Audio Transcript

How do I follow God’s lead in my daily decisions? I know he’s my shepherd. He’s leading me. I think so. But how do I know if I am following him?

That’s such an important question we all must answer for ourselves, and it was a question taken up by a very young Pastor John Piper, in his very first summer as a pastor. In fact, just a few weeks into his pastorate, Pastor John preached through some of his favorite Psalms. One of them being, of course, Psalm 23. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake” (Psalm 23:1–3).

I was 22 before I first saw one of the lines in this psalm. Now I’d seen it, but there is seeing and then there is seeing, right? Verse 3, “He leads me in paths of righteousness for his namesake.” I’d never seen “for his namesake” until I went to seminary. Well, yes, I’d seen it. I’d read the words, but you can read over phrases in the Bible a hundred times and they never hit you for what they mean.

Open My Eyes to See

I went to visit Mrs. Bromgren just before her surgery on Wednesday. She was getting her eye operated on, and it was all bandaged over, and I read to her this verse from Psalm 119:18,

Deal bountifully with thy servant that I may live and observe thy word, open my eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.

And I said, “Isn’t it true that one of the best things about having two good eyes is the Bible, being able to read the Bible? But isn’t it true, too, that there is another pair of eyes that God has given us? The apostle Paul calls them the eyes of the heart, and he prays in Ephesians 1 that the eyes of the heart might be enlightened. I think that’s what Psalm 119 is talking about: ‘May the eyes be open that we may behold wondrous things out of thy law.’”

Well, I hadn’t seen that phrase there in Psalm 23 as wondrous. I’d been as deaf to that theme as you could imagine, but there it was, “he leads me in paths of righteousness for his namesake.” The thought that God might have been causing me to do right ever since I was a little boy for his sake just never dawned on me. I just read right over that phrase. It never struck me, though I’d read it hundreds of times.

So I want to zero in on that phrase for a few minutes, but before we get there, we better look at the phrase before it, namely, “he leads me in paths of righteousness,” and ask how God does this.

How Does God Light Our Paths?

The picture, of course, here is a shepherd leading sheep along with his crook, or maybe with his call. “The sheep know my name, and they follow me.” But when we get out of the metaphor of sheep and shepherd into our own experience in our day and ask, “How does God lead in paths of righteousness,” we need to ponder a little bit and poke around in the Scriptures to see how he does it.

“In my experience, I have never seen a manifestation of God going before me at a fork in the road.”

Now, in my experience, I have never seen a manifestation of God going before me at a fork in the road. I’ve never seen a cloud of fire or pillar of cloud like they had in the wilderness. That’s not part of my experience, nor have I ever heard an audible word that I know was God speaking. A lot of people talk in that language, and maybe I’m just callous, but that’s never been part of my experience to see God in some clear manifestation showing me it’s this way and not that way, or to hear a voice like my teacher at Wheaton said he heard one day while he was shaving in front of the mirror, “Go to Wheaton from Boston.” He was in Boston. “Go to Wheaton.”

God can do that if he wants. He’s just never done it for me, and he doesn’t do it for most people most of the time. The way he leads us is apparently differently, and I think we can get a clue from what David would say in Psalm 119:105. There, he says, “Thy word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” And in that same psalm, verse 9, “How can a young man keep his way pure? By guarding it according to thy word.”

So one answer to the question, “How does God lead his people in paths of righteousness” is: he has revealed a lot about those paths of righteousness. He’s described what sort of paths are righteous paths and told us to walk in them so that we can read and obey. Surely, David did that often because he talked about meditating on the word day and night.

Why the Bible Is Not Enough

But now, that answer is only half the answer, isn’t it? By itself, the Bible will not keep us on track. No matter how wonderful the Bible is, and how we would be utterly lost without it, it is not enough by itself and for two reasons.

“By itself, the Bible will not keep us on track.”

One, we make lots of decisions in life which are not prescribed for us in the Bible — hundreds of little decisions every day and some big ones in which we look in the Bible and there are no sentences about that. How many children to have, where to send your child to school, where to go to work, this, that, just hundreds of little things that we have to decide every day, and we don’t want to bracket those and say, “Well, that’s not part of Christianity. I’ll just make those decisions anyway I please, and then Christianity is something else.” God has to do with all those decisions. But the Bible doesn’t give explicit guidance for every one of those little decisions and, therefore, something more has to be said if we’re to walk in right paths in those decisions, as well as the ones where the Bible is perfectly explicit.

The second reason that the Bible, by itself, is not enough to guide us in those paths of righteousness is this: a path of righteousness is doing the right thing with a right attitude or a right motivation. It’s not just a bodily action. It’s having a right attitude towards your wife as well. But, reading words on a page doesn’t always change attitudes.

You can read over what you ought to feel like in the Bible a hundred times and maybe your attitude is just the same. Something else has to come into play, and I think that’s why David said, “God leads us in paths of righteousness,” and why Paul said, “All who are led by the Spirit are the sons of God.” We need not only revelation coming to us from outside, namely the Bible, we need transformation coming to us inside from the Holy Spirit. The word and the Spirit together are the leadership that we need.

