A Life That Can Be Led

If you’ve ever said “God, lead me” while quietly hoping He won’t change your plans, this message is for you. We sit with two anchoring Scriptures Acts 20:22–24 and John 10:27 and ask a single, uncomfortable question: can my life actually be led?

We talk about the difference between living reactively and living led. Reactive living lets pressure, fear, convenience, and the next open door make our decisions, and then we ask God to bless whatever we picked. Along the way, we tell a real story from the journey of launching and relocating Celebrate Recovery: one leader responds with hesitation, another responds with readiness, and the contrast exposes how easily “I’ll pray about it” can become a mask for resistance.

From there we get practical about hearing God’s voice. Stillness is not optional, because you can’t follow a Shepherd you never slow down to listen to. We dig into why surrender comes before vision, why obedience matters more than endless evaluating, and why Jesus being Lord confronts our need to control timing, cost, and outcomes. If you want clarity about purpose, calling, and direction, we point to the overlooked pathway: routine Scripture, quiet prayer, and quick obedience in the small things.

We close with a legacy check: do your values and your service line up with what you hope people will say at your funeral? If not, it’s time to realign. Subscribe for more messages on spiritual formation and discipleship, share this with a friend who feels stuck, and leave a review so more people can find it. What’s one area where you know you need to stop delaying and start following?

