When God Leads: How to be Led By the Holy Spirit

I want to invite you on a journey of developing and trusting your spirit senses, just like we learn and trust our physical senses. For much of our lives, we habitually trust our physical senses, and rarely think about developing the senses which help us perceive the realm of the Spirit. When we are born again, we immediately receive a deposit of God’s Holy Spirit. There’s a practical reason for that. I don’t want you to reject your physical faculties, I only want to help develop your spiritual senses so they can step into the lead.

When God Leads: How to be Led by the Holy Spirit

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From the time we are born, we interact with the world around us through our physical senses. We are taught about sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing, and we easily understand what we are taught because we have experienced them. We actually have more than those five senses. Humans can sense when we are upside down. We have a sense of balance and spacial awareness as well as internal and external body awareness.

Spirit-Filled Life: Developing Spiritual Senses

We also have spiritual senses. Scripture has many references to eyes to see, ears to hear, mouths to speak, and hearts which can be hardened, which we interpret as spiritual. I’ve heard of people having spiritual small encounters, and I can validate those claims. I’ve had several olifactory encounters: once in a church service and the rest were in my car. I’ve “felt” the Holy Spirit with my spiritual touch sense, however, I’m not aware of having any taste encounters in the Spirit.

Just as we have other, less taught about, senses in our physical bodies, we also have spiritual senses to interact with the Spiritual realm. For instance, I get a physical sensation in my spirit when I encounter God’s truth. My body knows what it feels like to receive Truth from God. As Jamie Winship says, humans have one response when they encounter truth: it sets them free. Even if my mind doesn’t agree, my Spirit knows what it feels like to receive God’s truth. Because I am on a journey of learning how to be led by the Holy Spirit of the Living God, when I feel the sensation of truth entering a situation, I am learning how to slow down and not rely on my intellect, logic, and reasoning.

The Beginning of My Awakening

One day, on a roadtrip in the fall of 2023, I was listening to a podcast and I heard Dr. Dharius Daniels say, "Soul wounds that had not been property tended to had manifested themselves, not in pain, but in personality traits. I wasn't in pain from anything in my past, but I had developed personality traits that I had associated with my identity." My mind had no grid to receive that, but my spirit immediately recognized there is truth in that statement that was relevant to me. It felt like the truth lit up my spirit, and my insides were suddenly animated with activity. I actually felt physically sick.

Immediately, my mind had questions. It took several minutes for my soul (mind, will, and emotions) and body to catch up enough to start to verbalize what my spirit had received quickly. I started asking questions: Lord, do I have personality traits that were covering wounds and scars? My memories started sitrring and popping up, and some reactions I’ve had over the years started to make sense. I remembered how difficult it was for me to relate to people who shared things that happened in their childhood and how it impacted them. When people shared their experiences, which I now know are called Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE), internally I would wonder why they didn’t just get over it and move on. I actually didn’t even realize until the beginning of 2025 that I, also, had some ACE in my childhood. My mind had self-protected and processed them differently.

The Lord started to show me that some of the “personality traits that I associated with my identity” were actually formed from coping mechanisms I developed to survive. Because I developed them very early (between the ages of 3 and 7), they were so familiar that they felt like a part of my DNA.

Allowing Yourself to Learn How to be Led by the Holy Spirit

So far, the biggest decision that highlights the commitment to be “led by the spirit” instead of being led by my own logic, reason, and intellect, was in December of 2023, when I heard the Lord tell me, “this is going to be your last month.” I knew He was asking me to quit my job. At the time, I thought I was just being obedient. It felt scary, and I was terrified of losing the retirement I worked hard for, the benefits, and the income I brought into our household. But, I wanted to trust God, and I trusted He had better things for me.

If I had known what we were going to uncover over the next 18 months, I don’t know if I would have said yes. I never had a clue that He would ask me to let go of the defense mechanism of being independent, a hard worker, and allow someone else to take care of me. Sometime in my childhood, I developed a belief that I couldn’t trust anyone to take care of me, so I had to do it myself. I’ve heard preachers say, “It doesn’t matter what you do, it’s always about the heart.” God knew, even though I didn’t, the motivation behind my work ethic was fear. My scars didn’t show up as addictions. They showed up as working hard, believing I don’t need anyone else, taking care of people, and providing everything my family needed. Only God knew, and He loved me too much to leave me there.

