“Earnest Christians seeking guidance often go wrong.  Why is this?  Often the reason is that their notion of the nature and method of divine guidance is distorted.  They look for a will-o’-the-wisp; they overlook the guidance that is ready at hand and lay themselves open to all sorts of delusions.  Their basic mistake is to think of guidance as essentially inward prompting by the Holy Spirit, apart from the written Word.  This idea, which is as old as the false prophets of the Old Testament and as new as the Oxford Group and Moral Rearmament, is a seed-bed in which all forms of fanaticism and folly can grow.

The idea of a life in which the inward voice of the Spirit decides and directs everything sounds most attractive, for it seems to exalt the Spirit’s ministry and to promise the closest intimacy with God; but in practice this quest for super spirituality leads only to frantic bewilderment or lunacy.

What conduct of this sort shows is failure to grasp that the fundamental mode whereby our rational Creator guides his rational creatures is by rational understanding and application of his written Word.

But the true way to honor the Holy Spirit as our guide is to honor the holy Scriptures through which he guides us.  The fundamental guidance which God gives to shape our lives–the instilling, that is, of the basic convictions, attitudes, ideals and value judgments, in terms of which we are to live–is not a matter of inward promptings apart from the Word but of the pressure on our consciences of the portrayal of God’s character and will in the Word, which the Spirit enlightens us to understand and apply to ourselves.” [Packer, J.I. Knowing God, pp. 233 - 236]