Transcript

Formation Over Inspiration

A Ministry Move And Two Responses

Reactive Living Versus Being Led

Stillness That Helps You Hear

The Control We Refuse To Surrender

Trusting Jesus As Lord

Why Vision Starts With Following

Shaped By Culture Or Shaped By Christ

Routine Obedience And Close Relationship

The Defining Moment Is Yes

Practical Next Steps For This Week

Values Service And Your Legacy

Closing Prayer For Courage

SPEAKER_00 0:01

I have both of them on the screen for you. The first one is Acts 20, 22 through 24. This is Paul speaking. And see, now I go bound in the spirit to Jerusalem, not knowing the things that will happen to me there. Except that the Holy Spirit testifies in every city, saying that chains and tribulations await me. But none of these things move me, nor do I count my life dear to myself, so that I may finish my race with joy, and the ministry which I receive from the Lord Jesus to testify to the gospel of the grace of God. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. This is the word of God for the people of God. Amen. May God add his blessing to the reading of his word. You may be seated. This message is a life that can be led right from that verse. The series Lead Your Life is actually focused on becoming the kind of person who can be led by Jesus into a life of purpose, endurance, and mission. Before your vision is clarified, which is what we're doing with the questions, it must be formed. Before mission is embraced, surrender must take place. This journey moves us from learning to follow to receiving a vision God has for us, to being shaped by it, to ultimately knowing how to live that out. It's not about inspiration. That's not what I'm about either. It's about formation and transformation by God. It's not about ideas, something that you think about, but about a life that refuses to stop where Jesus is leading you. Lead your life implies that you take responsibility for the choices and direction your life heads as you follow Jesus. So you must invest in, engage with Him while aligning yourself to Him. And we talked about alignment for the first several messages this year. So we don't sit around and wait for something to happen passively, but we actively engage in the process of learning what Jesus is asking of us and of us individually. This entails an entire switch in mindset and thinking for some of us. For others, it's a confirmation of the value of having goals and taking action. In 2021, to celebrate recovery, Christine and I have been leading for many years was going through a huge transformation. 2020 stopped the face-to-face meetings at Face Center pretty abruptly. And we went to online CR for a while. We ended the year at Heartland Church and looking for a place to welcome us for 2021 because nobody was opening up. Well, a place called Fremont Baptist Church got a hold of us in November of 20 and said, we'd love to have you, and you can come see the facility and be a part of that. So my wife and I got that information as we were coming back from Mussel Shoals, Alabama, and we said, we want to go see it. And so we looked, and in 2021, we went to Fremont Baptist Church. If you know where it is, you also know it's mostly not there. It got hit by a tornado a year after we left Fremont. While we were there, people were saying this is too far away from Paducah, it's too much of a drive. And so during 2021, we began to look for other locations. We were not going to go back to Faith Center, we were not going to go back to Heartland. So I contacted pastor friends. We began to look at different churches in the area to see where God wanted us to be. During that process at one particular church, it seemed to be in a decent location. The facility looked pretty good, and the pastor happened to be in that day. So I went to him and I talked about what we are visioning for 2022. And this was mid-year of 21 when I went to see him. And I talked about the benefits of the program, how it changes lives, creates leaders in the church, and builds the local church up and establishes more leadership there. And he said, That sounds really good. I said, Yeah, and we're thinking about uh coming back to Paducah in 2022. It's like we got a ready-made ministry, lots of people coming, all you have to do is open the space. And this is what he said. I'll pray about it. And I said, Okay, thank you. Our CR did not relocate there. Later, I went to a church where the pastor said, This is great. You're gonna help people? Can you start next week? We want you here. We're ready. And I said, Don't you got to meet with people? And he said, I'm gonna tell the Board of Trustees we're doing this. And I said, Okay. And he said, I'm gonna call them this week. And the church got excited. We are located there to this day at Concord United Methodist Church, and the pastor was Dean Emerson, a man who has a heart for people who are broken. And you could tell. Do you notice the difference between the two responses? A ready-made ministry ready to plop down and build a church, and a guy going, you know, I've got to pray about that. Another guy going, When can you start? We're ready now. There's a difference, isn't there? There's a difference between knowing that God is using you for a great purpose and being hesitant in the face of God's calling. So the same way, there's a difference between living a life and living a life that is led. Most people live reactive kinds of lives. They respond to what's in front of them, what's around them, and they adjust. They adjust to pressure, they make decisions that are based on an opportunity, an emotion, a pressure that's real or unreal, or the urgency of a situation. So the things that come along are the things that are guiding their decisions. But following Jesus was never meant to be reactive. It was meant to be led. Jesus did not say, My sheep figure it out. What he said, they follow me. My sheep hear my voice and clearly understand what God is asking, and they follow. It sounds simple, doesn't it? Just listen and follow. Kind of like follow the leader