Just Tell Me What to Do (So I Can Stop Seeking)

Tell me what to do and watch me resist it.

When my church lays out how they expect me to pursue faithfulness (be in a small group, serve on a team, find someone to mentor, come every week, work your Bible reading plan) something in me pushes back. These are good things. I would commend every one of them to another believer without blinking. And still, when they are prescribed for me, I bristle. I do not like being told what to do. I even bristle, if I am honest, at the plain biblical call to submit to one another (Ephesians 5:21) and to my leaders (Hebrews 13:17).

The easy diagnosis is pride, and it is not wrong. There is ego in a man who wants to arrive at obedience by his own road so he can call it his own. But I have come to think pride is only the top layer, and if I stop there I will miss the more dangerous thing underneath.

The fear I do not say out loud

Here is the deeper worry: that if I am simply handed the program, I will stop seeking the Lord myself.

I know how my own heart works. Give me a list and I will complete the list. I will settle into the pattern someone drew for me and feel, for a while, the clean satisfaction of a box checked, and somewhere in there the checking quietly becomes the point. The motions keep running after the connection to the real thing has gone cold. I am doing faithfulness and no longer seeking the One it was supposed to connect me to.

And is that not a real loss? Every believer is meant to be moved by the Spirit, to dream, to be led into things no one put on a checklist for him. I do not want to follow someone else’s pattern so faithfully that I stop listening when the Spirit has something else for me. That fear is not pride. That fear is pointing at something true.

So I hold two things that both seem right. I want to be moved by the Spirit and not settle for merely being led. And I want to be humble enough to submit to another’s guidance and genuinely seek God inside it. We are complicated people; two things can be true at once.

The man who could only lead

Tolkien gave us a picture of where this ends if it is never broken. Saruman was the head of his order, the wisest of the wise, and that was precisely his undoing. He could lead, brilliantly, but he could not follow. He would not sit under the counsel of the Council, would not take correction from a Gandalf he reckoned beneath him, and his refusal to be led was exactly what convinced him he could handle the Ring, treat with the enemy as an equal, and run his own program. His pride wore the costume of independent wisdom (I will seek the good, but by my own road) and it hollowed him out until there was nothing left but a ruined voice. That is the cautionary end of “I won’t be told what to do.” Not villainy in a thunderclap. Just a man who could only ever be the leader, never the follower, and was lost for it.

The soil, not the substitute

But here is where the honest tension finally breaks, and it breaks in a direction I did not expect.

I had assumed the constraint was the enemy of seeking God. That the program and the leading of the Spirit were rivals, and submitting meant surrendering the second to get the first. That is the lie. The constraint is not the substitute for seeking God. It is the soil I seek him in.

Jesus himself settles it. “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing” (John 5:19). No one was ever more filled with the Spirit, more free, more alive than Jesus, and no one was ever more submitted. In him, obedience and the Spirit’s leading are not rivals. They are the same life.

Submission was never meant to replace communion; it was meant to be the ordinary, unglamorous ground where communion grows, the way a trellis does not compete with the vine but gives it something to climb. The small group, the service team, the reading plan: none of these were ever offered to me instead of the Spirit. They are a place to meet him.

The early monks understood this better than I do. When Benedict wrote his Rule in the sixth century, he called the monastery “a school for the Lord’s service.” Men took on a prescribed pattern of prayer, work, and obedience, not to stop seeking God, but so they could seek him every day without having to reinvent the road each morning. The rule was the trellis.

Which gives me a test sharp enough to catch me every time. If I am seeking God within the restraints, then submission is doing exactly what it was for. But if I am not seeking God within them, if the boxes have become the whole of it, then my pushback was never really about guarding the Spirit’s freedom at all.

I was just resenting them.