Psalm 23
He Leads Me in Paths

Let me ask you right here at the beginning. Do you experience the leading of the Divine Shepherd? Do you feel as if your life and activities are led by God and for that reason the effect of your life is sure to come out all right?

Please consider with me the four very significant senses in which God leads us as Christians.

I. FIRST OF ALL, HE LEADS US IN THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE AND ULTIMATE WAY. HE LEADS US, AS WE SAY, "PROVIDENTIALLY."

1. He said to Jeremiah "Before you were formed in the womb I knew you, Jeremiah, and before you were born I consecrated you (and) appointed you a prophet."

2. Even the time and place of your birth was in the mind of God from eternity past and served to lead you in paths of righteousness. You have been born into, perhaps, the most comfortable, the most educated, the most technological, convenient, generation of history for the largest number of people.

God has blessed us even though it is a matter of common grace (and not special grace) that we share in these things. God is behind it all. And the influence of all of these things has had a great deal to do with who you are and what you will do and it is the hand of God upon your life even though it is in an indirect way. This aspect of God's leading is most accurately portrayed in the way a shepherd leads the sheep.

II. THEN IN THE SECOND PLACE, HE LEADS YOU BY THE SCRIPTURES.

1. It is no accident that this great economy and culture I have spoken of has come upon those who are the cumulative heirs of centuries of the knowledge of the Word of God. Our law code, our corporate sense of right and wrong, the good aspects of our way of life such as the belief in nobility and uprightness, observance of the Lord's day, expectation of truthfulness and honesty in business and government -- all these national expectations are strongly influenced by the place the Bible has played in our past.

And in your personal life God leads you as you make decisions that are not only based upon his specific commands such as "thou shalt not murder," "thou shalt not commit adultery" but the whole tenor of your world and life view is based directly or indirectly on the Word of God. The Bible is filled with commands that, properly applied, tell you how the Shepherd is leading you.

It is an important part that the church plays in your understanding the leading of the Lord, for it teaches you in its teaching, in its modeling in the example of its members what the will of the Lord is.

This shows how very important it is for you as an individual to live your life in obedience to the Lord and openly before your fellow Christians. Are you a model of the will of God to other Christians? Is your life, perhaps, a living embodiment of Matthew 5, or I Corinthians 13 or the first verses of Philippians 2 or the last half of Ephesians 4?

III. FURTHERMORE, AS A REDEEMED PERSON -- REGENERATED, A "NEW CREATURE," "FILLED WITH THE HOLY SPIRIT" YOU ARE GIVEN WISDOM ABOVE AND BEYOND THE WISDOM YOU WOULD HAVE HAD IF YOU WERE NOT A CHRISTIAN. THIS IS ANOTHER WAY IN WHICH HE SHEPHERD LEADS HIS SHEEP.

1. When you make ordinary day by day decisions having to do with the mundane affairs of your life, you make them as this person who loves God who is filled with his Spirit and the decision to follow this path or that path really is influenced by God.

2. Grow in grace and in the knowledge of his revealed will and the decisions you make will increasingly give evidence of leading from the Lord even though on the other hand they will seem to be your decisions.

3. Your very desire -- a deep desire -- to do what the Lord would have you do has the tendency to make you do his will and is a part of the leading of the Lord. Someone told me the other day about a Baptist church that gave out a million bracelets printed with the words "What would Jesus do?" They actually used the wrong question because, due to the unique person and ministry of the Lord, the Father's will for him was often not the same as it is for us. It would have been better to have printed: "What would God have me to do?" I don't know about bracelets, but it certainly would be well for us all to run every projected act or decision through this test during the process of deciding. "What would God have me to do?" That would help us substantially to discover the will of God.

IV. AND THEN, OFTEN GOD WORKS SUPERNATURALLY IN A MUCH MORE SPECIFIC AND MIRACULOUS WAY AS WE PRAY THAT HIS WILL BE DONE.

1. He does this by changing your mind, giving you the "mind of Christ," the mind of the shepherd.

2. And on occasion it happens that Christians receive supernatural intervention or signs as to his leading, especially in extreme cases. Perhaps many people here could give us an example of this in their life.

I urge caution about this. The seeking after miraculous signs is often a substitute for really believing in God's promises and seeing his leading in non-spectacular ways but sometimes, often in times of crisis and emergency God intervenes in this way.

I am reminded of the way in which Augustine came to know the Lord with the voice of a child beyond his garden wall crying out "Tole lege! Tole lege!'' (take up and read! Take up and read!). And he took up his Latin Bible and read Romans 13: 13 and was gloriously converted. You may know, as I do, of many claims of similar things happening in our own times. I do not think we can or should put them down. But seeking these sorts of miraculous confirmations of the will of God will inoculate us from seeing it in the ordinary ways we discover it.

And take note: Even in N.T. times -- even when in that transitional time God frequently worked miraculously, the will of God was not usually revealed by miraculous intervention but by the individual's sanctified decision. Paul, for example seems to have gone out and evangelized in what seemed to him to be the best way and God led him onward by success or failure. He and the rest of the Lord's people in the N.T. seem to have usually discovered God's will for vocational matters in circumstances rather than in miracles.