Renewed in the Mind of Christ

Paul says in Romans 12:2 this very familiar word, “Don’t be conformed to the world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” — why? — “so that you can prove — or better, approve of — “the will of God, what is good, acceptable, and perfect.” In other words, you’ve got to have something happen up here on the inside, some changed attitudes, some changed feelings, or when little decisions present alternatives, you won’t know how to prove which one of those is the will of God.

So the Bible is the input into that new mind, and the Spirit takes the word and begins to shape our thinking, mold our emotions, so that even when there’s no explicit command in Scripture for this decision you’re facing, you weigh all the alternatives and you’re weighing those alternatives with the mind of Christ. Paul says, “We have the mind of Christ.” And then when you make the decision, you look back and you don’t say, “My, what a smart fellow was I,” but rather, you say, “Thank you for your word that informed the principles of my life, and thank you for the Spirit that shaped my emotions and my priorities so that I made this decision your way,” and God then gets the credit for the leadership, which means personally, for me, that I have been driven basically for all of life to meditate day and night on the word and to pray continually that the Holy Spirit would work on me.

You can’t over-intellectualize the Bible. You can’t over-spiritualize your private experience with God. It’s both/and, not either/or. It has been in my experience, and I haven’t found the two in conflict but tremendous complements for guidance in life.

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15642389/how-can-we-be-found-blameless-at-the-end

Where do you turn in moments of decision? To what, or to whom, do you look for help when you need to choose between two paths?

We live most of our lives spontaneously, without pausing to ponder one option or another. But we sometimes come to moments of decision. It might seem as small as a request to help a church member, or a text informing you of a friend in need. You pause, even briefly, to ponder, Will I give of my time and energy to help, or do I have a good excuse to kindly decline?

In such moments, where do you look for clarity? Specifically, as Christians, what might we put before our minds, and hearts, to guide us in these times of decision?

The end of Acts 20 gives us not just a Christian way to proceed but what we might call a Christian Hedonistic approach. Could it be that the best decision is also the most blessed?

Remember These Words

If you’re reading a red-letter Bible, you might expect the Gospels to have plenty of crimson, but not the book of Acts. Mostly Acts is black and white — with some exceptions for Jesus speaking to the disciples before his ascension, to Peter from heaven in a vision, and to Paul on the Damascus road. There we find some splashes of red. But Acts 20 is a strange place for color.

This is Paul’s last will and testament to the pastor-elders of Ephesus. He is making for Jerusalem, anticipating he will not see them again. Paul gives them a rich and moving farewell speech (verses 18–35), which culminates, surprisingly for many readers, with red letters.

As his message draws to its close, Paul reminds them of his own hard work, which they themselves observed, and which he wants to be a model to them:

In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” (Acts 20:35)

“It is more blessed” — more happy! — “to give than to receive.” This is strikingly hedonistic logic. What a parting word to leave in such a poignant moment!

Not only does Paul believe this truth, live by it himself, and quote it for others, but he adds that these church leaders should explicitly remember it. That is, bring it to mind, and keep bringing it to mind. Have it guide and motivate you. Turn here in key moments of decision. This is the sort of truth that deserves remembrance. So, be conscious about it, and regularly rehearse this reality, that you might live according to the supernatural way and words of Jesus, rather than as a natural person.

The natural human instinct is, I’ll be happier if I get, rather than give. But Jesus teaches another calculus.

Unblushing Promises for Giving

Whether this particular wording is Jesus’s own or Paul’s insightful capture of Christ’s ethic, we cannot say conclusively. However, what’s most important, whoever captured it, is recognizing that this is clearly a good summary of Jesus’s teaching. This is indeed how Jesus taught. This, in summary form, is the spirit of Christ’s regular appeals.

C.S. Lewis, for one, comments on Jesus’s “unblushing promises of reward” throughout the Gospels. Give to others, Jesus says, and you will get from your Father in heaven. Give on earth, he teaches, and you will receive from heaven. Give of your earthly, temporal possessions, and you will get a heavenly, eternal possession. The heart of his appeal is this: you get more in giving than in getting. Or slightly expanded: you get more (from God) in giving (to others) than in getting (from others).

Whether Acts 20:35 is a quote from Christ or a summary from Paul (or Luke), let’s see from the Gospel of Luke why this matches Christ’s ethic so well. Four passages, and promises, come quickly into view.

1. God will outgive you.

Give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. (Luke 6:38)

In this context, Jesus has instructed his disciples on how they should treat others, and then how they will be treated by “the Most High” who is “your Father.” Verse 37: “Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven.” Jesus’s pattern is this: treat others on earth well, with an explicit view toward the benefit that comes from heaven.

Christ’s ethic is plainly not the natural human ethic that says, “Treat others well, and they will treat you well in return.” He expressly denies that in verse 34: “If you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to get back the same amount.” Rather, Jesus says, “Love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great” (verse 35).

