God Doesn’t Whisper Again

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The one thing I've picked up on is everybody picks on the man. Oh, that's not true. He picks on everybody else. No, no. See, I think he's an innocent victim of just ruthless people who heartily judge him.

He just seems to me so innocent. I don't know. I need to meet him to find out. But, yeah, that's just my impression. He'll have to tell me whether I'm right or not. That's hilarious. Wow. I don't trust Chris's opinion on it.

I mean...

One, two, three. Welcome to The Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community.

For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Hosting Jim Osman and the Listener Review on God Doesn’t Whisper

All right, well, I am your host, Andrew Rappaport, the executive director of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community, of which this podcast is a member. I have another podcast member with me today, and that is Pastor Jim Osmond from Kootenai Community Church.

You should be checking out the Kootenai Community Church worship service. That is one of the podcasts on the Christian Podcast Community. Welcome, Jim. Thank you, Andrew. Thanks for having me on. We'll get to why you and I are recording today, because we had to have you back as a returned guest.

Not as a co-host, but as a guest. But the clip in the beginning was from Apologetics Live when I was not there, and that was Israel Wayne disagreeing with Anthony Silvestro on whether, you know, I'm the one that picks on others or I get picked on.

And the Chris he refers to is Chris Hanholds of Voice of Reason Radio, another Christian Podcast Community member. And so I tend to think that Israel's right. I'm the one that gets picked on. I don't think I do the picking on.

Well, I certainly don't pick on you. No, but I do think before I preached at your church this last time, you did pick on somebody else other than your mother-in-law.

Yeah, other than my mother-in-law, yeah. You picked on somebody who took you on that ATV ride and tried to kill you.

And the mother-in-law joke didn't go over so well when you wanted to bring your mother-in-law out for a ride with the same individual. From what I understand, your mother-in-law loves when you pick on her, though.

She doesn't mind it. She feels like she knows that. It's a way that I endear myself to her.

Yeah, but there were some oohs in the audience when you did that. I can't believe that I would say that. Yeah, well, your church has, like, it's tripled since the first time that I was there for a conference.

And probably tripled since the last time I gave a mother-in-law joke. So I dropped it for a while, and then a bunch of new people came, and they're just not used to hearing me kind of throw her under the bus.

So when your mother-in-law was there, did you throw her under the bus again with her present?

No, I didn't. In fact, I didn't preach this last Sunday. She was here this last weekend, and I didn't preach. Another gentleman in our church did.

Yeah, and that's because you had some big event in your family.

Yeah, my youngest daughter got married on this last Saturday, which was pretty neat. We're blessed to add a godly young man to our list of in-laws.

So your family is growing in both ways, right? They're in competition of having children, too.

Yeah, and my oldest son had a son on June 19th, and now my youngest daughter is pregnant, and she is due at the end of October. So we have two grandchildren and a wedding all within this year. You feeling old yet?

No, I feel younger and better than I've ever felt.

The Listener Review and the Questions About Hearing from God

All right, well, let's get into the topic we have and why we wanted to have you back on. Folks that may be asking where Bud is, Bud and I will be recording back again. His computer is back and re-established.

As long as this hurricane, I guess, doesn't throw him off, because we plan to record this Saturday. We got a review, Jim, and I sent this to you. This was a zero star, so this is just no rating. Just wanted to give some feedback.

This is, I can't even pronounce the name from Nigeria.

Well, Esther, the middle name is Esther. That I can pronounce. The middle name is Esther, yes.

So I can't pronounce the name. Last name is A-R-I-Y-O from Nigeria. But let me just read the review. This is back from the last time that you were here on the show. But they recently left a review, and so we wanted to have you come back on and engage with, because they do ask some questions.

Let me read the review, and then what we could do is go back over some of the things for people. Discuss your book, God Doesn't Whisper, because that's what this came from. But let me read the review first, and then we could dig into a discussion of your book.

It says, At first, when I listened to this, I was upset. Like, why shouldn't I expect to hear from God audibly? I had to ask God, please help me keep an open heart and teach me what I need to know, which he did.

I still have questions, by the way, but at the end of this podcast, I can truly say I've learned something fresh. I don't know if I agree with all that was said, but I definitely see what I need to work on in my walk with Christ.

I've had to ask myself, is the word truly sufficient for me? Why exactly do I desire to hear God's voice? I do have a question or two that I need answered. I was disappointed it was not really talked about or perhaps I missed it when it was discussed.

