Perfect Guide and Guidance

In his book Perfect Everything J. Rufus Moseley beautifully explains how we can rely on our Perfect Guide, the Lord Jesus:

"Jesus is our perfect guide and guidance. His guidance is clear to the degree of our union with Him, to the measure of our dedication to do His will, to obey His Spirit and to walk according to His light and teaching. To will to do His will enables us to know His will.

"Where there is uncertainty as to your guidance turn to the Guide, desiring and asking for His highest will and wisdom for what is best for Him and for all. As you do this, you will find He never fails to guide you aright. The trouble is not with His guidance but with our unwillingness to obey. To use a happy phrasing of Tennyson, 'He guides in various ways, lest one good custom should corrupt the world.'

"Where the need is extreme He intervenes directly and tells exactly what to do, as He did in the case of Saul of Tarsus, Sundar Singh, 'Sammy Morris' and a blessed company of others. He has even intervened directly for me with such certainty and authority at times that there was nothing left for me but to obey. It would have been tragic to have disobeyed.

"He is always guiding by His light of love, conscience and reason that lights every life coming into the world. Where there is no other guidance that we are aware of, if we follow His light within, if we do the most sensible and most loving thing open to us, we find we have done His will.

"When we yield to temptation we of course are not guided by Him, nor by our best selves, nor by His Spirit, nor by His teaching, nor by the accumulated wisdom of the race, but by desire, by the herd instinct or by the evil one. Even here He is always doing His best to help us to repent and return, and to turn our disobedience to good. He is always turning to all possible good everything that is turned over to Him.

"In union with Him, guidance is not only clear but supernaturally natural and spontaneous. We do His will unconsciously for the most part and see later how wisely and well we have been guided. In this union with Him we are aware that everything is working together for good. We meet the people we need to meet; we find the right books when we are ready for them, and make all our contacts at the right time in the right way. If we find doors closing to us, we have the assurance it is because better doors are ready to open.

"Confusion and uncertainty come because we have yielded to the temptation to worry instead of to pray, and to try to solve our problems and to improve our condition while away from home. When we repent and return, the guidance is clear again. Don't try to make decisions away from home, in moods of fear and discouragement. The Prodigal Son wisely came to himself and made a 'bee line' for home.

"The happiest type of guidance comes when we choose and invite Him to write His law in our hearts and upon our minds, and to make us happily willing to do His will. The Old Covenant failed because it sought to get obedience to commandments coming from without, before there was a love to obey them within. The New Covenant succeeds because in the new birth, and in the new life given from Above we love to do what we should do. Here every one delights in doing the very thing he is created to do and he will do it better than it has ever been done before.

"Everyone is a genius when he finds his place and work in the will and wisdom of God. Here he will delight so greatly in doing his work that he would gladly pay for the privilege of doing it and yet does it so well that he cannot escape the best pay of all. He has something so good to communicate and to do, it is woe be unto him if he does not do it and communicate it.

"In the deepest union, the Father seeks to please the Son and the Son seeks to please the Father. In like manner the begotten and the adopted sons of the Son will like best of all what the Son chooses for them, for He chooses always what they really want even if He opposed what for a time they thought they wanted.

"Moreover as much as we like getting what we ask for if we are wise enough to ask aright, it is what comes to us as spontaneous gifts of love that pleases us best of all. The Prodigal Son only asked for the status of a servant. He was received as a son and given the best of everything. So the happiest relationship between Jesus and us and with one another and will all living things is that of spontaneous love.

"It is happier to give and receive what is not promised than what is promised. God of course will do all that He has promised. He is duty bound to do this much. I have the feeling that He will do far more and better. Then His joy will be full.

"Duty apart from love does not satisfy God nor us. Still love fulfills duty which has only been a school master to bring us to spontaneous and joyous love.

"Jesus achieved so much maturity in the early church that by the time of the first church council, as reported in Acts 15, the disciples found what seemed good to the Holy Spirit seemed good to them, and what seemed good to them seemed good to the Holy Spirit. This was high achievement both for Him and them. The disciples were on the way to the certainty Jesus had that because He pleased the Father, the Father was always with Him and always guiding Him aright.

"Jesus and the Father were so much one, even when the Father seemed to withdraw and leave Jesus to make the most difficult choice of all as His own choice, it was also the highest choice of the Father. They were one in choosing. This is the highest achievement; in the field of guidance when we do His will we are doing our will and when we do our will we are also doing His will. This union will make us as free as God and yet utterly happy that we are nothing apart from Him. Because Jesus did the highest of all when seemingly left alone makes what He did all the more glorious.

