How Can I Discern Whether I’m Hearing From My Flesh Or The Lord?
Would you say that, although God is omnipresent, omniscient, that He isn’t a God who micro-manages us? I do sometimes struggle to discern whether instructions are my flesh or from the Lord. Advice?
The meticulous determinism of God is an interesting and a broad theological question. To what degree does God meticulously determine what people will do? Every Christian believes that God determines what happens in the big picture. Moreover, there are some Christians, including our more Reformed brethren, who teach and believe that God meticulously determines every act, every thought, and every molecule in the earth. You can’t get more meticulous than God determining the course of every molecule in the universe.
A famous phrase from RC Sproul was, “If there is one single molecule in this universe running around loose, totally free of God’s sovereignty, then we have no guarantee that a single promise of God will ever be fulfilled.” I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I believe that God’s sovereignty is so great and so significant that He can and does allow real choices by the beings who are made in His image. God, in His greatness, knows how to reconcile these things, how to guide events, how to take all into account, how to work through the real choices of men and women in this world, and work it all into His unfolding plan of glory.
How do we discern whether we’re hearing from our flesh or from the Lord? Here’s a simple framework to understand the difference. If it’s your flesh, it will be self-serving in some way. Listen, our flesh has great power to accomplish things. There are people who have been shamed into giving up their addictions, such as alcohol or drugs or pornography. Someone has found a way to effectively appeal to their pride, and because they don’t want to be exposed in front of other people as a drunkard or drug addict or a pornography addict, they have found a way to resist the temptation of those things, But actually, in many ways, they’ve given into an even greater temptation that feeds their flesh, and that’s a temptation of pride.
It’s possible in the flesh for people to replace one sin with another. If you sense that you should read your Bible, it’s not the devil or the flesh telling you do this, unless reading your Bible makes you proud and feel superior to your brother and sister. An important distinction is to note whether or not things feed our flesh; that’s a good way to know whether something is from our flesh or from the Lord.
But don’t be shy about simply asking God, “Lord, I don’t know. Is this me or is this You? I pray that You’d guide me and show me.” I don’t think you necessarily need to pray that God would speak to you. Friends, I’m not going to say that it’s impossible for God to speak to somebody in an audible voice, but if He did, I think it would be extremely rare, never to be counted on, and never to be assumed that it’s promised from God that He would do so. But God has ways to communicate with His people and to guide us along the way. You can ask God to guide you with that.