But question one is, does God speak audibly in this day and age? Two, is it wrong to desire to hear from God audibly? Even knowing that it is not compulsory part of the Christian walk and should not be expected, but are you saying we don't even think about it?

Thank you. That's what we're going to end up talking about. By the way, I should give a shout out to a listener that I got to meet this week. I was out at the James White debate, showed up for that, walked in.

I was speaking at a men's retreat and rushed right out of there, down, made it just before cross-examination, during a break of the debate. So I got to watch the cross-examination of James White's debate.

Have you heard James' response podcast to the debate? It was bad. It was really bad. Let me put it this way. You know it's bad when the opponent, in his closing remarks, basically blamed James White and other scholars like him for homosexuality in the church.

Oh my goodness. And he also admitted he was doing it for resume building. Is that kind of like cross-politic blaming.

Credo Baptist for the transgender movement? Is that kind of the same thing? Did they do that? Oh no. Well, a listener on cross-politic did. Sorry, a guest on cross-politic did. Oh wow, okay.

Yeah, I guess it would be like that. But yeah, I mean, it was bad. I mean, his whole argument, the argument was that the Texas Receptus is equal in authority to the autographs, to New Testament autographs.

And my, oh my, oh my. I mean, I'm going to talk about this on Apologize Live this week too, but it was bad. I mean, the guy, I talked to him afterwards because his whole argument was, well, we know that the Texas Receptus is the Word of God, that is the Bible because it's been accepted.

He prayed about it. And he first said he prayed about it. And I turned to my bride and said, that's Mormonism. He's got a burning in the bosom. And immediately James White goes, that's Mormonism. I said to James afterwards, either I've been listening to you too long or we think alike because that was like exactly what I said to my wife is what he said to this guy.

So the guy says, well, no, it's not just a prayer. It's different because it's accepted by the church. It's the Holy Spirit. But how do you know it's the Holy Spirit? I mean, James ended his cross-examination because what he ended up saying was, he just responded and said, I'll yield the rest of my time because I just hope everybody heard what he said because the guy basically appealed to a subjective argument that he just, he knows it's the Holy Spirit, not based on any evidence, but because it's the church.

The church accepted it. So I, being my sarcastic self, walked up to him afterwards and said, I really, I didn't get to hear the opening. I came just after the cross-examination and I got to tell you, I prayed about what you were saying throughout the cross-examination and the Holy Spirit has spoken that you're wrong.

And in fact, the fact that you're in the minority of the church, that should reveal, you should really repent. And he just shrugged his shoulders like, okay, whatever. Those were his two arguments though, weren't they?

Oh, they were. And I asked him, I said, okay, let me ask then, do you think that, because he admitted that Erasmus was not inspired. He just happened upon the right text. Yeah. So it's not that he was inspired or infallible.

And so I said, well, where did we have the word of God before Erasmus? I mean, did we, we had it in the Greek autographs, but what about the Latin Vulgate? The church accepted that and he agreed. He basically said that was the right text at that time.

The inspired word of God changed this manuscript tradition. Thank you.

Yeah, that was my point. Because we know that there's things in the Latin Vulgate that we don't have in the Texas Receptus and we don't have in any other Greek manuscripts. And so he's appealing to the church.

I didn't say this to him, but the thing I thought of afterwards, after I walked away is to say, well, then why are you upset with James? Because the church has changed and we now accept the manuscripts that we look at instead of the Texas Receptus.

Yeah, that's right. He's confessing that the church changed back then. Yeah. And so how can you really trust,.

In that argument, my thinking is, how do you trust the Texas Receptus and say that's the word of God if you accepted that the Vulgate could have been the word of God? Yeah. So if the church was to suddenly accept the Book of Mormon, would that be the word of God?

Right. Yeah. But as soon as I got there, as soon as I walked in, I had a guy that recognized me. But you ever have this, Jim, where someone recognizes you, it's out of place, they know they know your face, but they haven't figured out who you are yet?

Yeah, I think so, yeah. Yeah. Well, that's what happened. The guy looked at me. He wagged his finger at me. He's giving me the look, so I stopped. I was actually just trying to get in after a two-hour drive to get into the men's room, and he was walking out.

He's waving his finger. He's looking at me. So I stopped because I figured he recognized who I was, but he didn't. And he goes, you're someone famous. And I said, no, no, I'm not. And then he realized who I was.

