We often make reference to the example of Jesus in the gospels and this serves to emphasize many things, but one is particularly important.. A careful (some might say even a cursory) reading of the New Testament will leave no reasonably open reader in any doubt that every Christian should be living a life led by the Holy Spirit. This practice, such a common and explicitly stated part of Jesus’ own life and example, not least in John’s gospel, is nonetheless almost foreign to many parts of the Christian Church today. Our parishes and local churches are most clearly not run on these lines and one never, absolutely never, hears this topic preached on.

Corporately and individually we insist on making our own decisions, even about quite important things in our lives. How many of us, for example, pause before making an important decision to ask for the Spirit’s guidance? Yet Jesus clearly intended the Spirit to be our guide -- our personal guide as well as guide to the Church as a whole. In fact, Jesus intended the Holy Spirit to be our Mentor. He can only do that if we are prepared to allow him to do it.

The Example Of The Healing Ministry

The healing ministry provides a superb example of the way our wider lives ought to operate. In praying for healing we not only have the opportunity to be led and taught by the Spirit, but we shall make very little progress without his being active in our ministrations. Indeed, anyone seeking to develop a healing ministry will find their progress severely retarded unless they work under the explicit guidance of the Holy Spirit -- and precisely because it will then be their progress, not God’s. Yet we can live our whole lives as Christians and ignore this principle and foundational element in Christian discipleship while appearing to be, in some sense, good Christians. But in the healing ministry we shall get nowhere without explicit and overt reliance on the Holy Spirit. On course this all applies strongly when we to certain other charisms. When we begin to understand what this means, it becomes a principle which seeps into the rest of our lives.

Unfortunately the same principle of cause and effect not always operate in our wider lives. We want to grow in God so that , as 2 Peter 1 puts it, we

"may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires".

Yet unless we are prepared to put God’s will first in our lives by actively and daily following the leading of the Spirit, we shall be running round in circles like a cat with its tail on fire!

In his life on earth Jesus participated in the divine nature, but he did not do it by "doing his own thing." He did what his Father wanted him to do, so that at the time of his Transfiguration the Father could say to the three disciples:

"This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!" (Matthew 17. 5).

Jesus’ Father was "well pleased" because Jesus always did the Father’s will — and we can be in little doubt about the role of the Holy Spirit in guiding him in that will. Right at the start of his public ministry, when Jesus had just been baptised by John, we are told something of the way the Spirit directed his life. In Mark 1. 12, immediately after his baptism in the Jordan, it is is a shell of a delay of the literal translation is that the Holy Spirit "thrust him forth into the desert". What a drammatic expression that is — and what a magnificent sense of the power of the Spirit in Jesus’ life!

There are times in our lives when we are brought to a position of having no choice but to turn to the Holy Spirit for his guidance. Often that comes when we are faced with great difficulties. We do not know what to do, or we are unable to move forward. At such times and on such ocassions we have no choice but to wait on the Spirit. We are forced into it by circumstances. Would those situations have arisen if we had been more mindful of the Spirit’s will for us? Or if they would still have occured, would we have the same sense of desperation had we been really led by him? If this is for us a more recollected time, let us consider that the degree of stress in our lives is a direct measure of the extent to which we have not trusted our lives to the leading of the Spirit.