In my last blog post, Kara pointed out that I left out one of the greatest sources of truth, and that is what is commonly known as "the Leading of the Holy Spirit". She was absolutely correct; I left it out on purpose. I left it out for two reasons. The first reason is that I wanted the demonstrate that the process that Christians go through, in order to discover truth, is almost identical to the search for truth in other disciplines, whether it is science, or mathematics, or history.
The second reason I gave was that I personally don't understand it. It's actually a little more than that; I don't trust it. Don't get me wrong; it's not that the Holy Spirit is not trustworthy, it's that I do not trust my ability to recognize it. More on that in a moment. Let me first say, this is me being transparent, honest, and vulnerable, so, please... go easy.
It's amazing to me that despite this (the leading of the Holy Spirit) being a thing that is talked about on a relatively frequent basis in the Christian community, how little we actually understand it. It's one of those things that people say and assume that people know what they mean and yet people really don't understand. It's like the story of the Emperor's New Clothes; everyone is thinking it, but no one has the guts to say anything.
So let's talk about it. Think about this: when was the last time you heard someone say "God led me to ...." or "I felt the Holy Spirit's leading in this matter..." Did you understand what they meant? Did you question their guidance? Did you ask them, "What did God say, exactly?" If not, why not?
Before we dive into those questions, let me lay out the foundation. Jesus himself described a "Counselor", which we understand to be a reference to the Holy Spirit.
John 16:5-15
5Now I am going to him who sent me, yet none of you asks me, 'Where are you going?' 6Because I have said these things, you are filled with grief. 7But I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. 8When he comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment: 9in regard to sin, because men do not believe in me; 10in regard to righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you can see me no longer; 11and in regard to judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned.
12"I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. 13But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. 14He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you. 15All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you.
So we know from these verses that one of the tasks of the Holy Spirit is to "guide us into all truth." But how exactly does this happen? In what ways does He guide us? I'm going to lay out three potential ways that the Holy Spirit uses to communicate with us and, along the way, point out just how little we know about each. If there are other ways than these three, I'm not aware of them.
Audible
In most cases in the Bible, audible speech was the primary way that God communicated to His prophets and people. However, if you were to poll Christians, I think you would find that most of them do not believe that God communicates in this way anymore, or if they do believe he still audibly speaks to people, they feel that it is only on very, very rare occasions. Many people would even consider you a lunatic if you claimed that you audibly heard the voice of God. Why is this? Why did God stop speaking to people directly? This method of communication is the most clear and unmistakeable. If you hear the voice of God such that you are able to repeat the words that He said, then there should be absolutely no confusion as to what He said. Unfortunately, like most people, I have no personal experience in this area, so I have only questions and very little answers.
Circumstantial
An interesting feature of the human mind is that it instinctively understands probability. You may never have been exposed to probability through academic study, yet if I tell you that I flipped a coin 100 times and it came up heads every time, you simply won't believe me. Many Christians believe that the Holy Spirit sometimes guides us through life by using our circumstances. They get to a point in their life where they need to make a choice and they begin looking for the "doors" that are open or closed to them, attributing this to the Holy Spirit. While I believe that God can and does manipulate our circumstances to guide us in a particular direction, the real challenge is to distinguish real guidance from simple coincidence. Too many times have I seen Christians assume that, because a particular opportunity is open to them, it is God's will and plunge headlong into something that turns out to be a very bad decision. So how do we know if God is trying to guide us through circumstances or not? I don't have any real solid answers here. The only thing I'm able to lean on to help distiguish is my sense of probability; the more unlikely a set of events is, the more likely it is that an outside influence, such as the Holy Spirit has a hand in it. So for example, if I'm on my way to the airport and I encounter a red light, I'll think nothing of it. However, if I hit all the lights red, my car has a flat tire, the road I was planning on taking to the airport is closed for construction, and then later I hear that the plane I was supposed to be on had engine trouble, then I might think that God had really not intended for me to be on that plane that day.
Mental
Ok, so this is the one I most want to talk about, because it is the most common, yet we understand so little. We hear this all the time. People say that God "led" them to do this or that. Even George W. Bush has said that God told him to "go and end the tyranny in Iraq." I can accept that God speaks to people, but I'm not sure how to be certain that it is true or not.
To define this method of communication, I would say the common view is that the Holy Spirit inserts thoughts into your stream of consciousness. You can't hear it with your ears, the thoughts just appear. This is similar to the concept of "telepathy", except that word doesn't fit; the prefix "tele" implies "transmission over a distance" but since the Holy Spirit is living inside Christians, there is no distance. For sake of discussion, let's give these thoughts a name; let's call this a "God-thought". All the rest are typically "Me-thoughts". It might be possible that all of your thoughts don't fall into those two buckets, but we'll touch on that later.
Here's an analogy that I've shared with a few people. Remember the classic episode of I Love Lucy where Ethel and Lucy are trying to wrap candies coming off a conveyor belt? Imagine your mind is like that conveyor belt and on it are your thoughts as they go streaming by. Instead of wrapping candies, your job is to sort those thoughts. You have two big boxes to throw the thoughts into, one labeled "God", and the other labeled "Me". The "God-thoughts" go in the "God" box, and the "Me-thoughts" go in the "Me" box. When making your decisions, you will rely heavily on whatever is in the "God" box and take everything in the "Me" box with a grain of salt.
The problem is that the two types of thoughts appear very similar and I don't feel that we as Christians have ever been taught how to properly differentiate between one type or the other. Some people have a loose "filter"; there's a lot of "Me-thoughts" that end up in the "God" box. i.e. there's a lot of times when people come up with ideas on their own and and then attribute them to God. The good news is that there's a little bit of help in this area; the Bible should be an initial "filter" before your own. If a thought crosses into your mind that conflicts with what the Bible says, it should immediately get tossed into the "Me" box. Following this principle should solve cases that blatantly contradict the Bible, so for example, if someone says "God told me I should leave my wife", you can confidently say, "Uh, no, sorry, He most definitely did not." But that leaves a whole group of ideas that are not directly contradictory to the Bible. How do we respond to someone who says "I think God is leading us to move to another state." How can we be sure? It sure looked like a God-thought when I tossed it into the box, but how can I be sure I'm not tossing my own thoughts in there?
Then there's the other side of things; people, like me, with the "strict" filter. To be safe, I, by nature, toss everything in the "Me" box. It has the advantage of never doing the wrong thing because you mistakenly thought God said it. But I can say from experience, it leaves you wondering why God never says anything to you. You feel like you're on your own. It's for this very reason that I left the Holy Spirit out of the process for determining truth; I can't be certain of the source. I think that there must be times where I may ignore the leading of the Holy Spirit because I'm chucking everything that "still small voice" says into the "Me" box.
There's also a more sinister notion here. If Satan is the "Deceiver", how does he go about deceiving? I'm pretty sure he doesn't audibly talk to us, so then does that mean he is also able to insert thoughts into our stream of consciousness? If this is so, having a "loose" filter is even more dangerous, because not only is there the chance that you might attribute your own thoughts to God, you might even toss a "Satan-thought" in there too!
So, with this analogy in mind, how can you tell the difference? Do you just guess? Jesus says in John 10:27, "My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me." Can anyone please tell me what His voice sounds like?