Led by the Spirit Is Pragmatic

11/15/1989

There's a way that most of us grew up looking at religion which was just a bunch of pragmatic dos and don'ts and rules of living and if you do this then you can go to heaven and play a harp. It was just all basically stuff. It was all religious; you go through these motions and do these things. "This pleases God." "Don't do this." "Don't live that way.” "Do live this way." "Be sure to go to church, read your Bible and don't forget to pray and everything will be okay." But it's all external stuff.

Well, we've begun to learn the bare minimum about how to walk with God and be led by His Spirit and be in touch with heavenly things rather than just carnal, external dos and don'ts. And that's great! But, here's what can happen. It's the ditch on the other side of the road where everything is just super spiritual, just goo-goo, goo-goo--the introspection and the weepy face and the whining and the long term depression and the valleys and the wilderness experiences. So much of that stuff is self-inflicted, pseudo-spiritual junk. If you go back and you read the epistles, just start with the epistles, and see if you can find all these deep spiritual experiences. They're not in there! It's very pragmatic. It's scary how pragmatic it is. Paul, who was caught up into the third heaven believed in spiritual experiences. Believe me. He saw Jesus, who knocked him off of his horse and was blinded for three days and had a lot of experiences after that--dreams and angels appearing to him. He had a lot of spiritual experiences. He wasn't a rookie. But, read his letters and see how pragmatic, how straight forward and practical they are. They're not just filled with oohing and awing and "being led by the Spirit."

That phrase, "led by the Spirit," do you know how many times that exists in the New Testament? Very few. You can count them on one hand, I believe. Isn't that scary? A whole life of being led by the Spirit, several decades of men who were led by the Spirit recording what it was like to be led by the Spirit, and they didn't use that phrase but a few times in a couple of decades or more. Isn't that scary? To be led by the Spirit is very pragmatic.

Now there is the carnal aspect of things which is far from God's heart, and that's just to do everything according to your own mind based on a series of dos and don'ts and morals and rituals and so on and so forth. But, if you get right down to it, the men who walked with God were led by His Spirit, bound on earth what they saw was bound in heaven and spoke only what they heard the Father saying. Very seldom did they get caught up in this whirlwind of so-called deep spirituality. "Here's what I want you to do, Timothy, do this, do that, do this, do that." Read the books. Read them, and you see that it's to the point, it's practical, and it appeals to the mind. All that stuff is in there. It's very straight forward. It isn't just weird gushy stuff that they were swept from day to day in a spiritual fervor of learning magnificent things from Heaven. But, it's very to the point. And I'd like to encourage you that that is the way the Spirit leads. It isn't external. It doesn't begin in the mind, and to follow God you do these things because it says so right here on this page. That isn't the way it is at all. It is to be led by the Sprit.

If you think about it, the phrase "in fellowship with the Holy Spirit," that idea, that concept is not found in the Scriptures very often. It was the norm. It was the way of life. But the overflow of that way of life was very pragmatic, very to the point. But the fellowship with the Holy Spirit is a fellowship with a carpenter, not fellowship with some nirvana, but fellowship with a carpenter, the man Jesus Christ who mediates between God and men. So think about all of that, and I think it'll just wash out what you've tended to at times consider spiritual struggling. "I'm just struggling with this right now." Well, hold on there. I just wonder if it's a struggle in the Spirit, or if it's not just the carnal mind that's gone into an eastern religion way of dealing with things rather than an American traditionalism way of dealing with things.

I know that's kind of heavy, but just consider that prayerfully. Read the book and what you'll see is that the leading of the Spirit, if it were really in fellowship with the Spirit, ends up being much more straight forward and not nearly so whirlwind of emotion and struggling and all this kind of stuff as we might have begun to believe, as we've dumped ritualism and traditionalism and just this external legal religion in favor of really walking with the living God. To walk with the living God ends up coming back to being very practical in a lot of ways. So, just think about that. Don't end up in either ditch.