Now, in this session we are going to be more specific and practical about what it is like to be spoken to by God and needless to say, this causes a lot of trouble, and we want to try to really be helpful with this.
It is true that there are various ways in which God speaks to people, but they all have in common one thing and that is, each contains a message. Sometimes people need to be addressed in one way or another in order to get the message but often the way they are addressed, while it brings the message confuses the meaning. [00:51] And the more dramatic—the way the message comes, the more difficult it is to get the meaning. This causes a lot of grief because you have people who think that the more dramatic the message is, somehow the better the meaning is but the teachings of the scripture and …I’m sorry I don’t have time to spend a lot of time on this but the teachings of the scripture is plain that the less dramatic the form the message comes, the fuller is the content and the more advanced, if you wish, is the condition of the person who is receiving the message. [1:45] So, if you study the life of Moses and Abraham and Jesus, you’re going to see that that is true. One phrase comes to be used about the usual form of the message and that is, “still small voice.” It’s actually difficult to translate that passage in 1 Kings 19:13 that is in the Old version put in terms of “still small voice” and it could be no voice at all, and it could be just a thought, or it could be a whisper, and the passage is very instructive because you could hardly imagine more dramatic events occurring in which there was no voice. Right? Earthquakes are on our mind today. That’s pretty dramatic. But the question is always, “What does it mean?” All right. So, if you were to step out here on the mountainside and find a bush that was burning and not consumed and you would hear that nothing was said, what would you take it to mean? Funny bush. Right? It’s the voice that matters. [3:21] We really have to pay attention to that, and we can learn when God is speaking to us in our thoughts because the form it will take always is in our thoughts. And if you have a pink elephant talking to you, you’d better get the thought that comes with it because that’s what matters. The elephant does not matter—so don’t start a pink elephant movement. [4:03]
Now, in your outline, you see a reference to the three lights, and I need to talk with you briefly about that. Then we want to move on to how you learn to identify the voice—the voice of God. The three lights are not adequate. For one thing, they tend to be limited to guidance, and we’ve already said that the conversation is not just about guidance. The three lights are not adequate to understand the conversational relationship with God. Now, having said that, I want to say they are important. The three lights are Circumstances—what’s happening around you, Impressions of the Spirit, which, in themselves are not easy to read, and then Passages from the Bible (Scripture) [5:09]
[5:09 to 5:29—there is no sound, only graphics on the screen and then it picks up at 5:29 with the next paragraph]
….and you’ll find this in a wonderful author named F. B. Myer that I greatly appreciate. The Secret of Guidance is his book, and he says, “When the three lights line up, then you can know that that’s God’s Will and I encourage you to be worried about that because in many cases, the circumstances are not going to give the indication of what you should do. Sometimes the indication is precisely, you ought to disregard the circumstances and full speed ahead, and how would you know whether or not they were an indication of how you should go. Well, the impressions of the Spirit would come in but then you have the problem of identifying those and passages from the Bible are obviously important but when you are seeking guidance, you are always seeking more from the Bible than it says because if you want to know whether or not to go to Denver, the Bible doesn’t say anything about Denver. What I would say is that while these are not a mechanical sort of indicator, as they are often presented, they are factors that you would consider in forming a responsible openness to God’s teaching. You should not disregard circumstances. You should not disregard impressions of the Spirit, and you should not disregard passages in the Bible. But you need to recognize that these three lights are not indications of God’s speaking to you. They may be there but without God’s voice, you cannot rely on them. They will not substitute for communications with God. Study is a part. Study the Bible; that’s great; you ought to do it. You ought to be sensible. You ought to be sensitive and you could even say that these are conditions of responsible judgment, but they will not substitute for the voice of God coming to you in a way that you will learn to recognize, and I have never taught on this material in a group where many people in the congregation did not say to one another or to me, “I recognize that. I didn’t know what that was.” See, one of the things that I mentioned earlier and needs to be emphasized is you do not automatically know that it is God that is speaking to you and here you need to take seriously the story of little Samuel who was spoken to by God and he thought it was Eli and it took Eli a little time to figure out what was happening and then he instructed Samuel and what did he instruct him to do. He instructed him to speak