So, in the time we have, we just try to emphasize really central concepts and the central concept of course of the first talk was about how God creates community and moves into it and does it on the basis of friendship with Jesus. A good way to initiate a conversation with people in public or private places is to ask them, “If they are friends of Jesus?” Normally, that allows them to do some thinking about things they hadn’t thought about on the spot. It makes it possible then to move into a discussion if that is appropriate in which you help them come to know what they need to know in order to live the life that God intended for them to live. [1:05]
The idea of God is the center one and it is important to understand that all human troubles come from thinking of God wrongly. And to get this right is to get right thinking about us because if we are in the image of God, in order to understand ourselves, we have to come to an understanding of God. Now, the way it works is it goes in the other direction too because in reality and especially when God is on the scene, it’s always a back and forth—always a back and forth. This is one of the hardest things to get because we tend to think of ourselves wrongly because we are thinking of God wrongly and then we can’t get right what our relationship with God is supposed to be. So, now, the very idea of hearing God is troublesome. There are many ways that one can get it wrong. One problem is set by the fact that God communicates with us in many different ways. We have to come down on what I call and what others call the “still, small voice” but God does communicate in many ways and sometimes they’re quite puzzling—dreams, visions of various kinds, actions in the physical world and the social world. The Bible is one of the primary ways that God speaks to us and one of the ways that we respond by seeking His face is to turn to the Bible. But then the Bible can kill you, did you know? —because there are so many ways that we can bring ourselves to the Bible and not get anything from it. There is an old saying of the medieval thinkers that responds to this by saying that “if a jackass looks into a mirror, he will not see an apostle looking out.” The problem is the Bible is often a mirror and we see what we bring to it. So, we have to read the Bible on the assumption that we don’t already know what it says. We have to come before it humbly, repentedly—assuming that I haven’t “got it.” That is crucial because when we are talking about God speaking to us, we must always leave it in a position where we are not in control. The desire to control is one of the primary ways that we fail to hear God. The desire to make him say what we want Him to say, and I think that very often, we come to think that some ways are superior to others that if we are spoken to by a vision, that’s better than being spoken to by the Bible. If we are spoken to by the Bible, that’s better than being spoken to by the vision or the spirit and so within the fellowship of believers, you have these huge battles about what is the best way and when you dig into them, you will nearly always find that they are battles about how to control it. So, when we come into the conversation with God, we want to abandon our hopes to be in control. [4:53]
Then that will deal with this issue of motive. Why do we want to hear from God? Do we want to hear from God when we don’t have a need? That’s an interesting question, isn’t it? Or am I actually trying to use God’s guidance just to keep me safe? Many people want to know what the will of God is so they will not have to be responsible for their actions. They can say, “God said it; God did it.” I hope that one of the things you will take away from the first discussion is “responsibility is the heart of our relationship to God.” Responsibility—initiative on our part, and if we aren’t careful and we lose that idea, then we will misconceive the very nature of our Heavenly Father and we will come to think of Him as working with robots. So, that’s a great danger. [6:10]
Now, if we get God’s nature right, then we step into the conversation in a way that is creative and that is another key. That word is another key to the conversational relationship is creativity. I take you to a passage of scripture briefly that you know very well and that is Jesus’ parable of the talents and there are many lessons to be derived from that and of course it is in Matthew 25. That whole passage after the parable of the talents is a teaching about our responsibility. The discussion—it isn’t a parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25—it’s actually about responsibility and the failure of responsibility. Jesus is judging in terms of how people responded to other people. You will remember the words; “in as much as you did it to the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.” That’s calling us into life where the need is great, and it tells us that Jesus is there. And responding to the conversation with Jesus means that we include the other people who are around us that are in need. But, the point of the parable, I think, is very important for our discussions here about hearing God and living in a conversational relationship. You will remember the three people that were given talents. At the top as it were, the 10-talent man and what did this 10-talent man do? He took initiative. He took initiative. He did not wait to be told what to do with it. He was told to have charge of it, to use it but he was not told what to do. The 1 talent man is the most instructive for many people because they had this 1 talent man; his problem was he had the wrong view of God. You remember the words he said, “I knew that you were a hard man, that you reaped where you had not sown, you gathered where you had not invested anything and so I took my talent and hid it. What’s he thinking of? He’s thinking. Well, I didn’t do anything wrong but in trying not to do anything wrong, he did the biggest wrong of all. He did not venture what he had and invest it and count on the Kingdom of God, and we can be on the wrong side of life because we are on the wrong side of God’s nature. Actually, in so far as we have a use for God, it’s probably simply to get our way and that is why so many people only wind up in relationship to God trying to get guidance. [9:54]
