The difference between doing something for God and doing something because God has led us to do it...

“For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.” — Romans 8:14

From the day I was saved in 1984, for nearly thirty years I was constantly busy in ministry, spinning like a top.

During those years, I went through travel, wandering, hunger, thirst, need, hardship, opposition, rejection, exclusion, loss, and many other difficult experiences.

The needs of God’s people became my needs. Their education, medical care, marriages, places to stay, and many other matters became responsibilities that I gladly took upon myself.

I am not recalling these things now to make a list of what I suffered or the sacrifices I made.

There was a time when I thought, God’s people are my life. They are everything to me. They are my family.

I put God’s people first and pushed my own family into the background. At the time, I saw it as a sacrifice. But I did not see the price my family was paying for it.

While my children were growing up, I failed to give them the time, attention, and presence that I should have given them as a father. It was not because I did not love them. I believed that living for God and for God’s people was something higher.

The wound of that failure remains even today. In time, a wound may heal—but perhaps the scar remains for a lifetime.

On the other hand, those whom I once regarded as my life, my family, my everything—those for whom I pushed my own family into the background, those whom I received and nurtured in Christ—not one of them is in contact with me today.

I pushed my family into the background. I put God’s people first. Today, having lost both, I stand in the midst of this bitter reality.

I am not writing this to blame anyone. I cannot blame my children. Neither can I blame God’s people.

I am writing this to look back at myself.

For the past ten years, I have been looking back over my life. What makes me think now is not how much I did or how much I endured.

What made me do what I did?

Who was leading me?

That is the question.

“For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God” (Romans 8:14).

I have read this verse before. I have even quoted it in sermons at times. But now this verse asks me a different question.

The question is not whether what I did was good or bad.

The question is not whether it was right or wrong.

The question is not whether it resulted in gain or loss.

The question is whether the Spirit of God led me to do it.

Something may be good. It may even be right. Others may benefit from it. Doing it may bring loss to me. I may have paid a great price for it.

All of these things may be true, but none of them answers the question: Did God lead me to do it?

If I were asked today to do many of the things I did during those thirty years, I would hesitate.

I am not saying that I would refuse to do them.

But I would not immediately rush into them as I once did.

Because now a question would arise within me:

“Is God leading me to do this?”

A person’s need may be genuine. I may have the means to meet that need. It may be a good thing to do. I may even pay a great price to do it.

But even when all these things are put together, do they prove that God led me to do it?

I do not know whether I asked that question often enough in those days.

I am blind. Therefore, I can be rash.

My problem was not merely that I did not know. My problem was that even when I did not know, I acted without hesitation.

If I knew that something was good, that was enough. If I saw a need, that was enough. If I saw someone suffering, that was enough. If I knew that I could do something about it, that was enough.

I would jump in.

The intention may have been good. The sacrifice may have been genuine. The price I paid may have been great.

But good intentions, genuine sacrifice, and great personal loss can never take the place of God’s leading.

The lives of God’s children should not be determined merely by calculations of good and evil, right and wrong, gain and loss.

What must determine our lives is God’s leading.

There is something else I have been thinking about during the past few years.

We may think that the service we render to God and to people is unmixed, untainted, and pure, with no hidden motives beneath it.

Perhaps I thought so too.

But our service will be tested by fire.

The circumstances of life will test it. Failure will test it. Rejection will test it. Exclusion will test it. Not receiving the results we expected will test it.

And then some things that were hidden within us may begin to come to the surface.

Do I want influence?

Do I want a good reputation?

Do I want recognition?

Do I want status?

Do I want personal gain?

Do I want success?

I may be absolutely convinced that none of these things is in me. But what happens when I am disregarded? When I am rejected? When I am forgotten? When I am excluded?

What happens when no one remembers what I did?

When the very people for whom I spent myself walk away from me?

When the service I thought I was rendering to God and to people comes to an end?

It is then that the cross begins to expose our hidden motives.

Not only what we did, but why we did it begins to come into the light.

Perhaps it is only after losing our ministry that we begin to discover what that ministry really meant to us.

Perhaps it is only after being forgotten by people that we begin to discover whether there was a desire within us to be remembered by them.

Perhaps it is only after losing our influence that we begin to discover how important influence had become to us.

Perhaps it is only when success disappears that we begin to discover how much we may have loved success more than the glory of God.

In writing these things, I am not saying that all my thirty years of ministry were wrong.

There was genuine love in it. There was genuine sacrifice. There was genuine loss.

But the question I ask today is different.

How much of it was the definite leading of God?

How much of it was my own zeal?

How much came from my love for people?

How much came from my natural temperament?

How much came from motives hidden even from myself?

I do not know.

I am only now beginning to learn that there may be a difference between doing something for God and doing something because God has led me to do it.

That is why I no longer want to run as quickly as I once did.

I want the motive of my life to be this: to live and act according to God’s definite leading, by God’s abundant resources, and for God’s glory.

But even here, I must be careful.

I cannot look back at the past and simply say, “I did not know then; now I know.”

If I say that, I may fall into yet another blind spot.

That is why the question does not end with:

“Who led me?”

There is another question I must continue to ask myself even today:

“Who is leading me now?”