until you try to live it. Then all of a sudden it gets like, wait, how do I do this? What's next? How do I make that happen? And we get bogged down in trying to figure it out. But hearing his voice requires something, and the reason why I have trouble is because hearing his voice requires something most people resist, and that's stillness. Getting quiet before God and giving him your full attention. And in that moment, surrendering all your thoughts and your agendas over to him to see what he is doing and then trusting his response. Following him requires something even deeper than just that, though. It's letting go of the right to lead yourself. You say, wait a minute, didn't you just say take responsibility for your life? I did say that, but you notice what I put at the end of that is in our response to the choices and calling of Christ, we take responsibility for how we react to that. How we respond to Jesus. Here's the tension that we live in. This is the dynamic we face. We want God to guide us. God lead us, Savior like us, shepherd lead us. God will take care of us. We like all that. But we still want to control where we're gonna go, what we're gonna do. We like the control. And we want clarity from God without having to surrender. And we want direction from God without disruption. Make it fit my plans, God. But that isn't how Jesus leads. Do you find yourself resistant in any point in your life to authority, or do you distrust leadership figures? A lot of people do. So if you do, you're not alone. Many people say they are following Jesus. But functionally, here's what they're really following. They're following comfort or their preference or they're following fear or the opportunity that lays in front of them. And then they ask God to bless it. God, here's what I want to do now, bless it. We don't always reject God's leadership. We redefine it. We say, I'm praying about it. I'm praying about it. Listen, if God's put an opportunity in front of you, he's asking you to do it, not pray about it. But we say, I'm praying about it when we've already decided, or God's already decided it's a good thing. But we just haven't surrendered to what he asks. Or we say, I have a peace about it when we've chosen the easier path rather than the hard one. Or we say, well, God is opening doors when we're just walking through whatever's available in front of us, rather than searching for a different path. But Jesus never said, the verse is up there still, it does not say, my sheep evaluate all options and choose wisely. He doesn't put pros, cons, which one's better, which one's got the best choice here, and go, and then pick from that. He doesn't do that. That's not how he chooses. He said, My sheep hear my voice, and they follow me. There's no inner dialogue about is this a good idea? Is this how I'm supposed to do it? You know, it's I hear it, I follow. Do you use some of those excuses or reasons that I've just shared? I'm praying about it. I don't have peace about it. You know, God will open doors, and if he doesn't open a door, he'll open a window. You ever heard that one? We use all those things without ever knowing exactly what God's trying to do. Wouldn't you like to know with extreme clarity where God is leading your life? That you can partner with him in that and lead your life in that direction with him? This is what we're talking about. And when it happens, it transforms the way you live your day-to-day life. It opens up the power of God to what he's asking you to do. So why is it so hard for us to be led? Why is it so difficult? I think it's because being asked to be led confronts something in us, and that's our desire to control. To have a say in how things go. We don't mind Jesus being our Savior. We praise Him for the redemption, for the healing, the rejoicing, the forgiveness of sin, but we struggle with Him being Lord of it all. Because Lord means He decides, He directs, He leads, and we follow. I don't know if I'm a good follower. I like to take charge. Jesus is a take kind of charge, kind of Lord. And it means if he's going to do all that, where he leads may not make sense to us. We may not understand it. And what he asks may actually cost us something. And the timing may not align with our plans or our expectations of our life. You might have to be like me and say, Lord, I usually cruise then. You can give up a cruise, it costs about the same as a mission trip. Well, Lord, I don't know. My wife won't agree. See all the excuses I threw out there before he finally got me to go, whatever you say, you're the boss. But I was throwing it on my wife. My wife won't let me. Guess what? My wife's going this time. So that's different, isn't it? It isn't she didn't let me, she encouraged it and said, you need to. How often do we try to find another way out of what God's calling us into? I tried several, threw all these caveats out there last year, and God answered every single one of them. And he answered them word for word for the phrase I asked him to use. So being led actually requires a trust that some of us are still learning, and we trust without full explanation of what it's about. Well, God, you're giving me a vague idea. I have something there you want me to do. I'm going to have to trust you to take me there, but I don't know what it is, and I'm a little scared. And we kind of get bogged down, don't we? Some of us are not good at this trust thing and going where God says with a little bit of blind faith, and we're hesitant even to learn how to change to go ahead anyway. Is that you? I guarantee there's some of that in all of us somewhere hiding. But the beg the vision that God has begins at a certain spot. And before you can talk about vision, before we talk about God's call on our life, before we talk about anything God might do through our lives, we have to settle this one thing. Can your life actually be led? Can your life be led? Will you allow Jesus to lead you? Because if if your life can't be led, if you're not willing, it can't carry a vision that belongs to him. It'll be your definition of