Now, you know in any church or religious situation, if you will offer a seminar on how to know the will of God, people will come running. You will always have attendees and if you are in a church where you have, let’s say, Wednesday evening services, you have alternative teaching sessions, you run one on knowing the will of God and people will come constantly. What is interesting is, they will come back—the same people over and over and over. I think this might help us realize that that’s not the focus of a conversational relationship. I mean, if you had a child and they only wanted to talk to you when they wanted to know what you wanted them to do, you would realize there was something wrong in that relationship. So, our problems with hearing come often from the wrong direction of what we are thinking about and if we get God wrong in His attitude towards us and eliminate initiative, then our lives will shrivel and not grow and not expand. It’s helpful I think sometimes to say, “Well, there’s a lot of things that hearing God is not.” Then we begin to look and see how badly people adjust themselves to hearing God and some of this comes out with people who think that if God isn’t telling them what to do all the time, they are out of the will of God. I’ve met people who would say that God tells them which way to step when they are walking—that everything they do is directed by God. This ties into a lot of theology that we don’t have time to go into but that is not God’s idea of how He develops his saints. It isn’t consistent with the view of personality that it has—it comes often by trying too hard. This may sound strange in your ears, but you can try too hard to hear God. [12:50] You want to come to the point where you realize that in a conversational relationship, you have to leave initiative with the other person as well as yourself. Conversation used to be treated as an art before T.V., and the realization that you learned how to respond to people and among other things, you learned how to listen, and you learned how to leave space and how not to be thinking about yourself all the time and so on. You learn conversation is an interchange between people and you can’t make the other person do anything in a conversation. Just try it out in your imagination. Trying to make people do things in a conversation; it’s totally opposite to what actually works. [13:45]
Another form of this is what we call Bible roulette. It’s another way of trying to force God to give you a message. It’s done over and over, and you know what, I think sometimes God cooperates. Have you discovered that you don’t have to be right all of the time for God to work with you? Sometimes you have to remember that if God blesses something, that doesn’t mean it was His preference. Again, we are working on this idea of a certain distance now that God leaves in His relationship to us where we don’t have to be totally right. St. Francis and St. Anthony both used Bible roulette to determine the course of their life. The consequences, I think were not wholly good because one of the things their fingers lighted on was the idea that you should go sell everything you have, and that poverty was an exalted spiritual condition; it’s not. It has had incredible consequences and does to this very day because of a teaching that came down essentially out of Bible roulette. Did God bless St. Anthony? Obviously, He did. Did God bless St. Francis of Assisi? Yes, He did. But just remember, that doesn’t mean that He chose the way of working that they picked out. Now, some people of course don’t use Bible roulette—Bible roulette is of course where you open the Bible and put your finger down and that’s what God told me to do. In the Bible, for example, you still in the book of Acts have people using drawing straws or casting lots to determine what should be done. Now, you probably have never done that. [Laughter] I don’t know—some of you might have but you wouldn’t recommend that as a procedure for a business meeting in church, I hope. Right? But there it is in the Bible. Did God bless it? Well, you’ve had people who have questioned that and so there are real problems when we come to methods of forcing God to tell us something. [16:27] That I think is one of the most important things for us to stay away from—you do not force a conversation. You respect and you wait, and you listen. Now, there are many other things—some very troubling because many people are used to thinking that those in authority bring God’s word and God’s will and so if someone in authority says, “God told me or this is what we should do,” that is often taken—by the way, that often comes from a context where people are not taught to hear the word of God themselves and identify it, and so when the person in authority says, “God said,” they don’t know what to say. [17:26] Well, God must have said it and you know as well as I do what terrible things that leads to and every few years we have another round of that same thing and basically it comes out of a situation where people have not been taught to know and to hear and know what to do and say when someone says, “God told me that YOU should do this.” Of course, there are some people who think that God speaks with a great “booming” voice that if—among other things—that if he spoke, you would know it because it would sound like the voice from the Mormon Tabernacle or something of that sort, you know—a great voice that is coming down and that must be God. Of course, it’s not that way. His preferred way of speaking is in a very quiet way that often makes no noise at all. [18:32]