He's like, wait, you're Andrew Rappaport. I said, yeah, that's who I am. I'm not famous. And he's like, oh, I listen to your podcast. So I should give a shout out to Chris. It was great to get to meet him and talk to him as a listener.

That's always a great experience. I also, I don't know if I shared this with this podcast group, but when I was out in Ohio, one of the guys who listens to Apologetics Live knew I was coming to that area in Ohio, wanted to get together.

We had breakfast together. What I didn't know, Jim, was I remember him. His name's Ethan, and he's been a follower of Apologetics Live for a long time, student there over at Cedarville. But what I didn't know is when he first came into Apologetics Live, it was because his brother was in a cult, and he was trying to get his brother out of a cult.

So he started learning about apologetics. And in the process, he got saved and then started talking to his brother about the gospel. And so now his brother's out of the cult and is saved. So it's just crazy to think.

I was like, wow, from listening to Apologetics Live to get his brother out of a cult, he got saved. So it's just neat. I mean, here we're going to talk about someone in Nigeria that listened to us talk about your book.

And you have spoken often with Justin Peters, who travels to Africa, talking about the NAR, Word of Faith. How prevalent is Word of Faith and NAR there in Africa that we've heard from Justin? And also, can you define those terms for folks?

Word of Faith and the New Apostolic Reformation in Africa

Yeah, so let's define the terms first. Word of Faith is the belief that we can create our own reality or create things out of our mere profession, that our profession coupled with faith as an active force has the power to make us healthy, cancel disease, conquer Satan, create prosperity for us, make us wealthy in this world, that that is what faith is, so that those who are blessed by God are those who are wealthy and healthy.

That's the Word of Faith. The New Apostolic Reformation, or the NAR, is kind of a hyperized version of that where they take the charismatic gifts and issues to a new level and have modern-day apostles and modern-day prophecies.

Of course, the Word of Faith movement believes in prophecies as well, but then they add to that modern-day prophets and apostles, believing that the new apostolic office is actually more powerful and more dynamic and more spirit-filled than the original apostles were.

And this is, of course, necessary to usher in their end-times eschatology. So those are just two strains, as it were, of the charismatic movement. In the continent of Africa, on the continent of Africa, from what I've been told by people who are there pastoring churches, it is not just a form of Christianity.

It is the dominant, visible form of Christianity on that continent. So many of the reports that we hear of Reformation, revivals in Africa and the work that God is doing is really nothing more than people pursuing American Western ideas of Christianity that are rooted in the prosperity gospel.

Yeah, I mean, I remember a pastor in Ohio that contacted me years ago, wanted to use our hermeneutic syllabus with another local pastor. He met a pastor that came to his church, that pastor was planting a church here in America from Africa, from South Africa.

And he was planting a church in America as a missionary. And he was getting together with this, but he first just wanted to meet the pastor, just so he knew, got to know pastors in the area. And what ended up happening was they got together for lunch, and he started using our syllabus for our hermeneutics class with this pastor who didn't know how to interpret the Bible, and the guy started to realize he was misinterpreting the Bible.

He started employing proper hermeneutics, which got him actually in trouble with the sending church back in Africa. And they actually told him that if he did not start teaching Word of Faith theology again and get out of teaching just the Bible, they were going to bring him back home.

Wow. Unfortunate sad part to the story, the guy, I guess, wanted his job more, stopped meeting with this pastor that had gotten our syllabus, and went back to teaching Word of Faith. That's the sad part of it.

But one thing the pastor had said to me that was interesting was when this guy that got our syllabus was meeting with this African pastor, he said the African pastor told him he never knew there was any other way to understand the Bible than Word of Faith, because that is the only way that they discuss it there.

And so he didn't know there was any other hermeneutical principles to apply other than what they were taught in Word of Faith. And I think that when we look at your book, and your book is God Doesn't Whisper, available, by the way, at jimosmond .com, I believe?

Yeah. Comm .org. So jimosmond .com. And it's not Osmond, like the Osmond family. He's not Mormon. No D at the end. Yeah.

You can skip all the confusion. Just go to Amazon. You can order it on Amazon at amazon .com, God Doesn't Whisper.

Yeah, but then Amazon gets more money. We'd rather you get more money. Oh, okay. Because for folks that don't know, when your books don't go to you, the profits don't go to you, do they?

