Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. (Galatians 5:25 NIV)
Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.” (Isaiah 30:21 NIV)
But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. (John 16:13 NIV)
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Last month I visited a small church group that was studying the work of the Holy Spirit – specifically, how to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit in our everyday lives. We watched a video where preacher David Hogan told the following story I have rewritten in narrative form. May it challenge you, as it does me, to be obedient to the leading of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
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The missionary man’s heavy backpack fell from his shoulders. For twelve hours he had hauled all the food he could find up the mountain to this remote village. The women of the community quickly surrounded the bag and divvied up the food among themselves.
The man looked around. This was his fifth trip up that mountain. In the last three trips, he had brought clothes and food, and so the women knew what his backpack would contain. But that first trip? Oh yes, he remembered it, too. On that first trip, he had climbed the mountain because the Holy Spirit told him to go heal the man with leprosy. “Really, God?!?” But he had gone, only to be arrested by the local authorities and escorted back down the mountain—over twelve hours seemingly wasted.
Except it wasn’t.
Suddenly, at the bottom of the mountain and with him there had been a woman whose body odor was overwhelmingly noxious. He had struggled to breathe in her presence and to keep from vomiting. But she had held the key he needed to obey God. “Do you want to know where the leper lives?” she had asked.
“Really, God?!?!” This tremendously smelly woman was the guide to finding the leper?!
But he followed her back up the mountain, by a different route that avoided law enforcement. She led him to the place where the leper and others lived—at the end of the village’s sewer pipe. This colony of cast-offs gathered around the wastewater for their sustenance. The stench in this place included rotting human flesh as the leprosy, poor sanitation, and other diseases did their work. The missionary man struggled not to retch every time he breathed.
Finally, he found the shack the leper lived in. When he laid hands on the man to pray for him, his hands sank into the man’s open wounds. “God, I don’t know what I’m doing here. How is this going to heal him?” he wondered as he left.
When he came back up the mountain later—no change in the man. The third and fourth times he returned, he did not see the man. Finally, the fifth time, the man’s wife called for the missionary to come sit on a rock. He waited, wondering what was going on. Finally, he saw a sight he never expected.
The leper came around the corner with a hoe and rake on his shoulder. He had been to work—because he had been healed! There was no living leprosy—only scars.
What would have happened to this leper if the missionary man had not heard and listened to the Holy Spirit? What would have happened if he had heard and listened but was not obedient?
What would have happened if he had only gone up the mountain once—or twice—or three times?
Was the missionary man’s obedience something that helped change the spiritual atmosphere in that village so that the leper could be healed?
When the villagers realized the leper was healed, they wanted to know who this Jesus was who had healed him. All thirty villagers in that place became believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, and that opened the way for the missionary man to go into other villages and plant thirty more churches.
Five trips of twelve hours up the mountain.
Hundreds brought into the Kingdom of Light because of one man’s healing..
Hundreds brought into the Kingdom of Light because of one man’s obedience.
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God,
Give us the hunger to be people who hear the Voice of our Shepherd, who know the leading of the Holy Spirit within us, and who are obedient to where you call us to go, we pray in Jesus’s name. AMEN.