The Goodness of God - Pt 3

The friendship of the Lord is for those who fear him, and he makes known to them his covenant. My eyes are ever toward the Lord, for he will pluck my feet out of the net. (Psalm 25:14-15 ESV).

Yesterday we saw that David understood the necessity of prayer to experience the goodness of God. There are at least eighteen petitions in Psalm 25, including our reading today. David goes to God in every aspect of his situation. David comes to God with his fear and his loneliness and guilt and confusion and pleads with God to make things right and to lead him in the way of love and faithfulness. Most of us take that for granted. Unfortunately this is not our most common response when we are threatened, lonely, guilty, or uncertain about God's will for our future. We typically panic; God wants us to pray. Ask and He will guide. If you face a decision, and there is usually no direct biblical command relating to that specific choice. There can be some miracle in the circumstances to point the way, but I think I can say that these are not his normal means of guidance in such cases. The Bible describes the ordinary guidance of God as the development of spiritual sensitivity. In other words, the prerequisite of divine guidance is not the quest for messages, but the quest for holiness. Guidance is the product not of ecstatic heights but of spiritual depth. Normally God guides his children through alertness to circumstances and through spiritual sensitivity to the present implications of God's character and purposes revealed in his Word. God guides us by bringing our hearts and minds into harmony or sympathy with his own heart and mind so that when we study a situation, we discern (you might even say intuit) what path would best accord with the character and purposes of God that we know from Scripture. So what we ought to be asking when we pray is, "Lead me into your truth, and teach me." We must pray that God would create in us a spiritual and moral conformity to himself and that he would help us see all the relevant factors that relate to the decision we're about to make. God teaches us his way by alerting us to significant facts of the situation and by awakening us to the implications of his character and his purpose. Wherever you find yourself today, the light of God is always pointing you to the way of safe passage from the storm. Ignore every other direction, no matter how logical it may seem, unless it is absolutely clearly from the mind and purpose of God. Pray for that and you will find peace in your journey.