How do we seek God’s guidance? How do we know that we have received it? For people who have been around church for awhile, the first question yields some fairly common answers: pray, ask others to pray, fast, study Scripture. All good answers. It’s the second question that causes us to stumble a bit more. Some would say that we know we have received God’s answer when we experience an inner peace. That inner peace is a sign that we are in the right place or that we have made the right decision. I don’t disagree with that answer, but I know inner peace is not always my experience in these times. It does happen but not as frequently as I would like. If the inner peace doesn’t appear, are there any other ways that we can know?
Last night, I led a group of fairly seasoned Christians in our church through a study of several passages from the book of Acts in an attempt to deal with this issue. Just as in our experience, the biblical answers to the first questions were fairly straightforward and consistent. When the earliest Christians were faced with conflict, crisis, or decisions, they commonly prayed and fasted as they made their decisions. That all makes good sense, and we would expect those answers.
More problematic was how they actually determined God’s will. In Acts 1, they cast lots. Of course, this was not uncommon in ancient culture, and we see it at work in the OT, but it certainly seems an odd method to us. In another instance, Peter depended on a vision and the clear manifestation of the Holy Spirit to know that God was at work in bringing Gentiles into the church (Acts 11-11). More acceptable to us was the prayer and fasting of the church of Antioch and then their commissioning of Paul and Barnabas (Acts 13). And in Acts 15, we have church leaders coming together for a frank exchange and then a decision on the Gentile question.
The actions of the church are clear here. Our interpretation is what is difficult. When we are faced with crisis, conflict, or decisions in the church, which of these examples from the early church should we follow? Should we have a healthy debate or pull out a silver dollar and call heads or tails? Do we choose one over the other because it fits our cultural sensibilities better?
Certainly, the primary lesson is that the church depended on the leading of the Holy Spirit in all of these instances, but beyond that, what do you learn about how we should make decisions as the community of faith?