No, they don't. My profits don't go into any fund for me.

So why don't we, because we're going to be pushing the book, so why don't we explain to people, if people buy the book through jimosmond .com, where's that money going?

Well, no matter where they buy the book, the profits, the royalties go into a fund that supports retired missionaries. So we have a number of missionaries in our church that have retired, and it goes into a fund that gives them a little stipend every month, and eventually it will support retired pastors from our own church, and the goal is that people who have served long on the mission field will eventually be able to kind of be supported into their retirement years after that.

So even though the missionaries continue to be supported, often when you leave the mission field, their support sometimes dries up or goes away entirely, or at least drops significantly. So we didn't want that to happen, and we wanted to just add a little bit of support for them in their retirement after they've served faithfully.

So that's what those royalties go to support.

The Sufficiency of Scripture for Guidance and Decision-Making

Yeah, and that's an important thing. So the book God Doesn't Whisper is really addressing, very much like we see in Africa, where they don't know any other way to interpret God's word. Well, I would say in America, as well as Africa, people don't know any other way than to explain that they're expecting to hear the voice of God audibly, or through nudges, feelings, dreams, all these ways that people, even here in America, have this expectation to hear from God.

Yeah.

Yeah, they look at God speaking throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament, and they look at the supernatural manifestations of God speaking audibly to Elijah, audibly to the prophets, audibly to Adam and Eve, to Noah, to Moses, and then they extrapolate that into the present day and say, well, if God needed to speak to them, then certainly he needs to speak to me.

And if God loved them enough to speak to them, certainly he loves me enough to speak to me. And if God did that under the Old Covenant, then why shouldn't we expect even more and greater manifestations of the Spirit and revelations under the New Covenant?

That's the assumption. So they read that in the Old Testament, New Testament, and then they bring that into today and say, well, we should be experiencing the very same kinds of experiences.

Yeah, and I don't know if I shared this story when we reviewed your book on the previous episode, but we had a gentleman that worked for the ministry that I met on the streets in New York City. He was in a Word of Faith church.

He had been saved for, I want to say, just a few months, maybe one to three months. But he was in Word of Faith, and he picked up very quickly the Word of Faith lingo. And I guess, and I didn't remember this, but he told me this many years after.

He would come and sit and watch me do open air, and he would go to the Whole Foods right outside where we would do open air, and he came and would listen, which is not a good thing to do. I told him he really should go shopping after because his ice cream would usually melt.

His little biscuit thing blew up one time. We heard a pop. It was a biscuit that just got in the heat of an August day. But when he first met me, he heard me do an open air. He came over. He listened.

He came up to me afterward and said, the Lord spoke to me and told me to come here and listen to you. He said, I had the feeling within me, and I just must have turned to him and said, it was probably heartburn.

And he said the fact that I just discredited him claiming he heard from God, it bothered him. And he came back week after week. He said what he ended up realizing was anytime people would ask me a question about Scripture, I would back up and read context.

Well, he started doing that in church, and he went, wait a minute. They're not following context. And so he left that church and eventually got into a Reformed Baptist church. And so, but he told me years later, it really bugged him because he expected this to be something that I was going to agree with.

Oh, God has spoke to you. And instead of reaffirming God speaking to him, I dismissed it. And this is something in our culture, Jim, that, well, I'll ask it as a question. Do you think that this idea of God speaking to us, whether through feelings or nudgings, circumstance, audibly, dreams, is this becoming commonplace, or is it commonplace even in America?

It is the default view of evangelicalism in America. And it is embedded into Baptist churches. It's, of course, in Pentecostal, Charismatic, Word of Faith, New Apostolic Reformation churches. But even your small community churches, your independent churches, your mainline churches, anybody almost who names the name of Christ, believes and has been taught that they can expect to hear God speak to them through still small voices, promptings, nudgings, impressions, signs, dreams, visions, and a whole host of other things.

Almost anything becomes a vehicle through which God gives direction. And people are told that this is the way that God normally, naturally works, that he speaks to his people in these ways. And they are sort of discipled into this simply by the vernacular of many Christian teachers, even ones that we would consider or would call themselves cessationist teachers, like Charles Stanley and others.

So it is the dominant and predominant view in evangelicalism, this expectation.

