Feeling Led

One of the issues involved in finding God's will is how far we can trust our feelings and impressions. I know that for myself there have been times when I very clearly felt I was being led by God in a certain direction. But there have been other times when I thought I was being led by God, and in retrospect I was clearly wrong. There have been still others where I am still scratching my head, wondering what was really going on. The thing we need to do is not to trust our feelings (or our intellect or our common sense), but to trust God (Proverbs 3:5,6; Psalms 37:3-6; Isaiah 40:31). It is easy to start trusting in ourselves rather than God. One problem comes when we start to trust in anything as a magic formula to find God's will. We need to be willing to test things to determine whether they are from God (1 Thessalonians 5:21; 1 John 4:1; Acts 17:11). We do this through prayer (Philippians 4:6,7; Ephesians 6:18; Matthew 7:7-11), knowing God (Jeremiah 9:23,24; Ephesians 3:18,19; Philippians 3:7-9), and knowing His Word (Colossians 3:16; Psalms 19:7-14; 2 Timothy 3:16,17). God can lead us using anything He wants to use. But we need to use care and experience to learn to identify His leading in our lives.