back. “Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth.” Now, that’s the beginning of one of the most famous conversations, lifelong in earth but little Samuel didn’t automatically recognize it. Now then after that, he recognized it. And how you learn to recognize the voice of God coming to you and it will usually take the form of a special type of thought, and we want to turn to that now. You will learn to recognize by experience. That’s how you learn. You do not learn by getting a bunch of signs that you can put on it and test it. You learn by experience like you learn by experience the voice of others that you are familiar with. In that case, of course we are talking about the sound of the voice. Now, it’s very important to understand the role of the Bible in this—a very wonderful, young man named Scott Hilborn, a Presbyterian minister who is now located in South Carolina, makes this comment, “90 percent of God speaking to me comes in class time, as he called it, with the Bible. While I am reading the written word, 90% of IT is not about what to do but to enlighten and to encourage me.” I would imagine every one of you have had that experience with the Scripture where suddenly it is not the words on the page; it is something that you find far different from that. They’re related to the words on the page. We like to say the words on the page “leaped” off of the page and grabbed me, so the Bible is really very central but when that comes, you’re going to learn—again, I know that many of you have already learned to recognize that, and you know that this is now God speaking to you. [11:12]
There are three factors in the voice—tone, spirit, and content that I want to mention. When I say the voice, I am referring to thoughts that come to you. There may be a voice. It may be the voice of another human being. It can come in many ways, but you learn to recognize that, and you will find that you will hear a certain tone, and I think that is one of the most important things for us to identify. There is a tone or quality. For example, it has a certain “weight” to it—a certain weight—it impresses you and this is connected with the point about the spirit as the voice but weight, I think, is the best term that I can use to indicate this. Confidence—it comes with confidence. It comes without thinking it up—you don’t think it up. Very often, you are quite surprised by it—both in terms of it showing up and what it has to say. You don’t sense it as something coming from you and not from any other person, though some other person may be speaking. I want to give another quote from E. Stanley Jones here on this point. Here is what he says, “Perhaps the distinction of the voice is this. The voice of the subconscious argues with you and tries to convince you, but the inner voice of God does not argue. It does not try to convince you. It just speaks and is self-authenticating. It has the feel of the voice of God within it.” You experience it because of the weight of the person who is speaking. Now, you can’t separate that from the spirit. The spirit is peacefulness, joy; there is a sweet reasonableness to it. There is good will. It is a warm but firm presence in your life. This is described in James 3:17 and elsewhere in the Bible that we ‘ve had discussions about what it is like—about what the voice of God is like. James 3:17 describes the “wisdom that is from above—the wisdom that is from above.” One of the phrases he uses is “easy to be entreated.” It is not the voice of a bully. The spirit that comes with God speaking is not something that is going to run over you. That goes with a few comments I made earlier about Gideon and so on. If you are uncertain, you ask. You ask for more light, more talk, more conversation if you are uncertain. Being uncertain does not mean you lack faith. Don’t run from it. Embrace it and say, “please speak to me more; speak to me again.” [15:58]
The final thing I mentioned—content is absolutely important. There are a lot of things you know that God is not going to say. Now, this is where the Bible sometimes can cause you problems and you have to distinguish the principles of the Bible from the periphery of the Bible so if you find a passage in the Bible that says, “Women should not have short hair.” Right? Now don’t sit up at night and worry about that. One of my old mentors wrote a book called Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers, and needless to say, he was “agin ‘em.” [Laughter] So, I wouldn’t be too concerned about a voice that came to me and wanted to enforce that but if a voice came to me and said, “You can disregard the Bible,” well, I think I hear something that I’ve heard before in that voice and it is not the voice of God. If a voice were to come to me and say I could hate my neighbor or it was quite all right for me to despise a certain class of people, I would know on the basis of the content that that was not alright. If it were to come and make some statement degrading Jesus, I would know the same thing. The important thing here is keep to the principles in interpreting the word or the voice of God to you in terms of the Bible. Keep to the principles. A rule of thumb that I use is that if the Bible says something once, don’t worry about it; if it says it twice, think about it twice. If it becomes a fundamental principle, then use that as a guideline to understand what comes to you as the voice of God. [18:20] If you have a passage that talks about being baptized from the dead, well, you compare that to the rest of the scripture.