it. And a vision is not something that you decide, it's given to you. It's something you receive when you're close enough to Jesus to hear what actually matters to him. And this means this you don't start with the vision. God give me the vision, I'll go do it. That's not how it starts. You start with following, learning to follow. Before vision comes following. Before calling on your life comes surrender. Because he can't call you if you're not surrendered to him. And before direction, he's asking for your obedience. So you have to have following, surrender, and obedience. So when you want vision, calling, and direction, you've got to stop saying, I don't always want to follow where I don't know the direction I'm headed. And maybe you don't like surrender or obedience that challenges your comfort zones. But listen to what Paul said in Acts 20, verse 24. We had it on the screen a moment ago. I do not count my life dear to myself. The first part of that was none of these circumstances and trials move me away from the vision. And I don't count my life dear to myself. What I count dear to myself is a call God put on my life. And it is ultimate over everything else. That's not strategy language. That's surrender language. That's the foundation of a vision. You can't go if you want to protect and preserve what's not yours to protect. Well, who else is going to protect it? Have you not learned to trust that he knows your needs and loves you? If your life is not led, if you won't allow yourself to be led, it will be shaped. But it will be shaped by culture, by pressures around you, by fear that you face, or matters of convenience. And that's how your life will go, is the least resistant path. And you'll wake up then one day living a life that you never meant to build. Not because you rejected God, but because you never fully engaged in following Him. You'll wonder at that moment how you got to be where you are, and surprise how it caught you off guard. This only happens when your life is happening and you're not leading it or taking responsibility for who, what, and where you are. It means you didn't slow down enough to hear Jesus say, turn around. Y'all have been on a journey with me with my back and on and off the bus for a few years now. And it's not because all of a sudden my back had a problem. It's because over the years I knew my family had a history of back issues, but I didn't do anything about it. Ostrich in the sand is what we call that. Well, we bury our head and say, well, maybe it won't happen if I don't see it. That's kind of what we're talking about here. The one day, well, I knew God wanted this, but I was kind of waiting for him to do something to wake me up or whatever we want to say there. But if you neglect the things that matter that are important for maintenance or health or spiritual formation in your life, one day you're going to reap the results of lack of activity in those areas. Ha! Back problems. I could have been working on those things had I actually believed it was a real thing. But why would I trust what I haven't experienced? And that's the same excuse we use when we come to God. Why would I trust what I haven't experienced to know is real? How can I do that? Because we're not used to being led. And once we're led, we can lead our life the direction he's leading us. We have to learn how to hear the voice of Christ. Jesus said, My sheep hear my voice. This implies proximity, familiarity, relationship. You don't recognize a voice that you don't spend time with. There's too many other competing voices. Hearing God is Not a mystical thing. It's not, oh, I just heard God's voice and oh, I'm excited. It's relational. It's developed through time with him in his word, being still and quiet before him, being obedient in small things, and sensitivity to the conviction of the Holy Spirit's leading in your life. This morning I got before the Lord under my prayer shawl at home as I was preparing to come. Been a while since I'd been under that in prayer, and it took a while for my mind to go, I've got to do this, I gotta do that, but it was seven different directions instead of own God. I said, I'm here to pray. Oh, but oh, I gotta do this, I gotta think about that, oh, I gotta tell the wife this, she's going on, and I gotta tell the other, and all this stuff. And the Lord said, Are you spending time with me or are you just kind of chattering in your head? I said, It's been a while, God. Calm my soul. Be still my soul, and know He is God. And we need to do that more often than not. And so when it finally calmed down, I was able to say, Lord, here I am. Send me. You might say, well, if I read the Bible, pray it before him, it's gonna be routine. And kind of, you know, just what do you call it, monotonous and the same thing over and over again. But I want you to know something. Routine means you won't forget it. Oh, I forgot to pray today. Well, it's because it wasn't part of your routine. Rather than facing the conviction inside of wishing that you had done this and buckling down then for a season to get it back right, just keep regular at it. And you won't have to say, God, I've missed being in your presence. I've missed your spirit, I've missed your heart speaking to me. So we learn to follow God in the small stuff, the obedient stuff, before the big stuff. Some of us are still waiting for God to show us something big while he's still waiting for us to follow him in something small. And here's the funny thing. I was the same way. I'd say, God, show me this big thing so I can go do it. He said, Go to Africa. No, God, show me. Wait a minute. No, a different big thing, God. Because once he shows you it, you're gonna resist it. Because it's not what you expected. It's not what you anticipated God to show you. Some of us want clarity about the future where God's gonna take our life, what it's gonna be like. But we're resisting obedience right now, in the present. And here's the truth: God does not reveal vision to people who are not willing to be led. He can't give that to you because he knows you