Being Led By the Spirit

8/13/1995

I was wondering if we could talk about what Holiness is, because it’s pivotal. “As many as are led by the Spirit are sons of God.” We would understand that to be a very, very pivotal verse, right? “As many as are led by the Spirit are sons of God.” Could anyone dispute the necessity of learning to be led by the Spirit, rather than led by our own feelings or our own opinions or our own selfishness? It’s a pivotal verse: “As many as are led by the Spirit are sons of God.” There is another very pivotal verse in Hebrews 12: “Without Holiness, no one will see the Lord.” We’re in agreement that that is extremely pivotal, that holiness is an essential issue for God’s people, right? If we were trying to sum up life in the simplest terms and decide what we’re going to pour our energy into, there are at least a couple of things that we’d want to pour our energy into, if we had any sense, right? In a business environment, you pour yourself into that kind of work which is most profitable. There are a hundred sorts of things you could do in a business. You could spend a whole lot of time doing record keeping if you wanted to, if you were a salesman. But you don’t make any money, if you’re being paid on a commission basis, for doing paperwork and being a great record keeper. There’s no money in that. So you don’t pour your time and your energy into that. If you have several different kinds of business that you can do with the equipment that you have or the talents that you have, you’re going to look at the workflow over the course of a year and decide that which generates the most profit and the most capital, which is the easiest work to get and to sustain, and you’re going to pour your energy into that sort of work so that your resources are well spent. Well, our lives like that. There are only so many seconds in a minute, so many minutes in an hour, and so many hours in a day and a year and a lifetime. It’s very limited. When you tally it all up, it’s not very long that we have allotted to us. The scriptures are clear on that point. Man’s days are numbered and they’re very short. Life is like a vapor; you blow and it's gone. So I think it would behoove us to look at how we can best spend our resources–our time, our energy, our money, our efforts, our conversations for that matter. And in order to do that, I think it’s important to have God’s perspective. What does God think is the most valuable thing that we can do? What does God say about how we can best spend our resources? What should we focus on? What are the main issues that we should pour most of our attention into? If we don’t do anything else right, what are the things that are the most important things to do right, out of the ten thousand possibilities of how we can spend a day and a lifetime? Learning to be led by the Spirit surely would be one of those. “As many as are led by the Spirit are sons of God.” If you’re not familiar with the meaning of that, if that’s not something you’re especially adept at, I would highly encourage you to find out what the meaning of that is and learn how to live that way every day of your life! Because you’re not living in the sonship of God if you’re not living by the Spirit of God. If you’re only living by your emotions, by your brain, by your experiences, by your common sense–if you’re only living by that which you can see and feel and touch and figure out on your own, or what you hear from somebody else, then you’re not going to experience the thing that God has destined you for, and that is the sonship that Jesus had and wants to give to you. You’re just going to be a little robot walking around, just a shallow person that’s blown by every wind and every circumstance. Your life is probably not going to amount to very much. “As many as are led by the Spirit are sons of God.” “Apart from Me you can do nothing,” Jesus said, which means that pretty much everything that is done without being led by the Spirit is nothing. You can do a lot of good works, a lot of good deeds. You can live sacrificially. You can live scripturally even. You can do a lot of good things, but Jesus said, “Apart from Me you can do nothing,” and “As many as are led by the Spirit are sons of God.” The summation of all that is, that if you’re not doing what you’re doing because God Himself is leading you in that direction, then the sum total of what you’re putting your effort into really doesn’t amount to much of anything. It’s essential that we learn how to be led by the Spirit if we really want to live in the sonship that God intended us for, rather than just as “mere men,” as Paul said to the Corinthians who were not living by the Spirit.