“When God gives, he does not hold back. He doesn’t cut corners. He’s a cheerful, generous giver.”

The “credit” or “benefit” (Greek charis) to which Jesus makes explicit appeal is not what others will do for you in return but what your heavenly Father will be and do for you. You give to others, seeking nothing in return from them, because you are looking to the reward you will receive from God. Oh, you are seeking return, but not from man — from God. And when God gives, he does not hold back. He doesn’t cut corners. He’s a cheerful, generous giver: “good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over”!

2. God gives treasure that will not fail.

Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. (Luke 12:32–34)

Here is the same spirit and holy hedonistic line of reasoning: as you empty your earthly, aging, stealable moneybags by giving to others in need, you “provide yourselves with [heavenly] moneybags that do not grow old,” treasure that cannot be stolen by thieves or destroyed by moths.

Again, we find two directions of giving in Jesus’s teaching: (1) his people give to others in need; (2) his Father gives to his people. You give from your limited possessions to the needy, and you get from your Father’s unlimited bounty — and remembering the second motivates the first. Knowing your Father has it all, and that what he has cannot be stolen or destroyed, and that he happily gives to his children, you are freed from hoarding and holding tightly to earthly possessions.

The appeal is plainly hedonistic: give to the needy, recalling your Father who has no needs. Not only does he care for his little flock and thus free you to care for others, but in your very giving to others, you accrue provision and blessing from God. You are more blessed, Jesus says in effect, to give to others and so to receive from your Father in heaven.

3. God will make you happy.

When you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just. (Luke 14:13–14)

This passage comes closer to Acts 20:35 than any of the others. We have Christ’s call to give, the promise of repayment/reward, and the language of being “blessed” (by God). This is not the blessed of being praised (eulogētos) but the blessed of being happy (makarios). When you give to others, and they cannot repay you, God will make you happy. He will repay you in the end, and knowing that makes us happy not only then but now.

A profound insight into the heart of Jesus’s ethic comes with the mention of giving to others who cannot repay you. The natural, human, less-happy way is to give to others who will give back to you. They will repay you, tit for tat. You have your reward, and you leave untapped the infinite joy-resources of heaven and eternity.

But the supernatural, divine, more-blessed way is to give to others who cannot repay you. Because then you know your heart has been truly hedonistic, Christian Hedonistic. Your heart has looked to the majestic Rewards of heaven rather than the miserly reimbursements of earth. And your heavenly Father has never missed a single payment in his ledger. He will repay you. In his perfect justice, he will reward you with everything you deserve — and in his amazing grace, he will lavish you with far more than you deserve. You will be far happier to be rewarded by him than repaid by fellow humans.

In other words, your all-seeing, all-knowing, all-just, and all-gracious heavenly Father will not let any act in the name of his Son go without eventual reward — however hidden it may be in this age. The books will be opened. The world will know. Christ will be honored. And our heavenly Father will shower his children with every good that’s justly owed, and then far, far more. Even the one who gives a cup of cold water in Jesus’s name “will be no means lose his reward” (Matthew 10:42). How much more the one gives a feast to the needy.

4. God will receive you into his own house.

Finally, Luke 16:9 may be the most unnerving of all. Jesus tells a parable of an “unrighteous manager” who shrewdly uses his temporary access to wealth to secure favor for himself once his stewardship is taken away. Jesus acknowledges his wickedness, yet risks drawing this hedonistic lesson for his disciples:

Make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings.

We’ve seen this logic before, even if it hasn’t been as provocative. Our possessions on earth are so fleeting; so soon will they fail us! Why hold on to them tightly and be ruined, when you could use what stewardship you have for now to “make friends” for yourself with God Almighty, who will receive you into his eternal dwelling?

It’s a hedonist’s appeal. Holding on now to earthly possessions will not make you deeply and enduringly happy. You really want to be happy? Loosen your grip. Give your earthly stuff away — not that you might receive in return from fellow humans, but that you might receive now and forever from your Father in heaven, and one day come as guest, and child, into his very home that is heaven.

Your Father Will Reward You

“It is more blessed to give than to receive” is a marvelous summary of Jesus’s ethic. But how might it become tangible in our own moments of decision?

When faced with the opportunity to give, think like a hedonist — a Christian Hedonist. That’s what Jesus would have us do. That’s what Paul himself did, and what he would have us do (as he makes explicit with the word remember).

So, very practically, you come to a moment of decision. You hear of some need. Christian love is calling. You can think of all sorts of carnal reasons to say no. And you can come up with carnal reasons to say yes. At that moment, Jesus and Paul would have us turn our minds to the promises of God: He will outgive your giving, guaranteed. He gives treasure that will not fail. He will make you happy forever, and in measure even now. And, in the end, he will even receive you into the divine generosity of his own house.

What unblushing promises of reward! Grab one of them, rehearse it, and act in faith. Or just reach for that insightful Christian Hedonist summary of Acts 20:35: “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”