There's a story Luke tells halfway through the book of Acts that offers us a fascinating example of praying for guidance. It grabs our attention because this is not how we are taught to receive guidance from God.
The story begins with a wink and a nudge.
Certain people came down from Judea to Antioch and were teaching the believers: "Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved."
— Acts 15:1 NIV
"Certain people"—you know the kind of religious individuals Luke's talking about—were teaching new believers that there was an extra step before they could count themselves as true believers: the men needed to be circumcised. And until they did this, they weren't truly saved.
Cut off
In ancient times, people aligned themselves within tribes. These tribes each had their own god and existed for the benefit and protection of their own members.
God challenges this insular view. He chooses Abraham to become the father of a new kind of tribe who would show God's love by existing for the benefit and blessing of outsiders.
Tribes mainly grow through having babies, which occurs when... yep, the birds and the bees. Therefore, circumcision was both a sign of commitment and a reminder of what kind of tribe God was creating.
In Genesis, God tells Abraham:
Any uncircumcised male who does not have the foreskin of his flesh cut off will be cut off from his people, for he has broken my covenant.”
— Genesis 17:14 TPT (emphasis mine)
You've got to love God's sense of humour. That cut off pun is brilliant. But the message this statement contains is serious: to be in a relationship with God, males must be circumcised.
No wonder certain people were announcing to new believers that they needed to be circumcised. They saw it as an essential part of their faith. An irrefutable truth of Scripture that had to be obeyed, regardless of the anxiety and harm it caused.
Their teaching left people questioning their salvation. This was so disruptive that Paul and Barnabas, along with some other believers, were sent to Jerusalem to ask the apostles for their opinion on this matter.
Which brings us to the apostle's sudden need for God's guidance.
A monumental decision
Saying this was an important or difficult decision would underplay what these early church leaders unexpectedly had to decide.
Voting against circumcision would challenge the nature of what it meant to be part of God's covenantal people, forever changing the entry requirements.
Voting against circumcision would change thousands of years of Jewish tradition and risk Jewish animosity towards the Church.
Voting against circumcision would support interpreting the Old Testament in a way that prioritises Jesus over the previous writings.
Decision made
The apostles and elders gathered to ask God for guidance. When they exited their council meeting, they proclaimed new believers do not need to be circumcised to follow Jesus. They wrote this in a letter and sent it with two of their own number, Judas and Silas, to confirm in person what they had decided.
The people read [this letter] and were glad for its encouraging message.
— Acts 15:31 NIV
I’m not sure "glad" adequately explains the sense of joy and relief the Gentile men would have felt when hearing this news. I’d have gone with ecstatic or jubilant or eternally grateful, but Luke is not prone to overstating matters.
Thankfully, Luke doesn't leave us to guess at what the apostles and elders wrote in this letter. In it, we glimpse how the early church leaders decided not to burden Gentile men with circumcision.
The apostles and elders, your brothers,
To the Gentile believers in Antioch, Syria and Cilicia:
Greetings.
We have heard that some went out from us without our authorisation and disturbed you, troubling your minds by what they said. So we all agreed to choose some men and send them to you with our dear friends Barnabas and Paul—men who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore we are sending Judas and Silas to confirm by word of mouth what we are writing. It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements: You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things.
Farewell.
— Acts 15:23-29 NIV
What!?
Did you catch the phrase the apostles and elders used?
It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us...
— Acts 15:28 NIV (emphasis mine)
It seemed like a good idea?
Really?
"Seemed good" feels so imprecise. It sounds like a gut instinct that lacks any kind of certainty. Or an opinion formed without conclusive evidence. Or a choice made that may only be marginally better than choosing the alternative.
It seemed good
If you and I had been one of these leaders, I think we would have wanted a little more assurance we were making the right decision than it just seemed good.
When was the last time someone asked you if the decision you're praying about seems like a good idea?
We're not taught to pray for guidance like this, are we?