Let me make a statement here about this because I know that you are people who reverence the scripture. What you want to believe from the Bible is what is taught on the whole, on a fair interpretation that interprets the Bible by the Bible—what is taught on the whole, and you should receive that as God’s teaching to be respected and used as a standard for everything else that you have. Now, having said that, you learn to know the voice of God by experience. Since you are not infallible, you don’t become someone who is telling everyone what to do because of what you have heard. In humility, you may share what you have heard if that is appropriate but hearing the voice of God does not make a Pope of me and I have to accept the fact that while the one speaking is infallible, I am not. [19:43] The voice of God is not a fix-all. It doesn’t solve all of our problems. It isn’t meant to, and, in many cases, we are expected to proceed in our conversation and in our life and deal with problems for which no solution is proposed. So, we don’t want to think that we have to wait and follow the voice of God and not act and not think and not consult with others and be guided by that. The voice of God is holistic—it serves the purpose God wants it to serve. We learn to recognize it by experience, and we can become very comfortable with it, but we don’t force it to solve our problems. It is, after all, a conversation and a conversation are not something you want to try to force. [20:43]
Let me stop there and we will go back and look at some of these points that we have touched on briefly and try to go into them a little more deeply. [Clapping] Thank you. You are very gracious. [21:10]
I’d like to take you to Numbers 12 for a few moments to drive home something I had said about the primacy of the voice. Numbers 12—and you are familiar with this story I think because this is the story where Moses’ brother and sister became jealous of him and God sort of calls them out in front of the tabernacle to give a little lesson here. So, Numbers 12—it’s talking about Moses, and this is one of the most important statements to understand about Moses because if you didn’t have it, you might not think he was this way. It says here, “The man Moses was very humble more that any man who was on the face of the earth.” That is perhaps the surest way for God to speak to you—is to be humble because that way, He knows that you are not going to misuse it. But others were not humble and in verse 2—Miriam and Aaron are sort of criticizing him and they start picking away at him about who he married. He married a Kushite woman, and they said, verse 2, “has the Lord indeed spoken only through Moses, has He not spoken through us as well and the Lord heard it.” Now, this is deeply indicative of some of the problems that begin to arise when God starts speaking to people or more generally perhaps in terms of the gifts that come among people. Peter Wagner wrote a book years ago called, How to Have A Healing Ministry Without Making Your Church Sick. Actually, that’s a big deal. When the action of God through gifts begins to move in a group, I mean, if the fruit is not there, there are going to be problems. It’s only the fruit that makes the gifts good and tolerable and actually, the gifts help the fruit too. They are meant to go together but, in this case, suddenly the Lord said to Moses, Aaron and Miriam, you three come out of the tent of the meeting—that was the Tabernacle basically—and it was the meeting place between God and the people of Israel—and the Lord came down in a pillar of cloud and stood in the doorway of the tent. The Lord preferred clouds because they are formless and it is very hard to worship a cloud and He said, “Hear now my words, if there is a prophet among you, I, the Lord will make myself known to him in a vision and I shall speak with him in a dream.” And, if you have experience with people who at least seem to be using or working in the gift of prophecy, you will notice how indeterminate many things they say are. Now, it isn’t always like that, but prophecy always or most often will come in a rather vague and indeterminate way. Now, that’s the character of a vision and the character of a dream. If you have a vision or you have a dream, they always require interpretation. They are not self-interpreting. Now, why would that be? [25:24] Think about it. “Not so with my servant Moses. He is faithful in all my household. With him, I speak mouth to mouth.” That’s just a way of saying, I talk to him, and he talks to me. OK?
