What pops into your mind when you hear someone say that God guided them? Many people probably think first about hearing God’s voice inside their head while they’re praying, or perhaps just feeling a prompting to do some particular thing. Others think about receiving a prophecy, or seeing a miraculous sign, or perhaps receiving a message in a dream. A great many books have been written about listening prayer, and about hearing God’s voice, and about prophecy in the church, most of them by people who know a lot more about those subjects than I do. So while I acknowledge that all of these are important, in this article what I want to talk about is being guided by God’s wisdom, even when nothing out of the ordinary appears to be happening. I’ll start with a brief story.
Buying a house can be scary. The house we’d been living in for the past ten years was wonderful, and it had a view that couldn’t be beat, but it was a two-story house, and those stairs kept getting steeper and steeper for both of us. And looking at the market, it seemed we were about due for a rent increase. At that same time, my wife Catherine had recently received an inheritance. So after talking about it, we started looking to see if we could find a house that we liked, and that we could afford. My prayer was that we would be led to exactly the right house, that would not be only a place to live, but also a place of ministry.
I started looking through listings on Zillow, and in less than twenty minutes one particular house had caught my eye. It looked just right for us, although it was near the upper end of what we could afford. I showed it to Catherine, marked it, and continued looking for other possibilities.
By now you’ve probably guessed the end of the story; that house I found in less than twenty minutes is the house we now live in. It’s the house I start from on my daily prayer walks through the neighborhood. As God guided us through the process, he essentially dropped that house in our laps. But, importantly, nowhere in the process did either of us receive any special messages from God. We prayed for wisdom, gathered all the information we could, and made the decision. Sometimes, that’s what being guided by the Holy Spirit looks like.
God’s word tells us:
If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. Such a person is double-minded and unstable in all they do. (James 1:5-8)
Wisdom is not something we have to pry out of God’s hands through grueling hours of prayer and fasting. God “gives generously to all,” the Scripture says. In fact, he explicitly tells us to obtain wisdom, a call that runs all through the Bible, but most especially in the book of Proverbs.
The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom.
Though it cost all you have, get understanding.
Cherish her, and she will exalt you;
embrace her, and she will honor you.
She will give you a garland to grace your head
and present you with a glorious crown.” (Proverbs 4:7-9)
This is not a situation for adding “if it’s your will” to my prayers. It is God’s will. He’s told us to get wisdom, and he told us that he gives wisdom generously to all who ask. Adding that phrase may sound pious, but it’s really just a cover for unbelief in a situation, like this one, where we already know what God’s will is.
Trust me, the Holy Spirit, who inspired this passage and many others like it, is not going to withhold wisdom from you, and thereby prevent you from doing something that he, himself, told you to do. Faith, in this case, means nothing more than trusting the Holy Spirit to do what he explicitly said that he would do. I completely reject any kind of name-it-claim-it prosperity teaching, but at the same time, I don’t want to make the opposite mistake and refuse to be bold in asking for the very things God tells me in Scripture to ask boldly for.
But one thing that going through the process of buying a house taught me is that having God’s wisdom to guide our decisions didn’t feel any different than not having it. There was no special sensation, and no sudden change in our understanding. Faith, it turns out, is required at two points, not just one. First, we had to pray, trusting that God would give us wisdom, and second we had to act, trusting that God had given us wisdom. God’s guidance during this time is only visible in hindsight, when we look back at how the process played out. So we needed to first ask boldly for wisdom, and then believe that we had it and act accordingly.
A second lesson is that I need to be clear what I’m asking God for wisdom to do. Not that he needs my explanation, but if I’m not specific about what I’m praying for, I won’t be able to recognize the answer when it comes. So I don’t pray for wisdom in general and leave it at that; I pray for wisdom to make a particular decision I’m facing, to understand the particular Scripture I’m studying, or to understand the issues connected with the particular article I’m writing.
Since we moved into our new house, I’ve started doing daily prayer walks around the neighborhood, which I had not done in our old house. In the two years we’ve been here, I’ve met more neighbors, and Catherine and I have opened our house to show hospitality to more people, then in the ten years we lived in our old neighborhood. In addition, the new house has put me into a good location to provide rides to church to a few people who needed it. Most of these changes weren’t really due to the change of address, but to a change in my heart that occurred during the process of buying and moving in to the new house. In other words, I began to make the house a place of ministry, just as I’d prayed. Which illustrates my third point; God’s wisdom always leads, in the end, toward Jesus.
The true test of whether or not I was guided by God’s wisdom is not whether my decisions brought me a profit, or comfort, or even whether they made me safer. The true test is whether I’m becoming more like Jesus. I can’t pinpoint any particular decision or event that resulted in me doing more to serve my new neighborhood than I did my old, but the fact is that I have changed in that way. I don’t know how it happened, which means I can’t justly take credit for it. All I can say is that God gave me the wisdom I asked for.
Remembering who I am and where I’ve been is important, because it’s only when I look back over the past few years that I can see God’s hand leading us to where we are now. At the time, all we could do was make the best decisions we could and trust God to grant that they were the right ones. If we had waited for proof that God was directing us, we’d most likely still be waiting for it, sitting there in our old house.
Being guided by God’s wisdom is part of what it means to “live by faith, not by sight;” (2 Corinthians 5:7) when facing a choice we pray for wisdom. And then believing that we’ve received it, we use the wisdom we have to assess all the options and choose the best one. Afterward, we look back and give thanks to God for leading us right to where we needed to be – closer to Jesus.