"It is what our children do when they are not aware that we are around that best reveals the children. If they do as well or better when we seem to be absent that when we are known to be present our delight in them is all the greater.

"Satan and those under his influence force their wills with violence. Jesus sets us free to choose, and by choosing the highest we become free indeed, free with His own freedom, free with the freedom of God.

"God is looking after us and guiding us far better and wiser than we are aware. His love, guidance, care and provision, even for the least of His creatures, is so amazing that it should bring us to faith and love and worship.

"The birds go South with the weather and they move with the wisdom that could only be from Him. Even in the cells of our body, His presence and almost unbelievable wisdom is manifest.

"The highest guidance, as we have seen, is the guidance which comes through a happy union of our spirits, minds and wills with His. Here when we best please ourselves we best please Him, and when we best please Him, we best please ourselves.

"On the way to this high and happy guidance He is caring for us and guiding us even better than He is the birds, and far better than the best of fathers and mothers care for their children. He is educating us and guiding us, not only directly which is His best of all for us, but He is also educating and guiding us through the total of our experience, and through the best experience He has attained through all others.

"The reason we prize our Bibles so highly is that they record so much of the best that He has given and achieved in the past.

"No experience is in vain. If we have gone the wrong road, we find it out not only for ourselves but also for others and we can make it easier and happier for them and for all who come after us. If there could be a single experience in the universe that did not have a positive or negative value, there would be that much irrationality in the universe, that much which was out of the hands of God.

"In our infancy, we, of course, know very little about how He has planned, provided and is caring for us. In full maturity, we shall fully understand. All the way from conception to birth and from birth to maturity, He is working for us within and from without and from above, and enlisting all the help He can get.

"In the Old Covenant as we have seen, He guided largely from without. In the New, He achieves largely by causing us to love as He loves and to choose happily as He chooses. In this immediate guidance, it is easiest for Him to guide the least, and most difficult for Him to guide those who feel themselves to be the greatest.

"He uses the meek and the lowly and the loving as His best bait. You can catch big fish with little fish, but not little fish with big fish.

"In Jesus everything is reversed; the last becomes first and the first, last. Even His Cross for us is a Cross of life and honor and bliss and glory in its inner aspect of union with Him. His death is our life.

"The Cross as a way of life, becomes the high privilege to love as He loved and loves, to meet all evil with good, to help finish out that which is lacking in His sufferings, to bring the unloving to love.

"While the whole universe teaches what Jesus lived and taught, it is through union with Him and guidance by Him that we receive all that He is and has attained without having to go the slow and painful way of finding out through personal experience.

"By the law of marriage, by His unspeakable grace, there is for all a new birth and a new life in Him; by His presence and help and guidance we can quickly grow up in Him and become partners with Him in making available all that He is and has for all of us.

"While we are taught by the whole of our experience and the race's experience, there is available for us through the Holy Spirit the perfect Teacher and the perfect Helper. We do not have to go the long and hard way. The best of all is knocking to come within us so that we can be perfectly taught by Him within, as well as perfectly guided and taught from above.

"Those who are taught and led even by the best disciples of His, will be better taught and led by Him. The church is divided and largely impotent because we have not availed ourselves of our privilege of being taught and led directly by Him and by His Spirit. When we are all taught and guided by Him, we will be one. As long as we look to an imperfect leadership we will be weak and divided. As had been well said, we are not nearly so much in need of leaders as we are of followers of The Leader. A disciple of a disciple is never free and vital as is an immediate disciple, and we are not a true disciple of a disciple of His until we , like the disciple, have become an immediate disciple.

"There is no limit to the way He teaches. As we saw in a previous chapter, He will sometimes let us have what we think we want, to teach us that we do not want it. He gives us much rope but not enough to hang ourselves. When the Prodigal Son leaves home, He furnishes the health and the means for the journey, but does not furnish enough so that he can remain away long without returning Home.

"If necessary, He will perform all kinds of miracles in our behalf, not enough to make us lazy but enough to deliver us.

"Socrates found he was given a free course unless he was about to make a mistake, and then he was warned. Emerson found when he proposed a journey of an enterprise and too many obstacles were encountered that the obstacles were God's way of teaching him that he was on the wrong path. Emerson said he did not call these hindrances laws or commandments, but grains of mustard seed, as it were, but he 'obeyed them as against the combined opinion of mankind.'