“I speak with him mouth to mouth even openly and not in dark sayings and he beholds the form of the Lord.” Now, you see here the preference for statement—clear statements that do not require further interpretation. That’s the nature of the still, small voice that comes, not in the form that needs to be interpreted, though it will have implications and so on, but the meaning is clear on the face of it. Now, in some forms of visions, dreams, you get some statements sometimes. If an angel appears to you like he did to many people in the scripture and he gives you statements, that’s the equivalent of how the still, small voice might come to you. But you see here that the difference in your position in life before the Lord or with the Lord determines how the message comes. Do you know that Jesus almost or arguably never had a vision? Isn’t that interesting? Paul had visions. Right? But Paul wasn’t Jesus. He was a way up there, but he wasn’t in the position where there could be simply clear communication without any colorful phenomenon attached with it. Now think about that a moment. Why would this be true? Why would it be true that the individual that is closer to God would have the clearer communication given to them? And I think it has to do with a number of factors. One is—God does not have to get their attention. Why doesn’t He have to get their attention? Because they are already paying attention. They are engaged in that interchange—that way of interacting and being together that characterizes the conversational relationship. [28:42] Another thing that is troubling here is that perhaps they are not in tune with what God wants done. Moses was totally in tune with what God wanted done. Miriam and Aaron were in tune with what they wanted done. So, God got their attention and manifested Himself to them in a way that He didn’t need to get the attention of Moses. What are we to make of that? Well, if we have a vision and it turns out to be of God, we should be thankful for it. We should not feel inferior; we should not say to ourselves, “I must be spiritually inferior, or God would just whisper.” We just give thanks to God for how it comes. The presence of the Bible in our lives—again, the Bible allows us to have an appropriate distance from what God is saying so that we can grow closer to what He has in mind for us. God’s ways of dealing with us are the ways that He knows are best for us. I do believe that we should look forward to the time when that conversation is a quiet, constant, regular interaction as is appropriate for our information, for our guidance, for our usefulness in ministry and in living with understanding as we do the work that God has placed before us.
I think that that is primarily something that is related to our work and our families but the intimate relationships, so we go back to the great commandment, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength” and then you relate that to “love your neighbor as yourself.” How do you do that? [31:07] You’re only going to be able to love your neighbor as yourself if you are living in a conversation relationship with God. Once again, we’ve already said, He is not going to tell you everything to do but as needed you will have the experience of God speaking so that you will be able to love your neighbor as you should. You won’t be able to figure that out on your own because what your neighbor needs is often going to be something you don’t know. So, you need to be told in many cases how to relate to your neighbor. What if your neighbor is your enemy? Well, that’s a special case. Sometimes that’s true and we need to be taught.
Some time back, I was in Ireland in a community where your neighbor might have just killed your son or your daughter or burned your house down or something of that sort and I was talking about this and—about loving your neighbor as yourself—that drew some puzzled looks like how do you do that if your neighbor has done something awful to you? And instead of saying, “Well you just do it because Jesus said,” I asked a question back. Is anyone teaching you how to do that? Of course, they weren’t. No one was teaching how to do that. See, we have to be taught, and we have to get through things like, “Well, if I love my neighbor, what does that mean?” Does that mean that I let them do what they want to do? What is it to love your enemy? Is it to think it’s okay that they did what they did? No, it isn’t. To love your enemy means that you do what is in your power for their good. [33:17] Sometimes that would be to oppose what they want. That’s what is involved in loving people. Now, how you do that and what that means will be something that we need to hear from God about. And, if we don’t hear from God about it, we probably, in many cases, we will not do what our enemy, who is our neighbor, needs. Now, if you are raising children, you know that you love them by not doing what they want to do on many occasions. So, we learn how to love as we stay in the relationship of listening as we seek the voice of God, we search for Him in all kinds of circumstances, and we have to keep that point that we made over and over that hearing God never makes sense except when it is set in the context of a larger kind of life. [34:35]
