spirit, or acted upon in disregard for biblical guidelines, is a problem – and it is more akin to pagan mysticism than biblical Christianity.
Many legitimate functions of the spirit occur in this way, but they are bound by scripture. But using feelings as a divining rod for God’s will or God’s work, is incorrect. Using intellect is the same thing. It’s all a divining rod. I definitely could have been more clear on this point.
Chris, it wasn’t me who wrote the review of this book. I’ve never read it.
It was Jasen, I believe.
Oh, sorry Bryan. Yeah, it must have been Jasen. I was going by memory. My bad.
But if I could expound on my own experience just a bit, I can say with absolute certainty that spiritual impressions I have had were by the same Spirit I have seen demonstrate more remarkable works. I say this because, according to my understanding of this book (and I haven’t read it to be fair), the authors draw a distinction between impressions and gifts of the Spirit. They seem to say that every time there was supernatural guidance in the book of Acts, it was due to a First Corinthians 12-type gift of the Spirit. Apparently this assumption is predicated on the omission of every detail of their experiences in the historical record. For instance, when Paul says the Spirit forbade them to go to Asia (Acts 16:6), they assume that there must have been a word or wisdom or a prophecy or something making that clear. The truth is that we don’t know exactly how they were forbidden, but at times when I was about to do something, I was warned inwardly not to do it and the results of those impressions were made undeniably evident.
More than once I have been saved from car accidents this way. A few years ago, I was going to work one morning and an inward voice (not an impression) told me, “Be careful this morning or you’ll be involved in an accident.” I had driven almost all the way there when I got to a stop light with left turning lanes. I was in the far left lane and another vehicle was in the lane to my right. When the light turned green, I “felt” that I should go slower. Just then the other car veered into my lane and would have hit me if I had not obeyed that inward impression to go slower so that I was able to avoid getting hit. A similar thing happened just a year earlier. People are always quick to blame God when tragedies happen, but I’m convinced many things happen as a result of Christians’ own negligence.
What does this have to do with discerning the will of God? It has to do with developing a sensitivity to the Holy Spirit who resides within. He may keep you from getting injured or killed or he may bring you to a certain place at a certain time for a certain task.
The pagan mysticism thing may be correct in some sense, and I have previously stated what I believe are obvious excesses and the motivating factors behind these excesses. But we have to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is correction and then there is over-correction, which is based on strawmanification.
Colin:
I think that you have it about right.
God’s will for all of us is expressed in His whole word: the Bible.
For instance, in the garden, He said that we may freely eat of all of the trees but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil we shall not eat of it lest we die. In this, He sets forth a principle: God knows what’s best for us, tells us in His word, and holds us accountable for our actions. Furthermore, to elucidate more fully, the implication of “In the beginning…” leads us to the conclusion that before “the beginning,” God had already addressed everything, that He is ever-present, and, among other things (which we learn later), had already accomplished everything necessary to save His chosen people. We learn how He is going to accomplish His objective (salvation) also in the garden (in this expanding but limited time bubble) in His remarks to the serpent: “…enmity…seed…bruise thy head…his heel.”
The word of God is more than the law of God; and that “more” is the Holy Spirit. In a sense, there is God (the Law), His word (the Son), and the “active ingredient” (the Holy Spirit)…all Three-in-One God.
We, created in His image, knew that we were not God; yet other (serpent-)spoken words set the stage (for Eve to eat the fruit).
So, God is clarifying the concept of “shall not eat of it lest you die” by introducing the couple to the serpent…more subtil than any beast…God made.”
I think you, Colin, are saying something about the subtilty of the “other spirits” out there.
d.
Interesting take D. Thanks a bunch for commenting!
“Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.”
Psalm 30 something-If you delight in Him, the desires will be from Him anyways and then you will be fulfilling his desires through you anyways. Delight in Him, the desires will come from Him, and then you just have to use discernment and know if it is Him. His sheep hear His voice and follow, if you have that much trouble with it, I wonder if you are a sheep anyway?
Goats have the trouble, sheep hear and follow. So listen to His heart in your heart if your heart is walking in the Light as He is in the light, and then the darkness of heart won’t get in the way of His truth and light. If Jesus went by “how he felt” he would not of went to the cross, He wanted the cup to pass, but He was beyond feeling and was lined up with the will of the Father in total surrender. One can’t go wrong if they are totally surrendered. Which is true biblical faith anyways.