Does God really guide people, or is the notion of getting divine direction for living nothing more than a pious superstition?

The officers of our congregation are holding a retreat today. They are thinking and praying together about the work and service of this church in the year ahead. Is it possible for these leaders to get God’s guidance for this church, or are they strictly on their own?

Today is Youth Sunday. Picked representatives from our youth groups have been our leaders in morning worship. These fine young men and the others of their group are right now in that crucial time of their lives when they are trying to make decisions about a life vocation. Does God give guidance to boys and girls about how and where they should invest their talents? Does He call them to definite posts of service?

Never a week passes, but I talk with people who are facing some crucial decisions in which they desire more wisdom than they or any other person or group of persons could possibly have. Whether or not to have a certain surgical operation? What is the right course to follow in an involved personal relationship or a community affair?

People want God’s guidance and they seek it. What hope is there for them to receive help from above?

Luke, the Greek physician, who wrote the Book of Acts, believed that the Apostle Paul was guided of God on all his missionary journeys. In the scripture lesson we read this morning, Luke mentions three specific instances in which Paul was divinely directed: First, the Holy Spirit prevented the missionary party from proclaiming the Christian message in Asia Minor; then, when they tried to enter Bithynia, the Spirit of Jesus would not allow it; and finally, when Paul had a vision one night of a man from Macedonia saying: “Come over into Macedonia and help us,” Paul and his companions accepted this as the guidance of God, crossed the straits between Asia and Europe, and brought the Christian mission to Macedonia.

“Paul was not traveling for pleasure or profit; he was traveling as an ambassador of God,” and as such, he sincerely believed that all along the way he received his Sovereign’s specific commands. He could clearly discern His God shutting certain doors and opening others.

But will God guide us today? Can we have Paul’s faith and receive the same sort of divine direction? One religious leader says that “the rank and file of people (nowadays) do not expect to be guided by God, and groups that have taken guidance most seriously have often reduced it to absurdity and made God in the likeness of a messenger boy to tell us what to do next. The result is that guidance is either discarded as a superstition or scorned as a fad of religious adolescents.” (Theodore P. Ferris in The Interpreter’s Bible — Volume 1 p. 214)

Of course, it is the nature of man that he cannot know the future. He cannot predict unerringly the outcome of his present decisions and actions. There are always factors, people, occurrences he can not foresee impinging upon the future event. This is the nature of man. To be man is to act on a stage this side of a curtain we call tomorrow.

But man is also characterized by a measure of transcendence. He can by memory recall the past, not perfectly, but with some accuracy. He can also pierce gropingly into the future. The curtain of tomorrow is not completely opaque. He can imagine, hope, plan, scheme, what he might do tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Man’s grasp of scientific knowledge and skills in our time increases mightily his capacity to probe more accurately into the future. By it, he lights up what is on the other side of tomorrow’s veil.

Always man has longed to secure from some source more and more reliable information about coming events. Always the religious man has believed that the future is known to his God or his gods. Part of the ritual of primitive religions has been divination, soothsaying, the proclamation by seers and holy men what God has revealed to them about the future. Then, with such special guidance, above and beyond the ordinary human wit and wisdom, a man could, with more confidence, make his choices and pick his way through to tomorrow.

Fortunately, most of this kind of guidance has been sloughed off by the higher religions on their trek through the years. Such rituals really belong in the classification of superstition. Religions which promise that kind of service are shunned by the modern intelligent man just as he resolutely turns from the gypsy fortuneteller or the horoscope reader.

Yet, man’s need for guidance remains, and his thirst for it does not diminish. Is there now a reliable, divine guidance available? If so, how does one come by it?

Perhaps our present involvement in the attempt to put a man in orbit around the earth can furnish us with a helpful illustration. As we waited nervously all last week for the countdown on our country’s first venture to orbit a man in space; as we listened to radio and TV reports and read more and more technical information about all that was involved to safeguard the man and the missile, were we not everyone impressed with the elaborate mechanism of communication our government has perfected to guide him safely on his way? Years have been spent; 75 million dollars have been invested in establishing all the way around the world a ring of 14 tracking or guiding stations. These stations are situated in Bermuda, Grand Canary Island, Nigeria and Zanzibar in Africa, two stations in Australia, one on Canton Island in the Polynesian group, one in Hawaii, and Mexico, and three across the U. S. A. Each is an installation of expensive and extensive radio and electronic communications, manned by skilled technicians, to stay in constant touch with astronaut Glenn as he whirls around the earth at 17,500 miles an hour on his epochal pioneering journey.

Why this enormous expenditure of time and money and effort for tracking and guiding stations? Russia constructed no such globe encircling string of communications centers. Why? And here is to see a striking manifestation of the basic difference in the American and the communist philosophy of life — because no expense is too great and no effort too prodigious to safeguard Glenn’s life and give him every assistance toward a successful accomplishment.

High in the stratosphere, circling the globe every 90 minutes, he will nevertheless be in almost constant communication with those on the earth who can tell him if he’s off course, counsel with him about technical problems as they arise, and assist him in emergencies if he has to cut short his anticipated journey.

Is there any such system of spiritual radar established and in service for the guidance and safety of the immortal souls God has launched in this life? Is there a service to warn them when they are off course or skirting danger: a way to get needed counsel for crucial decisions?