Just one final thing to talk about briefly and we will come back now and spend more time on that later, but that is—many people have a problem with hearing God because they think God is a “way off somewhere”—space troubles them. For this point, we just simply want to say that God’s way of being locates Him wherever you are—that God is not far off. As Paul said in his sermon on Mars Hill, “He is not far from us because in Him we live and move and have our being.” Space and distance are not a problem for God’s word and that’s where again our theology becomes so important in enabling us practically to interact with God in a conversational relationship. What that means takes a lot of work but we can do that, and here again, the Bible will help us if we read it carefully and learn what God has given us in teaching us about heaven—where heaven is—how He is related to us—what created reality is made up of and we will feel comfortable with God speaking close at hand and with our communicating with Him. You do have to come to the place to where you are aware that when you speak, God hears you and that when He speaks, He is near at hand. Those are just a few of the problems that have come up when we start trying to think about how God speaks, and we will have to stop there for a moment and come back later to talk about some of these points in greater detail. [20:37]
Now, the movie, The Stepford Wives—you remember that? This is a very instructive movie and book. It’s a story about a place call Stepford, of course and it’s a relatively lovely suburban setting with men involved in high tech or professional work and they are making a good living and then they have wives that just take such wonderful care about them and of them and about their home and their children and all of that and they wear frilly clothes and talk endlessly about kitchens and cookies and things of that sort and their children and they are not critical. They are not depressed. They are not picking on their husbands or one another. They are just sweet. Some new person moves in and observes all of this but she’s not like that and she has a friend who isn’t like that either until the friend is taken on a vacation and when she comes back, she is like that. She’s all nice and sweet and frilly and smells good and all of that kind of thing. So, the central figure realizes something is wrong and takes a knife or scissors or something and stabs her to see if she will bleed and of course, she doesn’t bleed. The central figure is now aware that something is happening but after all, she gets it too and everything is just wonderful.
You get the impression that that’s an image of a lot of churches. You want nice people; sweet people who just do what the Lord wills as they understand it, but they have no initiative of their own and actually, they are not persons at all. Freedom doesn’t show up on the horizon. God could have done that. No question about that if He had wanted a world of robots—not of free people who love Him, understand and are participants in His kingdom and in His work. Now, that’s possible. There would be no conversations. There would simply be direction and conformity and that is a picture that robs many people of the kind of initiative and freedom that goes into the kind of relationship we talked about in the last hour—friendship–cooperative creativity. Subordination, yes but not forceful direction that leaves no possibility of initiative on the part of the person and this is where casting God in the character of the cosmic boss comes in. It will eventuate in a situation where God is thought of as a great unblinking cosmic stare that just sees everything and freezes everything as in some way, He has decided it should be. One of the greatest effects on this is prayer. If you think of God in this way, then you will pray and you will conclude your prayer with, “if it be thy will” and you are off the hook. Right? Because now you have signed off and for many people, it’s “if it be thy will” is like “over and out.” It’s the way you sign off and you are not responsible now for anything that happens. If God was gonna do it, He’ll do. If he wasn’t gonna do it, He won’t do it. Right? So, now, in thinking about what goes wrong in the human divine interaction—when you surrender initiative—when you do that, you make prayer meaningless. Prayer is kind of like spiritual “happy hour.” You feel better maybe if you do it; it lifts your spirits. It does something for you, but it makes absolutely no difference in what God is going to do. OK? Now, when I say that, often, people hang on me the whole open theology agenda; please don’t do that. [26:42] God has His purposes, and He will accomplish them. Within those purposes are developing people who have a role in what He decides to do in some cases. If you don’t believe that prayer makes a difference in what God does and does not do within the sovereign purposes of His will, you won’t pray because it’s meaningless. That’s why one of the hardest things to do in church is to get people to pray. You would think they would read Jesus’ statement, “My house is to be a house of prayer” and say well, that’s what we do at church; we pray. Imagine a church that did that rather than treating it as a side operation. [27:44]
Now, I need a lot of time to elaborate on that because what that would look like is hard for people to imagine because they have been to so many prayer meetings. Probably if the church decided to get into prayer in the way that Jesus presents it, the first thing they would do is stop having prayer meetings. Of course, they would come together, and they would pray together but there would probably not be special meetings for it because it would become the main business of all the meetings, but that would cut in on the performance time so, it would have some problems. I just use that as an illustration. You see, if you interpret the conversation simply as God telling you what to do, then your initiative is gone—not only your prayer, but your action. Does it make any difference? Is it something that wouldn’t happen if you didn’t do it or would you say God’s gonna do it anyway? All of that is extremely important in interpreting the problems that come with hearing God.
