Published:  November 12, 2025 – Download PDF:  11.12.25.Guidance From the Holy Spirit is Central to the Gospel

One aspect of the Christian faith is that believers are enabled to hear from the Holy Spirit.  Jesus said the following –

John 10:2–5 (NASB95, emphasis mine)

² “But he who enters by the door is a shepherd of the sheep. ³ “To him the doorkeeper opens, and the sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. ⁴ “When he puts forth all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. ⁵ “A stranger they simply will not follow, but will flee from him, because they do not know the voice of strangers.”

Surrendering to the Lordship of Jesus Christ should bring supernatural enablement made possible by the Holy Spirit to hear His voice.  For believers to follow the Spirit of Christ, they must be able to hear His voice.  This foundational truth is completely lost in many denominations, fellowships, and churches. Typically, new believers are taught to begin reading their Bible, or, in rare cases, are encouraged to study the Bible.  However, studying the Bible without the guidance of the Holy Spirit, who illumined men’s minds to write the scriptures, is a setup for spiritual dryness that can lead one away from Jesus, rather than toward Him.

Jesus taught, “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them and they follow Me” (Jn 10:27 NASB).  In this passage, the word “know” is a specific term that refers to experiential knowledge, rather than simple cognitive, intellectual, or academic understanding.  Christians have been born into the New Covenant of the Spirit, where He begins to write His truth onto their hearts, highlighted by the prophet Jeremiah as the Spirit dictated to him:  “I will put My law within them, and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people” (Jer 31:33).  The good news is that the Lord didn’t stop there.  He goes on to promise, “And they shall not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,” declares the Lord, “for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more” (Jer 31:34).  Salvation opens the door for believers to not only hear the voice of Jesus, but to experience Him who is the truth, i.e., they can now encounter Him.

The Grave Error in the Church

Having lost this foundational teaching concerning the New Covenant of the Spirit, the Church has decided that it knows best what it should do and how it should conduct ministry to reach the world for Christ.  Church leaders and the many Christians who follow their teachings no longer hear the voice of the Spirit, but have substituted the teachings of men, which declare that the Spirit no longer speaks today.  This is the strategy of Satan, who has deceived the Church out of its inheritance based upon the New Covenant ratified in the blood of Jesus Christ.

Jesus told his disciples that when He returned to His Father, He would not leave them as orphans:

John 14:16–18 (NASB95)

¹⁶ “I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever; ¹⁷ that is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you. ¹⁸ “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.

So, the Holy Spirit not only leads the Christian into all truth, which includes understanding the Bible – “He will teach you all things” (Jn 14:26d, emphasis mine) – but He is also the Spirit of truth (Jn 14:16-17).  Therefore, the believer’s ongoing relationship with the Holy Spirit is essential to following Christ and walking in the truth (2 Jn 4; 3 Jn 3-4; cf. 2 Cor 4:2; Gal 2:14; I Jn 1:6), which provides the means for their sanctification whereby they become devoted to God and distinct from the world in moral purity (Jn 17:17-19).  Church leaders who have abandoned this foundational tenet of the Gospel have stifled, if not completely cut off, the life of the Spirit in believers, causing many to walk in sin and worldliness who are unable to please God.

This is the root as to why the Spirit has said to me, “None are as guilty as My Church.”  The Church has, in many ways, cut itself off from the Spirit of Christ, and thereby Jesus, who is our Vine.  Jesus was clear in His warning, “apart from Me you can do nothing” (Jn 15:5).  However, the Church has learned to do everything without the Holy Spirit; they do not hear His voice, they do not listen, and if they do hear His voice, they choose to reject His commands.  Having done so, they are no longer qualified as part of His Church, but have become temples of idols, adrift in their rebellion, practicing rebellion and lawlessness, and risk hearing the Lord say, “Depart from Me, I never knew you” (Mt 7:23, 25:41; Lk 13:23-27).  This is why judgment is coming to the Church.

Practical Implications for Ministry

Jesus spoke of His own ministry, “…we speak that which we know, and bear witness of that which we have seen; and you do not receive our witness” (Jn 3:11).  The implication is that the Holy Spirit revealed to Jesus what He was to preach, which John the Baptist confirmed saying, “What He has seen and heard, of that He bears witness; and no man receives His witness” (Jn 3:32).  Jesus did not preach from his mind nor intellectual understanding.  He preached what the Spirit revealed to Him.