God isn’t satisfied with us looking like we’re doing well. He actually wants us to be well, whole, and healthy. I didn’t know those coping mechanisms were causing me to not trust my husband, but God knew. His heart for my marriage isn’t for us to look like we’re doing well. His heart for my marriage is for us to be connected, interdependent, with depth of trust for Him and one another.

If we are going to be led by His Spirit, we have to learn how to sense His leading and prioritize His commands over our own logic, reasoning, and intellect. I had 100 reasons why I shouldn’t quit my job. I could have rationalized in any number of ways why it was a bad idea. There was one good reason, and only one. In order to obey, I had to prioritize His leading over my reasoning. It has been a battle to stay here, too. I’ve looked at jobs and wondered if I should apply for one probably every single month. A few months ago, He told me I could if I wanted to, but that’s not what He has for me. Ok then. If it’s not what You have, then I don’t want it.

Developing Both Spirit and Physical

I am an intellectual person, so I always want to know why. Curiosity is a beautiful thing! I believe God wants us to be curious with Him and ask Him questions. Asking Him questions is one of my favorite things to do. But when He answers, I have to be ready to give Him my yes and obey. I believe building up our spiritual senses is the key to being led by His Spirit.

If we can’t hear Him, how can we obey?

If we can’t see what He’s sharing with us, how can we give Him our yes?

If we can’t sense His heart, how can we respond?

God gave us logic, reason, and intelligence. I believe He values intelligence, since He is the One who created it. God isn’t asking us to throw intelligence out the window. I believe He’s calling us to build up our spiritual senses, build up our spirit man, and grow in confidence that we hear His voice, so we can be led by His Spirit instead of led by our flesh. Jude talks about people who “scoff at things they do not understand. Like unthinking animals, they do whatever their instincts tell them, and so they bring about their own destruction,” (Jude 10, NLT). He goes on to describe a few examples, and then warns: “These people are grumblers and complainers, living only to satisfy their desires…They follow their natural instincts because they do not have God’s Spirit in them. But you, dear friends, must build each other up in your most holy faith, pray in the power of the Holy spirit, (Jude 16, 19-20 NLT). Jude hits the problem right on the head when he explains how they follow the instincts of their natural bodies because they don’t have the Spirit of God in them.

Paul warns the church in his letter to the Romans, as well: “The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God. You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the spirit of God lives in you…If you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the spirit you but to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live,” (Romans 8:7-9, 13, NIV).

Both authors assume that if we have the Spirit of God, we are able to discern what God’s will is, follow it, and override the desires, habits, and thought processes of the flesh. Holy Spirit indewlling is the key to developing our spiritual senses. We all have spiritual senses to perceive the realm of the Spirit. We need to use them and process them in constant conversation with God through the Holy Spirit in order to develop skill and confidence in His ability to impart His desires to His children. Jesus taught His disciples that His sheep hear His voice, and to another they will not listen. Have confidence He has the ability to get through to you.

Letting God Lead is a Process. We Can Learn!

Sometimes, I talk to people who are worried about doing the wrong thing or making the wrong decision. I’ve struggled with the same thing. In those moments, I remind myself that I know what it feels like in my spirit when God tells me No. He knows how to get through to me to let me know when He doesn’t want me to go somewhere. When I understand what it feels like when He tells me No, I can have confidence that I can make a decision and He will let me know if it’s wrong.

I believe that if you can develop spiritual eyes, ears, and hearts, and also learn what it feels like in your spirit for Him to impart truth, and if you can learn what it feels like in your spirit when He tells you No, you have 90% of what you need to navigate following God. If you want help with developing spiritual perception, Havilah Cunnington wrote a book in 2024 called Created to Hear God. It’s a great tool to learn the four main ways people hear from God: Seers, Hearers, Knowers, and Feelers. If you want more development in having conversations with God, I wrote a book called Belief Rehab: You Are Enough. It will help you shape your beliefs with God, because our beliefs shape our lives. My prayer is we will all get better at allowing the Holy Spirit of the Living God to guide us, so we can rely more on Him who knows the end from the beginning, and less on our own intellectual devices.

This is the second of two blog posts about being led by Holy Spirit. Check out the first one here. If you want to discover more about what God planned when he created you,  fall in love with the YOU that you’re becoming, and learn to find joy in the everyday moments, check out Belief Rehab: You Are Enough!