August 11 Daily Devotional

Bible Verse

"For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God" (Rom. 8:14).

Devotional

It is the office of God the Holy Spirit in the covenant of redemption, after he has called a people out of the world, to place himself at their head in order to undertake their future guidance. He knows the path to heaven. He knows all its intricacies and dangers. He is familiar with the sunken rock, the treacherous quicksand, the concealed pit, and the subtle snare.

He also knows the individual and ordained path of each celestial traveler. All that God has appointed in the everlasting covenant—all the windings, and intricacy, and difficulties of the way—he knows. All the future of your history is infinitely more vivid and transparent to his mind than the past, already trodden, is to your own. It is utterly impossible, then, that he should mislead.

And what is equally as essential to him as a guide, he knows his own work in the soul. All its light and shade, its depressions and its revivings, its assaults and victories, are vivid to his eye. Dwelling in that heart—his sacred temple, his chosen abode—he reads his own writing inscribed there. He understands the meaning of every groan. He interprets the language of every sigh. He marks the struggling of every holy desire. He knows where wisely to supply a restraint, or gently to administer a rebuke, or tenderly to whisper a promise, or sympathetically to soothe a sorrow, in order effectually to aid a budding resolve, to strengthen a wavering purpose, or to confirm a vacillating hope.

But what, in less general terms, is it to be led by the Spirit? The existence of spiritual life in those he leads is an essential point assumed. He does not undertake to lead a spiritual corpse, a soul dead in sins.

Many are moved by the Spirit, who are not led by the Spirit. Was not Saul, the king of Israel, a solemn instance of this? And when it is said, "the Spirit of the LORD departed from him" (1 Sam. 16:14), we see how, in an ordinary way, the Spirit may strive with a man's natural conscience, and powerfully work upon his feelings through the Word, and even employ him as an agent to accomplish his will, and yet never lead him one step effectually and savingly to Christ and to heaven. There is, as in Ezekiel's vision of the bones, "there was a sound, and behold, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And I looked, and behold, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them. But there was no breath in them" (Ezek. 37:7–8).

But there is spiritual life in those whom the Spirit leads. They thus become in a sense voluntary in the movement. They are not forced; it is not by compulsion that they follow; they are led—persuasively, gently, willingly led. The leading of the Spirit, then, is his acting upon his own life in the soul.

It supposes, too, entire inability to lead themselves in those who are led by the Spirit: "I will lead the blind in a way that they do not know" (Isa. 42:16). And such are you. Unable to discern a single step before you, and incapable of taking that step even when discerned, you need the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Of yourself, what can you see of truth? What of providence? What of God's mind and will? Absolutely nothing. Oh, what displays of ignorance, what exhibitions of weakness, have marked some of the wisest of God's saints, when left to self-teaching and to self-guidance! Thus there is a strong and absolute necessity that wisdom, and strength, and grace, infinitely transcending your own, should go before you in your homeward journey.

Gracious Spirit, Dove Divine,
let your light within me shine;
all my guilty fears remove,
fill me full of heav'n and love.

(John Stocker, 1777; mod. LEW, 2009)

Be sure to read the Preface by Octavius Winslow and A Note from the Editor by Larry E. Wilson.

Larry Wilson is an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. In addition to having served as the General Secretary of the Committee on Christian Education of the OPC (2000–2004) and having written a number of articles and booklets (such as God's Words for Worship and Why Does the OPC Baptize Infants) for New Horizons and elsewhere, he has pastored OPC churches in Minnesota, Indiana, and Ohio. We are grateful to him for his editing of Morning Thoughts, the OPC Daily Devotional for 2011.