Devotion: – to guide and be guided
School students need vocational guidance. From time to time we need financial guidance. To get through different life crises, we need conversations and willingness to understand. Hopefully this guide will lead us to some good choices. Choices that make us mature and enable us to cope with life.
Now this with guidance is not new! It has always been there in a way. As long as there have been people on earth, there have been conversations about life, small and big questions. One has just given it a slightly different name.
Jesus gathered his disciples. He kept his farewell speech to them. And he had so much he should have said them. And we can understand that! 3 years is not long when one thinks that the disciples would go out in the world and preach the gospel!
But Jesus was to send the spirit of truth to guide them to the whole truth! And it’s not a little thing! The whole truth! The spirit was to guide them.
Think about that word: Guide, the spirit should lead them on the road.
The truth of God and Jesus. The truth about who they themselves was.
Then it’s okay to take it little by little!
We go against Pentecost and the Holy Spirit come to the disciples and to the church, to you and me. Now it is we who get guidance. When we take the time to listen and learn.
The spirit is patient and gives us insight, not just theological issues. No, we think so think so much about the spirit’s guidance that he can lead us in all the small and large choices of life! The spirit is known in the terrain you walk in. With great local knowledge!
And he follows our pace. He guides us to the extent we can carry it and understand it. I have some of this life we live. What do I have to stand in and fight on. And what will reconcile me. Or quit.
And sometimes it is not so easy to distinguish whether it was our thoughts, or God’s thoughts. Often it was both parts! The truth is an often demanding and liberating concept at the same time. Could it be that the greatest challenger of truth is not the lie, but oblique?
I just leave the challenge there. Then we ask that the Spirit must lead us on the way of God, step by step. Here where we look piecemeal and shared!
Good Sunday!
Sunday’s sermon text can be found at Johannes 16: 12-15