"As Stanley Jones insists, Jesus led His disciples on so they were guided by inspired insight. He wants to lead us all so we will be, too, but on the way His resources of checking us as well as leading us on are limitless. He has taught me things in dreams that I was too dull to see in my waking moments. Once He gave me a dream to enable me to help a friend in great distress, and gave the interpretation of the dream in the dream itself. When I have written letters it would have been better not to have written I have been warned in dreams in time to wire the postmasters for their return. Once when I was about to do an exceptionally foolish thing that would have been hard for another as well as myself, a friend who saw the folly appeared to me in a dream as a flaming angel warning me not to do it, and afterwards I had no desire to do it.

"His signals are everywhere. If we are on the right road witnesses on the right hand and on the left and in front of us and behind us are telling us so. A sure witness that we are going right is the witness of His peace and assurance; a sure witness that we are missing the highest is disturbance and confusion.

"As Evelyn Underhill puts it, 'Look for the signals of God.' They are all around you whether you see them or not. If you are too blind to see them always do the most loving and Christ-like thing that you can conceive of and that the situation admits of and you will find later that you have done the will of God and that you have pleased yourself as well as Him.

"Another good test for any motive, desire, intention or act is how it would look at the Judgment Day. As a rule the things we ourselves are ashamed of so that we want to hide them cannot even stand the judgment day of our souls. James of Harvard spoke of that appeal of the soul to the final tribunal that fully understands.

"Of course we are guided not to do the things that are against the highest good of everyone else as well as ourselves, not to indulge our appetites when they are against the health of the soul, and the mind, and the body, not even to attempt to get 'the sensuous sweet' and 'escape the sensuous bitter.' Not to try to cheat life by using any function contrary to its natural and God appointed use.

"All life is a warning against folly and a call to wisdom and love. Charles Beard, the enlightened historian, thus summarizes history: 'The mills of the gods grind slowly but they grind exceedingly fine; whom the gods would destroy they first make mad; the bee has to fertilize the flower that it robs; when the night gets dark enough the stars come out.'

"Jesus is made unto us perfect wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:30) and guides us by this wisdom, a wisdom that is 'pure, peaceful, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits' (James 3:17).

"He guides by inspired common sense, and sometimes by a sense of humor.

"He leads by circumstances. He leads by closing doors as well as by opening doors. He leads us by our failures as well as our successes. In fact He is seeking to teach us by all experiences as well as to teach us by the best experience.

"Highest of all, He is teaching us by Himself and by His Spirit.

"Sometimes He breaks through where the whole teaching and guidance is of Him. He took the lips of the prophets and spoke things that were wholly of Him and not even colored by them. He at times speaks through His children in the pure language of heaven. At other times the Light is from Him but much obscured by us.

"He gives us only the pure Water of Life but when we bring our vessels to the fountain the water takes the form of the vessel; and until the vessels are made wholly clean it may appear the dirt that the pure water is washing away is of the water rather than of the vessel. Happily when the water is allowed to flow long enough the vessels are all made clean and we have the wonder of the perfect water assuming the form of many vessels.

"In a similar way, the light shines in darkness but remains pure light. Truth in the midst of error remains Truth. Good in the midst of evil remains Good. Life in the midst of death remains Life, and, by remaining Life, conquers death. Love in the midst of hate remains Love and has no techniques but Love. The imperfect has to be reconciled to Perfection and put on Perfection. With God there is no mixture, but He brings out of the mixed and the messed the Pure and the Perfect.

"Jesus Christ as God-with-us is Love and all the more loving because of our need and lack of love. He guides all the more perfectly because of our great need of guidance.

"In my own experience He has been with me at every step of the way, though I have not always been aware of His presence and that the One who was always leading me was He. When I have asked His help in buying a mule that would be in the interest of universal benefit the mule that came was clearly a better selection than I could have made. He has guided me well even when I was not easy to lead. While I have had few business interests I have had the clearest kind of guidance concerning them. He has led me into a type of work that fits me best of all. He has given me a work that is not in competition with anybody else's work. He has led me to help all of the existing groups that I can without starting a new one. I have no hard luck stories to tell. Everything that I know of Jesus is unspeakably good. All of His leadings are precisely what I would have chosen for myself, had I had intelligence enough to have made the choice.

"I find in Him everything is always getting better and better, and the whole wisdom of life is to be Jesus centered, love radiating, happy on the Way and dedicated to His best for me and for all. There is nothing lacking in His Guidance. It is Perfect."