Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11005. Nothing brings people to my study door more often than the problem of knowing God’s will. Should I take the job, marry this person, move to that city, train for ministry, stay or go? Underneath the particular decision there is usually the same anxiety: that God has a single hidden plan, that I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09022. We tend to treat guidance as a private transaction, which is why the role of the gathered church in discerning the Spirit’s leading strikes many believers as an odd idea. The modern pattern is that I pray, I sense a leading, I act, and the church finds out afterwards. The New Testament pattern…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8060. Tarot cards have moved a long way from the fairground. They are sold in high street shops, recommended as tools for self-reflection, and used by people who would be offended at the suggestion that anything occult is involved. That shift in packaging is the first thing worth noticing. Scripture forbids fortune-telling in every…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2008. People ask me constantly whether God speaks today, and I understand why the question keeps surfacing. Cessationists tell us God speaks only through the closed pages of Scripture now. Some charismatic circles talk as though a fresh word, vision or impression carries the same weight as the Bible itself. Neither extreme is where…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4095. Scripture does not specify which career I should pursue, which city I should live in, or which of two apparently godly people I should marry. That silence is not an oversight, and understanding why it exists is the key to understanding Spirit’s guidance in the vast majority of ordinary decisions, where the Bible…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4094. Gideon’s fleece has become popular shorthand in contemporary Christianity for a particular approach to guidance: placing a condition before God and taking the outcome as confirmation of His will. “I am putting out a fleece” has entered the vocabulary of Christian decision making as though it described an approved biblical method. Whether the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4093. Learning to discern Spirit’s leading from my own preferences, fears and appetites is, in my experience, one of the hardest and most necessary skills in the Christian life. It is not a question of doubt or weak faith. It is the honest recognition that I am a fallen man with complicated motives, entirely…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4089. I get asked about this more than almost anything else in pastoral conversation, so let me say plainly that guidance through dreams is something Scripture treats with real seriousness, without ever making it the normal channel for hearing from God. Dreams sit in an odd place in the Christian imagination. Some believers dismiss…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4178. How does the Holy Spirit guide a believer in vocational discernment, in those large decisions about what work to take up, where to live, and how to spend the one life God has given us? Many sincere Christians approach vocational discernment expecting a private message, a voice or an unmistakable sign that will…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4181. The difference between being Spirit-led and impulse-led is one of the most practical things a Christian can learn, and one of the most commonly muddled. A sudden strong feeling rises up, an urge to speak, to give, to act, to walk away, and we baptise it with the language of guidance. We say…