Now, I want to say a few things about how I do this and just hopefully, it might be of use to you. When I want to hear from God, I very straightforwardly ask Him to speak to me. And then, I watch. I watch what’s happening as I go through my days. When I am studying or talking with others or maybe, in a waiting room reading a magazine or something. I watch for that special kind of presence in thought to come to me. So, first of all, you ask. Would you like God to speak to you about something? And in this case, we are talking mainly about direction. The direction might be, on the other hand, in terms of understanding something, not necessarily what you are trying to do. It could be perhaps just enlightenment that you are seeking so you ask for it. You don’t understand something. “Lord, help me to understand this.” You need to teach. You say, what shall I teach? And so, it’s a broad range of things but normally it comes up with reference to what should I do? I’m seeking guidance. It’s amazing how often we don’t ask for it. I’ve had to take myself to task many times over my failure to ask for what I need. Then when you ask, you expect it, and you watch for it. My experience is that it often comes when I am not really obsessed with that problem. Maybe I’m crossing a street or driving my car or something of that sort and I realize something is coming to me. Then I pay attention and if I am in doubt, I say, “Lord, would you make that clearer?” It’s been important for me to understand that that is not a reproach to God—to say, “Well, I didn’t understand. What does that mean?” That’s just the natural way we would relate to another person, another human being if they say something to us and we don’t understand it, we ask for clarity and that’s what I would do.
Now, if—and I usually will put a limit, 2 days, 3 days—say, “Lord would you please let me know in the next 3 days such and such?” Now, suppose I am given nothing or at least so far as I can tell, my next step is to say, “Is there anything in me that is preventing you speaking clearly to me about this matter?” And then again, I listen. I don’t just go on. I set time limits on these things. I believe that that’s what we should do because the Lord is able to speak to us if He wishes to. If there is something in my attitude or something I am doing that would seem to prevent Him speaking to me, I expect Him to tell me. That may come in various ways, but I don’t believe that God messes with our minds. He’s very clear. He’s very straightforward. He’s not mean. He’s not incapable. And if He has something to say to me, He will say it. That’s my faith. [39:09] And I believe that I have found in practice that that works well.
Now, suppose after that, there is nothing that I can identify as a word to the affect that I am doing something that I shouldn’t be doing or have an attitude I shouldn’t have, then I take that as God’s indication that I should decide on my own. That’s something you may–depending on your experience and background, you may have some trouble with that. When God leaves you to decide on your own, that is your assurance that He will be with you in your decision. Now, if you have come to the view that I have been trying to press on you is that God is preparing us for a life of initiative, on our own, where what we want because sometimes when you say to God, “What do you want?” In effect, He says, “What do you want?” Once again, if you are into raising children or developing people, you will understand how important that is and if you have a problem with that where you think well God would never do that, well, then you need to re-think your theology. Because back of all of the things we’ve been discussing is that issue of our theology. What are we thinking about God? I know that God will be with me when He doesn’t tell me what to do—that His being with me is not a matter of Him telling me what to do and if He doesn’t tell me what to do, then He is not with me. His presence with me is known in different ways than just Him specifying a course of action. So you need to have a breadth of understanding of how God speaks, a familiarity and that will put you in a position to act and other things I haven’t had time to say much about this—I think I mentioned it once—is so important that you know what this is so that when other people tell you that God wants you to do certain things, you will know how to respond to that. The harmful authority that is exercised in the churches and beyond that in society—you have to be in a position to know well enough to know what it is for God to speak that you can respond to people who are trying to lay harmful things on you and others in your fellowship. The only way you can do that is by having a confident knowledge of how God works even when He doesn’t speak. [42:29]
Now, that has worked well for me, and I can recommend that to you on the basis of my experience and what I believe is the picture that comes out of scripture of God drawing people to maturity both in the Old and in the New Testament. It also fits in with what you can find out by reading the lives of those who have lived in the manifest presence of God. In all of their cases, it is a life lived in a conversational relationship. That doesn’t mean He is talking all the time. No conversation is like that. Then you can explore your own experience to test whether or not what I have said to you about the voice of God and how you come to know it and then how you live with it. It is true. Let me stop there. [Clapping]