Nowadays we agonise over mystery and a lack of certainty. We hate doubt and can get bogged down in anxious thoughts that we may somehow fall out of God’s will or plan for our lives. We're often taught to prioritise facts over feelings.
The "traffic-light" system
Just think about the answers we've become accustomed to listening out for when asking God for his guidance.
No.
Wait.
Yes.
These answers are based on a "traffic-light" model that the Church often teaches to children and teenagers about how to seek God's guidance.
Red is God's no.
Amber is him telling us to wait.
Green is his yes.
When we desire God's guidance, we set aside time to quieten ourselves before him. We might even fast to get rid of any distractions or to overcome other barriers. Then we listen out for one of these three answers.
We make it sound so easy, yet all of us can tell stories about struggling to receive clear direction from God.
Why is this?
Why is it so hard to hear a single word from God?
Is it possible that God hates being limited to one of three words when communicating to us?
Could it be that this "traffic-light" approach is our attempt to create certainty within something that is actually ambiguous and instinctual?
Have we lost the ability to make decisions based only on a seemed good?
How the apostles decided
When you read through the story in Acts 15:1-35, you find the early Church leaders go through the following four steps as they seek to discern God's will about whether circumcision was still part of what he was up to within the world.
- They met together to discuss the issue at length.
- They considered the potential fruit together.
- They quoted from Scripture.
- They listened to testimony about how God was already moving among Gentile believers.
Only then did they make a final decision that seemed good. It's important to note early in this series that this feeling or belief that something seems good doesn't forsake reflection, discussion with others, or reviewing the wisdom of our actions.
It seemed good is still a considered decision rather than a spontaneous one. But it's not a slow, agonising, or paralysing decision. In fact, I'm left amazed at how quickly they decide. Luke gives the impression that these leaders met only once to consider this issue.
In their shoes, how many times would we have wanted to meet? How many prayer meetings would we have added to the church diary in order to seek God for an answer?
I reckon we would have discussed and prayed about this issue multiple times in multiple meeting because something in us wants certainty, especially when rejecting a command of God from Scripture (see Genesis 17:4).
But perhaps certainty isn't on offer.
The apostles and elders certainly don't claim certainty at this point. They don't even say "God says...," but that their decision "seemed good..."
The credit goes to...
Going back to the letter, did you catch who these early Church leaders credited their decision to?
It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us...
— Acts 15:28 NIV (emphasis mine)
The Holy Spirit and us…
The Holy Spirit and the apostles and elders both made this decision.
Together.
James, the brother of Jesus, even speaks up during the council meeting to declare: “It is my judgment…” (v.19 emphasis mine). Human opinion plays a vital role as these leaders seek divine guidance. They trust the Holy Spirit is involved in their discussion and will bring guidance through their own judgments.
Again, this isn't how we are taught to approach praying for guidance, is it?
Think about the phrases we use when we talk about guidance:
“I’m waiting for confirmation this is God’s will before I go for it.”
“It’s not about what I want; it’s about what God wants.”
Which begs the question, have we lost the us part when praying for guidance?
Leaving ourselves out
Our Western church culture teaches us to stop making big decisions for ourselves and rely upon the Holy Spirit to guide our future. The car sticker about Jesus being in the driving seat is a classic expression of this kind of thinking.
Effectively, we learn how to leave ourselves out.
Our dreams.
Our feelings.
Our opinions.
Our gut reactions.
All ignored so we don’t presuppose or pollute what God would guide us towards.
We also hear a lot about how sin gets in the way.
This means we end up trying harder, fasting longer, and generally attempting to be better Christians. Not only does this increased religious activity often fail to bring us joy, it also causes us to downplay our own preferences even more.
Adding to, not replacing
The thing is, the Holy Spirit is not meant to replace us, but to add to us. The Holy Spirit and us. The divine and the human, hand-in-hand.
Without ourselves and our opinions and our preferences in the mix, it's like we're trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle with only half of the pieces available. No wonder we experience a kind of paralysis that can last months or years while we wait upon God to reveal a specific direction of travel.
