Led By The Spirit
By Andrew Murray

You ask how you may know in how far you are led by the Spirit of God. As every man knows of himself when he is hungry or pleased, so too with regard to the Spirit of God, for the Spirit of God is more distinguishable from all other spirits and tempers than any of your natural affections are from one another. Let me show you this.

“God is unwearied patience, a meekness that cannot be provoked. He is an enduring mercifulness. He is unmixed goodness, universal love. His delight is in the communication of Himself, His own happiness, to everything according to its capacity. He is the good from which nothing but good comes and resisteth all evil only with goodness.”

This is the nature and Spirit of God, and here you have your infallible proof, whether you are moved and led by the Spirit of God. If it be the earnest desire and longing of your heart to be merciful as He is merciful, to be full of His unwearied patience, to dwell in His unalterable meekness; if you long to be like Him in universal impartial love; if you desire to communicate every good to every creature that you are able--you have the utmost certainty that the Spirit of God lives, dwells and governs in you.

Now if you lack any of these tempers, if the whole bent of your heart and mind is not set upon them, all pretenses to an immediate inspiration and continual operation of the Spirit of God in your soul are vague and groundless. Keep within the bounds here set you. Call nothing a proof of the Spirit or work of God in your soul but these tempers and the works which they produce, and then, and not till then, you may safely say with John, “Hereby we know that He abideth in us, by the Spirit which He hath given us” (1 John 3:24).

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Frannie