Hearing God is an honest exchange. Conversation is an honest exchange between people where you are dealing with things that you are doing together. In prayer, I am talking with God about what we are doing together. [29:39] I am not putting in an order. I am not dropping a coin in the Coke machine—now, it’s a bill. I am participating in something that God and I are doing together, and I am invoking His power in that activity—joint activity is the key to understanding how the conversational relation goes. Now, that conversation, very often, is not about what I am supposed to do. It’s about all kinds of things. People in a conversational relationship where they are working together don’t just talk about what they are supposed to do. What else do they talk about? Just think about it a moment—all sorts of interesting things—things that are funny; things that are sad; things that are glorious—that’s the nature of a conversational relationship. Most of what God has to say to us is not about what we are supposed to do. A lot of it is just teaching; helping us to understand things and appreciate things. There is the element of what we are doing together, and we talk about that, but that’s only part of the conversation. In the conversation of course, there is subordination where that’s appropriate and it is appropriate in many contexts—there is no question about who the boss in that conversation is. God is the boss. The question is how does He relate to His people? He relates to them in such a way as to leave them free to grow and take initiative: not to be a Stepford wife sort of Christian. It’s really important for us to have that picture because so often folks are frozen in that posture—that God has re-wired them. They are predestined to be conformed to the image of Christ and that comes over as something that God is just doing in them rather than as something they are attaining in a living relationship with God. [32:25]
Now, I have to say something a little more about space and distance because, for many people, this is really troubling. We are talking about being with God. This is the “With God” life. How are you with God? You are with God in conversation. You are speaking and you are hearing, and you are acting. If you think God is way off—see, when many people pray—“Our Father, who art in Heaven”—they think, our Father, way off and a way later. Where is God from here, you see? That’s the question that many people have in mind. I’ll just try to experiment with you a little bit here. We know that in general, spirit is a different kind of reality than matter but sometimes we think that it is outside of matter—separated apart from matter and is not accessible and so we think perhaps if we are going to talk with God, it’s kind of like talking on the telephone or some other device where you have to go through matter to get there and if it’s just the thin air, well, still, it’s matter and space and people don’t have a sense of the nearness of God. [33:57]
Well, I want to try just a little thought experiment with you. We know that there are different kinds of motion. We know for example that matter moves at a certain speed—an automobile, for example or an airplane. We know that it’s possible, for example, to break the sound barrier. And for most of us, we may actually remember when that happened with an airplane and an airplane wound up going faster than sound goes and piled up the waves and they make a big noise when you break the sound barrier. Now, matter is going faster than sound. Then we know that light goes faster than sound. There is a lot of talk in science about breaking the light barrier. So, you have the speed of things—the speed of sound—the speed of light. Now, let me give you another speed—the speed of Spirit. [35:10] How long does it take your mind to travel from the moon to the sun—from thinking about the moon to thinking about the sun? How long does it take that? How long? Is that faster than the speed of light? So, just think a moment about the speed of spirit and put that on a continuum with light and sound and matter. Now, we have some interesting things in the scripture on this. Like, in 1 Cor. 15, Paul is talking about the transformation of people at the coming of Christ and he says, “in a moment in the twinkling of an eye.” That’s 1 Cor. 15:52. How long is the twinkle of an eye? How long does it take? Actually, there are some people who have tried to time it, and I am not sure how you would do that. They have tried to time the twinkle of an eye. It’s very short to say the least. Paul is talking there about the speed of spirit and the fastest thing he knew of was the twinkle of an eye. [36:35]
Twinkles of eyes are interesting. At the Reagan museum there in—close to where we live—they have a picture of Ronald Reagan that was provided by some eastern nabob with a lot of money, and they have arranged for there to be twinkles in his eyes. They have put little diamonds in, and I guess Ronnie had a twinkle in his eye. That’s pretty fast, see.
