It’s possible to led by God in your day-to-day activities.I’ll never forget when my own family members started to come to this realization. Mom lost a bunch of presents for my youngest brother. She looked everywhere she could think of, until finally she prayed.
“God, show me where to look. Show me what to do.”
God directed her to look in her bedroom closet.
The presents were sitting right there!
God moves spectacularly and quietly. Genesis 5:24 says: “and Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him”.
It’s possible to walk with God like Enoch did!
Throughout the Bible, people prayed for God to direct their day, and God showed up.
1 Samuel 2:1, to quote one of many examples, tells of King David inquiring for direction of the Lord:
“Shall I go up into any of the cities in Judah?” And the Lord said to him: “Go up.”
It wasn’t just a general word of direction.
David kept asking for specifics:
“Where shall I go up?”
God said: “to Hebron”.
This is one of many times God’s people have asked God for direction. Another example comes to mind, in Acts 16:10, when the apostles were seeking God about going to Macedonia, “concluding that the Lord had called us to preach the gospel to them”.
A friend of mine, a brother in Christ, was sharing about this earlier.
“How do you know the will of God?” he was sharing. “Because, when God moves, there’s always a lot of peace in it.”
I’ve seen that a lot in my own life.
Sometimes, I would even stress out about hearing God’s voice correctly in the moment!
“God, are you leading me to go over there? Or go over here? God?! Augh! Which is it?!?!”
God replied: “My Spirit, my kingdom is in peace and joy.”
Then that still, small Voice spoke something to my heart that changed my life:
“You’ll never find My Spirit outside of My Spirit.”
In other words: “You’ll never find God’s Spirit of peace and joy by leaving peace and joy to find Him.”
Isaiah 55:12: “You shall be led forth with joy and go out with peace…”
That peace is a key element.
I’ll never forget an evangelist telling me: “no matter where I go, I always keep my joy. I never let anything steal my joy.”
After a crazy conversation, I stepped outside to clear my head in the cool air. It was 2am, and my brain was spinning. No matter how much I walked, my head wouldn’t shut up.
“Can you believe what they were saying about…”
“And then, can you believe…:”
I won’t even tell everything my brain was going on about. Thing is, it wasn’t important.
Why wasn’t it important?
There was no peace, nor joy in it. God’s spirit was absent from my whole head trip.
It didn’t matter because it was just noise.
And in the moment, at 2am in the morning, in the dark, I could hear it.
What do you do when everything is screaming and yet God isn’t in it?
Don’t you wish you could just turn it off?
You can!!
Rebuke the noise. Rebuke yourself! Bow before the Lord. As John 20:19 said, receive Jesus’ peace.
At 2am, I put on worship music and started singing to the Lord over the roar in my head. In the middle of it, listening to Michael W. Smith’s “Sovereign Over Us”, I heard a still, small Voice:Do you want joy?
And this is what my head had to say in that moment: “What in the world does this have to do with the situation that badly needs–”
Shut up. Again: nothing important.
As Jesus says in Luke 10: “...you are worried and troubled about many things. But one thing is is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from her.”
What’s that good part, again?
Just sitting at Jesus’ feet, basking in His presence, and listening to Him.
Yes, it’s nice to figure things out. And often needed. But what’s needed more?
Our hearts staying in peace and joy, basking in the presence of God.
Again, in that moment, 2am, I received that gift God was offering me, that joy. I went to bed, and that peace and joy enveloped me. God gave rest to His beloved, as Psalm 127:2 says.
We are His beloved!!!
Nothing can take away that peace! Nothing!
But the enemy comes to convince us to give it away.
I start thinking about finances, about a difficult situation where I work, or this or that, and suddenly, the enemy shows up.
Ding!
“Hello! This is the time where you get frustrated / depressed / overwhelmed about things!”
Suddenly, I feel swamped. Suddenly, I feel stressed. Suddenly, I feel confused and uncertain.
A few years ago, I was working when I started thinking about my love life. Or my lack of a love life. I’m not really sure what the correct term there is.
But I heard it, just like I heard my head talking at 2am.
“Heyyy... You in the mood for a complete garbage dump of utter hopelessness?”
Again, I heard the choice presented in that moment.
And I saw I had a chance to respond yes or no.
So I did.
“No. Life. Peace. Joy. That’s what I’m in the mood for. Now and forever.”
This is the peace that passes all understanding.
I’ve heard of people in devastating situations.
When all hell roared, when the devil came to rob everything from them, in face of tragedy, what happened next was remarkable.
God called an African prince on the brink of death in the middle of a Liberian jungle.
In that moment, that Light and that Voice changed his life, much like Saul of Tarsus’ experience on the road to Damascus.
Set free of his bonds, he escaped to a missionary settlement where this Liberian prince learned about the One who had called him.
Hungry for more, Samuel “Kaboo” Morris determined to go to America to learn more about God.
God led him to a ship where he traveled as a cabin boy.
On this ship, the diversity of his shipmates led to an powder-keg situation.
One man drew a cutlass, determined to spill blood.
But Kaboo stepped in.
“Peace,” he spoke. “Peace.”
And the peace of God, which passed all understanding, defused the whole thing,
The Spirit of God fell on the ship.
Over and over again, this happens.
At the casket of a beloved, the inexplicable joy of the Lord fell and changed everything.
In the lion’s den, in the midst of an inferno, you, too, can know the meaning of the “fullness of joy”, as Psalm 16:11.
The life of God is a very rich life.