won't go there. So before you ever ask, well, God, what's my calling? What's my purpose? People are always looking for a purpose. Or what does God want to do through me? And people ask these questions. Let's ask something simpler but more demanding. Am I following Jesus close enough to hear him clearly? Everything we're about to talk about in this series, and here's what's coming up: a bleedable vision, a calling, a mission, endurance, and being commissioned, all of it comes from this: a life that has learned how to follow. Many of us are waiting for this big calling, a clear vision, a defining moment. But Jesus often starts with small obedience, quiet conviction, and unseen but steady faithfulness? If you can't follow him in the small stuff, you will not follow him in the significant. We learn to trust in small pieces, if you will. Is there anything God has shown you or asked of you that you're still resisting him at? Is there something he said, you know, you've got to change this in your life? Or I want you to do. No. God, you know, I, you know, you know, let's talk about something else, God. There's something God will ask of you, and until you do it, he can't give you more. Whatever that is. And sometimes we look for that defining moment. You know, once I know what it is, God, I'll do that. That's my defining moment. My defining moment wasn't when God said, you need to go to Africa. My defining moment was when I said yes. Okay, I'll go. That's the defining moment when you surrender to him saying, Let's do this. So here's the question: Can your life actually be led? Are you willing to be led? Not in theory, not in your belief, but in reality. Can God interrupt you? Can he redirect you? Will you let him? Well, God, I'm doing no, I don't want you to do that. Well, I know God, but just a minute. Can he ask something of you that actually costs you something? And you say yes. Because if your life cannot be led, you cannot carry his vision for it. You will live your life without impact, without significance, or of any valuable legacy. Your life will only contain the value of your own ambitions and agenda and nothing else. Is that what you want? I mean, really? If so, check with Jesus and see if he's okay with that. If not, here are the next steps that you can take. This week, these are a couple things you can do. First one is identify where you're leading yourself without Christ, the decisions that you've made without surrendering them to Christ first, and areas where you're resisting God in your life. Practice listening, intentional times of stillness and quiet before God, and put scripture before strategy. And when he says something, respond quickly to be obedient in the little thing. Don't delay what you already know he's asking you to do. So, how do we do some of this? What is the next step? Remember last Sunday I had those four questions and I said wrestle with them, share them with somebody. I'm going to ask you to do it again. Same questions are in the bulletin again, but I'm going to ask you to do something a little different with them. It's in there. But I want you to answer them again, the same four questions, early this week. And then begin asking God to show you which of those answers can be used for his kingdom. By that I mean of the first two questions, the things that are valuable in your life and where you're serving. Honestly answer if those things are bringing you joy that you are doing. Do these things actually bring a sense of fulfillment? And are they fulfilling something for God's work at the same time? Sometimes we placate a sensitive ego or conscience instead of living out of the joy of things that matter to us? We're doing it because we feel like it makes us feel better rather than bringing us joy. And are there things in your first two answers, the three things that are valuable to you and the three areas of service that are somehow connected to your last two answers? In other words, are the things that bring you joy in the areas of service going to be some people you want to say about at your funeral? Are they going to be something you want as your epitaph on your gravestone? Those things. I'm doing these things and I want it on my funeral, I want people to say it on my funeral, then you're in congruent, you are congruent with your value and your service. But if the things that you serve and the things that you value are not things you want people to talk about with about you when you die, then your life is not congruent with what you really want. What do you want people to say about at your funeral? What do you want your big statement about your life to be? If those first two answers don't line up, something's off. Well, I want people to think I was a nice guy. Well, then is my value to be nice to everybody and I'm going around being nice? If my value is I want the world to be a better place, is my uh desire for my uh life and the things that bring me joy line up with that? If people say, I want my epitaph to say he lived a life for Jesus, is that the things that you value and is that how you serve? Because you can't have at the end, well, you don't have starting to get there. It has to line up. That's why these are challenging questions, because if your values and your joys and your service aren't what you project to be what you want people to say about your life, something's missing. Something's off. We live with the end of our lives and the legacy in mind, or else we can't live into it. That's what I'm trying to say. Let's pray. Lord, teach us to be good followers, not just in belief, but in direction. Help us to lay down control, to release our need for clarity, and build us up that we may trust you enough to be led. Speak clearly and give us the courage to obey quickly. Form in us a life that can carry what you're calling us into. And Lord, as we consider the questions that are set before us, may we struggle with them well and adjust the values in our life to line up with what we want our life to really be about and what you're asking us to be. Lord, thank you for that. Amen.