Even God’s own Son limited Himself in obedience to the Father, saying the following:

John 5:19–21 (NASB95 emphasis mine)

¹⁹ Therefore Jesus answered and was saying to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in like manner. ²⁰ “For the Father loves the Son, and shows Him all things that He Himself is doing; and the Father will show Him greater works than these, so that you will marvel. ²¹ “For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son also gives life to whom He wishes.

This critical and foundational teaching is repeated in John 5:30, 7:16, 8:26, 28 & 42 where Jesus declared that He did nothing on His own initiative during His earthly ministry.  This concept is completely lost on many church leaders and Christians, resulting in fruitless “ministries” that are nothing more than vain efforts where everyone does what is right in their own eyes (Deut 12:8-9; Judges 17:6, 21:25).

Moses admonished the Hebrews that they must follow the Spirit of God and not “do what we are doing today, every man doing what is right in his own eyes” (Deut 12:8-9), because he knew that they would not be able to take the promised land without the help of the Lord.  It was the Lord who would fight with them if they walked in obedience to His plan.  There was no room for their plans.  The Lord’s ways are far above our ways (Is 55:8-9); therefore, they had to receive revelation through Moses and later Joshua to see victory.  When they stopped following the Lord’s instructions and no longer listened to His voice, they could no longer take territory, and this is precisely what has happened to the Church in our day.

Moses received instructions from the Lord on a daily basis because the ministry the Lord had given to him required precise obedience.  Joshua would not have realized victories at Jericho or Ai without the Lord’s battle plan.

Luke writes about Paul during his second missionary journey, when he attempted to enter Asia and Bithynia, but the Spirit would not permit him to enter (Acts 16:6-7).  How could that be, in that Jesus commanded us to go into all the world and preach the Gospel, heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out demons, and baptize new believers (Mt 10:7-8, 28:19-20; Mk 16:15-18; Acts 1:8)?!  Here lies the fundamental flaw in current Christian thought.  The Church now believes it can do whatever it wants to win the world to Christ, forgetting that apart from Christ and His Spirit, it can do NOTHING!  Which is to say, it should do nothing on its own initiative, which is the model Jesus demonstrated to us.  If it was good enough for Jesus during His earthly ministry, it should be good enough for His Church, that means you and me.

And here we see Paul, along with the other members of his team, being thwarted from what the Holy Spirit called him to do (Acts 13:1-4), or was he?  Guidance from the Holy Spirit includes Him saying, “No, that is not what I want you to do.”  And, in Paul’s case, direction as to where he was being called to preach during this particular mission was not in either of the regions he had planned to enter.  The Spirit revealed in a dream that he was called to preach in Macedonia (Acts 16:9-15).  The remarkable thing is that Paul would find himself preaching to a woman named Lydia in Phillipi, who was originally from Thyatira, which was a principal city in Asia.  How ironic?  Moreover, a church would ultimately be established in Thyatira, one of the seven churches to which John’s letter was addressed, as recorded in the Book of Revelation, and still speaks to us today, if we have ears to hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches.  No one saw that coming, other than the Lord whose ways are higher than our ways.

The Church Must Repent 

We must return to the Lord and follow the guidance of His Holy Spirit.  The wisdom of man and of this age must be repudiated if we are to walk in obedience to Christ and see His work accomplished in and through us (cf. I Cor 1:19, 2:6-8, 3:18-20).  The Spirit alone knows the thoughts of God and what His plan is.  The Spirit of Christ testifies that the time of judgment is upon us, and that great darkness is about to come to the earth.  Because of this, we must stay close to Jesus, who is the Light (Jn 1:4, 8:12, 9:5, 12:46), and implement His strategy by doing nothing on our own initiative, thereby dying to our will and our timing.  We must pray for the revelation that comes by His Spirit, which Paul prayed for the church at Ephesus (Eph 1:15-23), and walk with the Spirit on His path of Glory.

This is the message of the Spirit to the churches, to you and me.  We must heed the voice of the Spirit of God and no longer walk in our ways, doing our own thing, but instead we must submit ourselves to Him who knows the way and the future.  His directive for us is to seek and wait for revelation from Him, and then to give Him room (Jos 3:2-5) as we follow.  The Spirit has the responsibility to evangelize the world for Christ, and He will accomplish His mission through us, if and only if we choose to listen to His voice and walk in obedience to Him and His word.  There is no plan B.

Mark C. Biteler