He Will Guide You Into All Truth

He can tell you the two of them, in order, with dates.

The first was a job. He was certain, in the way a person is certain when something settles in the chest and will not move, and he handed in his notice on a Tuesday, and eleven months later the whole department was gone and he had left a good post for it.

The second was a friendship. He believed, again with that settled feeling, that he was meant to invest heavily in a particular man, and he did, for two years, and it ended in a way he would rather not describe.

He is not bitter about either. He is careful about both, which is worse.

Because what he took from them was not caution. It was a verdict on himself. He decided he is a man who cannot tell the difference, and having decided that, he has stopped making calls at all.

There are four things sitting in front of him at the moment. A house. A conversation with his brother he has owed for a year. A question about whether to keep leading the group on Thursdays. And one small thing, which is whether to phone somebody back.

He has moved on none of them.

And here is the sentence he has never said out loud, because it sounds like blasphemy in his mouth.

He has decided it is safer to do nothing than to be wrong about God again.

Read who was sent to do the guiding

There is a promise given the night before the crucifixion, and it is not a promise about the disciples' accuracy.

Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come.John 16:13

He will guide you into all truth.

Read the grammar of that. He guides. He speaks. He shows. There is not one clause in it about the disciples' skill at receiving, their track record, or how many times they had misread Him before, which by that night was a considerable number.

And look at the word guide. It is not the word for a single instruction handed over at a door. It is the word for somebody walking with you along a road, correcting as you go, and correction as you go assumes movement, which assumes you will sometimes be facing slightly the wrong way when the hand lands on your shoulder.

Your guidance is His work rather than your accuracy, and Scripture assigns the guiding to the Spirit of truth without one clause about your record. The Holy Spirit is the One who was sent to do it, and He is doing it in a man who has been wrong twice.

A guide implies a road

Now the plain thing, and it is about what a guide is for.

You've been treating discernment as a test you sit, where the mark comes back and tells you whether you're the sort of person who can hear. Two low marks and you withdrew from the exam.

But nothing in that verse describes a test. It describes a companion on a journey, and a companion is only useful to somebody who is walking. A guide beside a man sitting in a chair has nothing to do.

Which means your two wrong calls did not disqualify you from guidance. They put you in exactly the position guidance exists for. The men He said this to went on to argue, misread situations, and need correcting in writing, some of it preserved in the letters, and He never once withdrew the promise.

And nothing in either of those two years has canceled what was promised over you. He said the Spirit of truth will guide you into all truth, with no exemption written anywhere for a man who has misjudged, and the Holy Spirit is beside you on the road today.

No formula is coming

Here is the part I will not do, and I want to be honest about why.

I am not going to hand you a test. There are teachers who will give you a five-point method for certainty, and every one of those methods eventually meets a decision it cannot resolve, and the person holding it concludes they have failed the method.

What Scripture gives instead is a way to weigh and a God who steers. Weigh a thing against what is written, because He does not contradict Himself. Weigh it in company with people who know you and are not impressed by you. Weigh it for the fruit it is asking you to grow. And then move, knowing the steering is in better hands than the map is.

That is less comfortable than a formula and it is a great deal more solid, because it does not depend on you being right.

You are able to move without certainty, and the steering was never handed to you in the first place. Proverbs 16:9 says a man devises his way and the Lord directs his steps, and the Holy Spirit is the One who does the directing while you are already walking.