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21st August 2025
ThursdayReflection
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'John Piper'
Founder & Teacher, desiringGod.org
'How Does God Lead Us
in Daily Decisions?'
Psalm 23 v 1-3
That's such an important question we all must answer for ourselves.
"The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake"
Psalm 23:1-3
I'd never seen "for his namesake" until I went to seminary.
Well, yes, I'd seen it. I'd read the words
"Isn't it true that one of the best things about having two good eyes is the Bible, being able to read the Bible?"
But isn't it true, too, that there is another pair of eyes that God has given us?
The apostle Paul calls them the eyes of the heart, and he prays in Ephesians 1, that the eyes of the heart might be enlightened.
Well, I hadn't seen that phrase there in Psalm 23 as wondrous.
There it was, "he leads me in paths of righteousness for his namesake."
The thought that God might have been causing me to do right ever since I was a little boy for his sake just never dawned on me.
The picture, of course, here is a shepherd leading sheep along with his crook, or maybe with his call.
"The sheep know my name, and they follow me."
But when we get out of the metaphor and into our own experience in our day and ask, "How does God lead in paths of righteousness," we need to ponder a little bit.
Now, in my experience, I have never seen God going before me.
I've never seen a cloud of fire or pillar of cloud like they had in the wilderness.
That's not part of my experience, nor have I ever heard an audible word that I know was God speaking.
God can do that if he wants.
He's just never done it for me, and he doesn't do it for most people most of the time.
The way he leads us is apparently differently.
David would say in Psalm 119:105.
"Thy word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path."
So one answer to the question, "How does God lead his people in paths of righteousness" is: he has revealed a lot about those paths of righteousness.
No matter how wonderful the Bible is, it is not enough by itself.
We make lots of decisions in life which are not prescribed for us in the Bible - hundreds of little decisions every day and some big ones in which we look in the Bible and there are no sentences about that.
How many children to have, where to send your child to school, where to go to work.
Just hundreds of little things that we have to decide every day, and we don't want to bracket those and say, "Well, that's not part of Christianity."
But, reading words on a page doesn't always change attitudes.
Something else has to come into play, Paul said,
"All who are led by the Spirit are the sons of God."
The word and the Spirit together are the leadership that we need.
So the Bible is the input into that new mind, and the Spirit takes the word and begins to shape our thinking, mould our emotions, so that even when there's no explicit command in Scripture for this decision you're facing, you weigh all the alternatives and you're weighing those alternatives 'with the mind of Christ'.
And then when you make the decision, you look back and you don't say, "My, what a smart fellow was I," but rather, you say, "Thank you for your word that informed the principles of my life, and thank you for the Spirit that shaped my emotions.
God then gets the credit for the leadership, which means personally, for me, that I have been driven basically for all of life to meditate day and night on the word and to pray continually that the Holy Spirit would work on me.
You can't over-intellectualize the Bible. You can't over-spiritualize your private experience with God.
It's both/and, not either/or.
It has been in my experience, and I haven't found the two in conflict but tremendous complements for guidance in life.
Un-edited version avaiable, on request
John Piper
is a cofounder of Desiring God, wrote more than 750 articles, and continues to serve as a board member.
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