The Still Small Voice, Fleeces, Dreams, and the Led by the Spirit Misuse

Okay, well, you just mentioned one thing right off the bat that we see, you quoted Scripture. So let's deal with that. I mean, we see in Scripture that it says that we should be expecting to hear still small voice, shouldn't we?

I mean, we see that. It says that Elijah heard the sound of a silent whisper. It's translated as still small voice in the King James Version. Unfortunately, even though it's an odd Hebrew phrase that's used nowhere else in Scripture, that has become the template by which people say that God speaks to us.

And so that phrase, still small voice, is found in 1 Kings 19. But the question is, is that the normal way that God speaks to us? And does Scripture teach that all Christians should expect to receive revelation through still small voice?

And the answer to that is no, we shouldn't. That phrase just simply means the sound of a silent whisper or the sound of a gentle breeze or a blowing. And Isaiah heard that from, he was inside the cave in 1 Kings 19.

He heard it outside the cave, and he went out to hear God speak to him audibly. What Isaiah heard was not an inner impression or an inner nudging or a prompting or some thought that popped into his head.

What Elijah heard was something outside of the cave that caused him to come outside so that he could hear clearly. And then what he heard was the audible voice of God. As a prophet, that's what Elijah could have expected.

But you and I are not prophets, nor should we expect that, nor do we need that since we have the written word of God.

Okay, but we see examples in judges of people putting out a fleece. So, I mean, when we have a decision to make, shouldn't we put out fleeces or put out things of saying, Lord, if you want me to do such and such, make this happen?

Something that's, you know, in the case of a fleece, make just the fleece wet and the ground dry and then reverse it, make the ground wet and the fleece dry. Shouldn't we be able to do things like that so that we could determine God's will?

Yeah, in Judges 6, that is what Gideon does, but that is a description of what he did. And his desire for a sign or a fleece, there's a couple things to note about that. Number one, it was a supernatural sign that he was asking for.

It wasn't the way that many Christians typically put out fleeces today. You know, if you want me to date Susie, then when I come home, please have Mom make a pot roast. And if you want me to date Abigail, then when I get home, we pray that it's ham.

And if it's pot roast or ham, that will tell me your way of indicating who I'm supposed to date. That's kind of the way most Christians use fleeces. But Gideon was asking for a supernatural sign. So if you wanted to have a modern-day equivalent, then you should say, if you want me to date Susie, then cause the car to levitate.

And if you want me to date Abigail, then cause the truck to levitate. That would be a fleece that's in the spirit of what Gideon did. But most Christians don't do that. Instead, they sort of read into their fleece test the parameters that will be most likely to give them what they want to do in the end anyway.

And unfortunately, a lot of decisions have been made in that very way, people putting out what they call fleeces like that. Gideon did that, but it was an expression of his unbelief, not his faith. That's key, because God had already clearly spoken to Gideon and said, you are to deliver my people from the Midianites.

And he had already described how it was going to happen and what he was going to do and that he was the man to do it. And then Gideon gives the fleece test to God and gets the supernatural sign that indicates, yes, God was confirming this.

And then Gideon prays, Lord, don't be angry with me, but here's another sign I want you to give me. You see, Gideon was cowardly in responding to God's command to be the man to lead Israel in their rebellion against the Midianites.

And his testing of God with that fleece was an expression of his unbelief and his lack of faith, not his faith and resolute trust in God. Gideon already had clear direction on what God wanted. It's not given to us as a prescription.

Nowhere in the passage is it given to us as a prescription. And nowhere in the New Testament do we see people doing that in a desire to know or discern the will of God.

Okay, so there you're getting into an issue of hermeneutics, right? The fact that we have a historical narrative, and as such, it's recording what did happen, not what should happen. And so just because Gideon did this doesn't mean we should be going and seeking this.

We would interpret something in Paul's epistles different because that's instructional. So if Paul was to instruct us on that, then we say, okay, we should be doing this. But that's not what we see in the New Testament.

For instance, in 1 Corinthians 7, when Paul's talking about whether to marry or not to marry and whom to marry, he doesn't say put out a fleece, wait for a nudging, or whistle a small voice. Instead, he says, look, here's the moral will of God, what he's revealed in Scripture.

You don't marry an unbeliever. You don't marry somebody who is divorced and unqualified to be remarried. You don't do that. And instead, then apply wisdom to the situation. Look at where you're at and understand persecution is coming, so it might be right for you to marry, it might be not.

