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Knowing What to Do and Which Way to Go

Know What to Do and Which Way to Go//Timeless Teaching of Kenneth E. Hagin

One of the most important lessons for Christians to learn is how to be led by the Spirit of God. But because some Christians don’t understand how God leads, they seek guidance through methods other than those God has set forth in His Word.

We sometimes judge how God is leading us by what our physical senses tell us. But nowhere in the Bible does God say that He will guide us through our senses. Sometimes we look at our circumstances from a mental standpoint and try to reason things out. But God does not guide us through our intellect.

Proverbs 20:27 says, “The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord.” The Amplified Bible translates the word rendered candle as “lamp.” This means that God will enlighten us—He will guide us—through our spirit.

Some people think that we are only made up of a physical body and a soul, but man is a three-part being. Man is a spirit being, he has a soul, and he lives in a body (1 Thess. 5:23). Some people think the spirit and soul are the same, but they are not. This is evident in Hebrews 4:12, which says that the Word of God divides the soul and the spirit.

The primary way the Holy Spirit leads us is through an inward witness. Learning to recognize the inward witness is not difficult. When making a decision or getting ready to go somewhere, we may have a “check” in our spirit . . . something on the inside—a “red light” or a “stop signal.” It’s not a voice saying “Don’t do this” or “Don’t go.” We just sense that we shouldn’t do something or go somewhere. We might call it an “inward intuition.” If we thought about it, many of us would probably say there are a thousand and one things we wouldn’t have done if we had  listened to that inward witness.

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At other times, as we consider and pray about a certain course of action, we might have a “velvety-like” feeling in our spirit. Our head might be giving us a hard time, but we have a “green light” or a “go-ahead signal” in our heart. We sense we should do something even though it may not make any sense to our mind. That’s the inward witness, or the witness of the Spirit.

We can learn to develop our spirit and follow the leading of the Holy
Spirit by the inward witness. One way to do that is to feed on God’s Word. Jesus said, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4). Another way to develop our spirit is to follow after love. The Scriptures say that God is love (1 John 4:8, 16). If we’re not listening to love, we’re not listening to the voice of God. If we are walking in love, we are following after God. We’re going to have to train our spirit to hear the voice of God on love in order to develop enough to hear His voice in other areas.

A third way to develop our spirit and become more sensitive to the inward witness is by praying much in other tongues. When we pray in tongues, our spirit is in contact with the Father of spirits.

When we begin praying in tongues, our mind may wander off. We must learn to train our mind to become quiet. At first this may be difficult. But if we keep our focus on Jesus—if we think about Him as
we pray in tongues—our mind will eventually become quiet. We then become more conscious of our spirit and of spiritual things, and we begin praying out of our spirit.

The more we pray in tongues, the more we become sensitive to our spirit. After awhile, we’ll know on the inside whether the Holy Spirit is saying yes or no, even in the minor incidents of life. God is not only interested in the major situations that confront us; He is interested in the minor details as well.

We spend most of our life in the mental and physical realm. Many of us have developed our intellect at the expense of our heart until our intellect has become the dominant force in our life. And our spirit—which should be our guide—has been kept locked away in prison, so to speak, and has not been permitted to function.

Let’s determine to develop our spirit being. Let’s get out of the flesh realm and out of the realm of human reasoning. When we get over into the faith realm and into the spirit realm, great things will happen.
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(This article was adapted from a message Kenneth E. Hagin taught at a Satellite Seminar in 1986 and from his book How You Can Be Led by the Spirit of God.)