The Christian faith teaches unequivocally that there is — that man may be guided of God, but only when a series of important and related factors are all operating in harmony — factors almost as intricately connected as the U. S. tracking stations for American mercury capsules.

One factor of fundamental importance in getting God’s guidance is scriptural knowledge. You can’t be guided by God, the God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, if you don’t know the Bible. The scriptures contain the record of God’s self-revelation. Here is the recording of ultimate moral and spiritual reality. Biblical illiterates, lack-luster scholars, spasmodic church school attenders, just aren’t fitted with the built-in receivers to get clear guidance from God.

The writings of St. Paul fairly bristle with Old Testament quotations, especially Psalms and Isaiah. Since the Apostle’s mind was formed by the inspired word, there is no wonder that he was on the right spiritual wave length for ready reception wherever he went.

Colonel Glenn has been listening to recordings of the voices of the Australian technicians who will be in communication with him when the space capsule passes over Australia. Why? So he will not be unfamiliar with their Australian accent. To fail to understand an important communication might prove fatal.

If we don’t know our way around in the Holy Scriptures, if we have not listened to the voice of ultimate authority over man’s soul in the sacred writings till we recognize its moral vocabulary, if we haven’t learned the spiritual accent, how can we hope to get God’s guiding message?

Another factor of fundamental importance in getting God’s guidance is a permanent prayerful attitude. Just saying our prayers, once or twice a day in not enough. To go through the motions of praying, however doggedly, in the mood: “I’ll do this if it kills me,” or “Now, that’s over, thank goodness, down to work,” is to miss most of the help prayer can be to us in receiving God’s guidance.

What we need is a daily, hourly, momentarily expectant mood, a mood that preserves prayer’s attitude of waiting upon God in all the day’s activities, believing there is a spiritual reality behind and supporting and infusing the material universe and the visible historical parade, and so, remain always not only unsurprised but alertly aware when God comes through to us in the day’s most commonplace encounters.

1. M. Ramsey suggests that Paul’s vision of the “man of Macedonia” saying “come over into Macedonia and help us,” may have been St. Luke himself, and that it may have happened thus: Certain things we know, others we can only conjecture. These things we know: Luke was a physician, a Greek, that he wrote the Acts accounts of Paul’s journeys, and that the “we” sections of his narrative begin at this point of the Macedonian call. It seems pretty clear that Luke joined the party at Troas.

Now, it may have been that Paul was ill in Troas, for he suffered from a recurring sickness. Luke, a Greek physician, perhaps from Philippi in Macedonia, was called to attend Paul at Troas, came under the spell of his spiritual influence and converted to Christianity. Furthermore, it may have turned out that the converted physician pleaded with the missionaries to cross over into Macedonia with him and bring the gospel to his fellow countrymen who needed its saving power. Long he pleaded, but Paul remained unconvinced. Then when night came, and Paul lay down to sleep, he dreamed of this man of Macedonia, still standing and pleading: “Come over and help us.” And the recollections of the day sifted in a subconscious that was saturated with scripture and faith and dedication took new meaning and urgency, as so often they do in the night hours. The vision deepened into a solid spiritual conviction. God had communicated His will to His servant Paul in the affairs of the day and Paul had not been irreverently inattentive, but prayerfully expectant.

Finally, another factor of supreme importance in getting God’s continued guidance is giving obedience to the directions already received. When we talk of getting God’s guidance we usually have in mind special orders in a given personal situation. How, if we are not already following God’s clear, general directions for living in fellowship with him, can we expect to receive clear special directives?

America’s astronauts can’t hope to receive on the spot instructions and the counsel in response to their specific problems unless they give basic obedience to the general instructions of staying in range and in tune with their tracking stations.

If we are off running errands for the devil, thumbing our noses to the call of honor and truth and service and love, how can we expect to pick up emergency guidance that is always being beamed to every man that is traveling in his appointed orbit?

Yes, God guides, but He has His own important requirements to be met, and disciplines to be observed, if guidance is to come clear, strong and uninterrupted. Spirit with spirit may speak. We believe in the effect of matter on matter. We should not find it difficult to believe that spirit can affect spirit.

“Where life is bounded by programs and plans and purposes that are merely human, life will be a succession of mistakes and stinging disappointments. ‘O rest in the Lord, wait patiently for Him, and He will give thee thine heart’s desire.’” (J. Parker, People’s Bible, — Vol. 24, p. 137)

But, “the manner of the guidance of God will be different under different circumstances and in the lives of different people. Whatever the will of God may be, it will not be communicated to them by any automatic device or magical means. Christians cannot go to any sacred book, and opening it at random, put their finger on a sentence and say: ‘That is the will of God for me.’ Their knowledge of the will of God will be found somewhere in their interpretation of the events of history, illuminated by God’s revelation of himself, in the prime event of history, and perceived by the inspired mind and spirit of men.”

“H. P. Van Dusen in an article on the Oxford Group (Atlantic Monthly 1934) defined guidance in the following words: ‘An eager mind, purified by rigorous religious discipline, relaxed yet alert, expectantly open to the most delicate suggestion of the highest.’” (Theodore P. Ferris — The Interpreter’s Bible — Vol. IX, p. 216)

We shall rarely, if ever, find God’s guidance in the clear objectivity of a well-painted road sign at the highway intersection. The element of venture, and hazard, and faith will never be removed. God will never give any form of His guidance as a substitute for a man’s courage. “Now we see through a glass darkly.” The time has not yet come to see face to face.