You might want to discern whether or not you should marry based upon are you able to be single and serve the Lord better? Is that really what you desire? Do you desire a wife or a husband? And at the end of the day, Paul says, look, if you marry, you haven't sinned, and if you don't marry, you haven't sinned.

So apply the moral will of God and apply wisdom to the situation and then do what you want. That's the biblical model.

I think it's very interesting, in my years of studying different world religions, cults, that most of the cults focus much of their time in the Old Testament, and it's in the historical narrative. And they take the historical narrative and make it instructional.

And there's a big mistake in doing that. But what do we do then with all the passages where we see people who had dreams? Because this is a big one. People will say that God revealed things to them through dreams.

And we do see that in Scripture. So is there something wrong with expecting a dream?

Yeah, there's two kinds of dreams in Scripture. There are ones that require no interpretation, and then there are dreams that require interpretation. The dreams that require interpretation were also given supernatural revelation to interpret the dream.

So an example of a dream that required no interpretation, Joseph had a dream that he was told that Mary and the baby Jesus were going to be hunted by Herod, and they needed to flee and go to Egypt. So Joseph did that.

Joseph didn't wake up after the angel appeared to him in the vision and say, well, you know, I kind of think that what that is is the Lord telling me to take the family out for Egyptian food. He didn't interpret it that way.

He didn't have to. Nothing in that dream needed interpretation because it was a direct revelation that he needed to go, that he was supposed to obey immediately. Then there are other dreams like the dreams given to Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel in Daniel 2 and Daniel 7, the dreams given to Pharaoh.

Those kinds of dreams required supernatural revelation to interpret. And there is nothing in Scripture that suggests or promises that God would speak to us through dreams. Yes, it did happen in times past.

And, in fact, Hebrews 1 says that that was the ways in which God spoke in ancient times, in the old days, back then. But now in modern times, he has spoken to us in his son. And so that's the fullness of revelation that we have is in Jesus Christ.

And we're not told how to interpret dreams. We're not told to wait for dreams. We're not told to expect dreams. And, again, going back to the pattern that is given to us in the New Testament, dreams, even in the book of Acts, were not common in terms of everybody getting them.

Paul had a couple of visions. Peter had a couple of visions. Cornelius had a vision. But these were uncommon occurrences that were attached to the apostles in their ministry. And there's nothing in Scripture that suggests that this should be a regular occurrence for Christians.

In fact, Paul warns against visions in the book of Colossians. And he says you shouldn't trust in those things because people have these visions and then they get all puffed up and want to make these visions revelatory for everybody else.

So there's a danger in it there. So the only instruction that we're given regarding dreams and visions in the New Testament epistles is warnings about them, not encouragement or instruction on how to interpret them.

The Meaning of Being Led by the Spirit

Yeah, now the way that when we speak of hearing the voice of God, the way that I have heard people use it the most is the phrase, I felt led, which I always use this example with it. I remember a gentleman who was in church talking about an incident at prayer meeting.

And he wanted prayer for a co-worker. Now his co-worker had done something wrong at work. I forget what it was, but the boss came to this professing Christian and said to him that the reason he came to him is because he was a Christian and wanted to know the truth.

And this guy lied to the boss to protect the guy. And he said he did it so he can evangelize this person. And I said to him, you blew your testimony with him. What do you mean? Your hope of evangelism is now shot because the guy knows you lied to protect him.

You lost all your integrity. But his response was, well, I felt led to do this so it's of the Lord.

Yeah, I've seen some of the most unwise, foolish, and sinful behavior excused with that phrase. Well, I felt led in the moment to do it, so I did it believing it was the Holy Spirit. And so who are you to criticize the wisdom or the morality of that decision in the moment?

That phrase, led by the Spirit, comes from Galatians 5 and Romans 8. And in both contexts, the Apostle Paul is not describing decision-making or receiving impressions. He's talking about putting to death the deeds of the flesh and walking in the power of the Spirit.

Being led by the Spirit is equal to, it's synonymous with, in Galatians 5 and Romans 8, it's synonymous with the putting to death the deeds of the body, the flesh. The lust, the immorality, the impurity, the covetousness, and all of those things that are listed in that passage.

And Paul says if you have the Spirit of God, you're led by the Spirit of God. That is, the Spirit of God will sanctify you out of that error and out of that sinfulness. And those who have not the Spirit are not led by the Spirit, so they fulfill the lust of the flesh and are in violation of the law of God.