Without God's confirmation to move on, we stay still.
We remain in our current job.
We stay in our current house.
We put down more roots in our current city.
We re-commit to the church community we already belong to.
We keep insisting on circumcising new believers.
It's not that we think God wants us to keep things the same; it's that we don’t feel empowered to change them.
A season draws to a close, yet there is often a prolonged gap before the next season begins because of our indecision and a perceived lack of divine permission.
Indecisiveness
This indecision or passivity regarding the future isn't just a Christian issue. Family, friends, and colleagues who do not profess to follow Jesus are rarely more assertive. They too, will usually express a sense of not being in the right place but are at a loss to know exactly what it is they could or should do instead.
Have they lost the Holy Spirit part?
Is the future meant to be a shared decision between ourselves and the Holy Spirit?
The BIG decisions
While seeking God's guidance could refer to any number of decisions we make daily, we typically reserve seeking his guidance in prayer to refer to those times when the decisions are BIG.
The destiny moments.
The make or break choices.
The career-defining, life-altering, location-changing appointments.
But Luke does a really interesting thing in this story that we miss in most of our English translations by linking our big decisions with our small decisions.
The Greek word we translate as "seemed good" is edoxen.
In the New Testament, only Luke uses edoxen or edoxe—once at the beginning of his gospel and four times here within Acts 15. The NASB conveniently translates all of Luke's five uses of edoxe/n as "seemed" or "seemed good."
It seemed (edoxe) fitting for me as well, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, to write [it] out for you in consecutive order...
— Luke 1:3 NASB (emphasis mine)
Then it seemed good (edoxe) to the apostles and the elders, with the whole church, to choose men from among them to send to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas...
— Acts 15:22 NASB (emphasis mine)
It seemed good (edoxen) to us, having become of one mind, to select men to send to you with our beloved Barnabas and Paul...
— Acts 15:25 NASB (emphasis mine)
For it seemed good (edoxen) to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these essentials...
— Acts 15:28 NASB (emphasis mine)
[But it seemed good (edoxen) to Silas to remain there].
— Acts 15:34 NASB (emphasis mine)
The small decisions
We may think sending two men with a letter is nowhere near the scale of the decision regarding circumcision, yet Luke uses the same Greek word each time. Is Luke saying all of these decisions were made in the same way?
They obviously discussed some decisions for longer than others, but does Luke’s repetition of edoxen promote the idea that a decision is just a decision?
Are the big choices just larger small choices and not worth becoming paralysed by fear over?
Guidance
The idea of basing our decision-making on what seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us is going to take some getting used to. What responses can we expect from God if he's not guiding us with a yes, no, or wait? And what does a seemed good even sound like?
But we also need to look beyond these immediate questions to ask other, deeper questions. What is God's purpose in guiding us? When can we expect to hear from him? And how can we talk about guidance in a way that works for all people, not just relatively wealthy Westerners?
Using the story of God's call of Abram, we're going to take the next seven weeks to explore how the Bible talks about guidance in a way that's very different to how we currently talk about it.
The need for corporate guidance
I was going to finish by saying it's unlikely you or I will ever be directly involved with making a decision that will impact upon a whole movement, religious tradition, or billions of people the way these early church leaders did that day in Acts 15. But then I thought about the role of women in the Church, the lack of Christian acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community, and even the Church's limited response to climate action.
Maybe we're already involved in such impactful decision-making through what we believe about these three topics, how we currently read the Bible, and what church or denomination we belong to.
Will we ever say, “It seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us that women can lead men within the Church?”
Will we ever say, “It seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us that we not force people to be heterosexual?" Or what about this: “It seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us to not make heterosexuality or celibacy a prerequisite for LGBTQ+ people ministering in our churches?”
Will we ever say, “It seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us that the Church’s mission includes taking a lead in climate action?”
How God guides us may have a great deal of bearing upon some of the most divisive issues being currently debated in our churches. Therefore, it's time we relearned the nature of God's guidance.