How long does it take for our thoughts to go to God—for His thoughts to come to us? Space is not a problem. Distance is not a problem in the area where we are carrying on the conversation between ourselves and God. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a book about what happens to you after you are dead if you still have desires and thoughts of things because according to them, once you are freed from your body, if you have a thought, it’s real. If you have a desire, it’s real. It’s kind of instructive, though I am not big on The Tibetan Book of the Dead but, it’s instructive when you try to think about the speed of spirit and you might now think, “Wow, I wouldn’t want my desires to be fulfilled the moment I have them.” Right? For one thing, you’d be going in all sorts of directions and really, that’s what The Tibetan Book of the Dead is about is the horror of living in a situation where immediately you have everything you think and desire. It makes you want to be reincarnated on their story. So, maybe, that will help you fix this idea of speed and spirit and when it comes to our prayers, our hearing God, our acting in response to God, we are not hindered by space and by distance. Paul puts it marvelously in Acts 17:29, “He is not far from each of us. In Him, we live and move and have our being.” Speaking of the material world, in Hebrews 1:3, “Christ upholds all things by the word of His power. The logos is present throughout all of physical reality. He is nearer than our breath.” Now, all of that is just so much theory without your experience of it and you can come to the place in your experience where when you speak to God, it is like speaking to someone seated next to you except it needs to be a little closer than that. It’s hard to depict that easily. You will hear people say, “Well, you know I pray, and my prayers don’t get above the ceiling.” Well, they’ve got the wrong conceptualization anyway because God is beneath the ceiling. Right? See, that space thing has got the best of them, and they have to re-think the nature of spirit both in themselves and in others. You may need a little description of spirit. You can just try on spirit is un-bodily personal power—un-bodily personal power. [40:55] So, when you try to come to think about the relationship now between you and God, not just in terms of conversation, but in general, you want to remember that it is not laid out in space. It is the communion of spirit. You are a spiritual being. God is spirit and He is looking for those who would worship him in spirit and in truth. [41:30]
One of the many theological profundities that comes out of John 4 is what he says about worship—that it is not located to place. He was talking with this lady and things were getting a little tight for her and so she begins to negotiate for room by raising a theological issue. Do you worship God in Jerusalem or here in this mountain? So, now they could have gone around and around on that for a long time, couldn’t they actually? That battle is still going on in many respects. Where is a holy place? Jesus simply says, “It doesn’t matter.” God is looking for people to worship Him in spirit, not in Jerusalem and when you come to worship at the level of spirit, there are no bushes to hide behind, no high walls to separate so you worship in spirit and in truth.
Did you know you can’t lie without your body? [42:54] You can’t hide without your body. One reason we love little children so much is because they haven’t learned to hide their spirit in the body. They can’t do it. Now, they will learn pretty quickly. You won’t have to teach them. They will learn how to lie, and they will use their body and their words to do that. It’s an absolutely fascinating thing to watch a little child go through that stage where they can’t lie and watch them learn and watch the display on their face as they are learning and you see that they know what they are doing and, yet they are going to do it. See? And then, of course, comes the reaction and there is a long process and then we have to wait until we enter second childhood and the thing about second childhood is that you don’t care what people think anyway. See, worshipping in spirit puts us in a different level and that is where the conversation goes on. You can’t fool God. [44:21]
I remember hearing a person teaching about prayer. He said, “You should never pray for the same thing twice because that way God would know you didn’t mean it the first time.” Now, you have to think about that just a moment. Right? Like God wouldn’t know you didn’t mean it the first time unless you said it the second time? Bad theology. So, in our thinking about our conversation with God, we are drawn to the level now of complete honesty because we know that there is no place to hide—that distance, space doesn’t hide us from God. Now, of course, our Psalms tell us that, “If I go to the depths of hell, you are there; I can’t get away from you.” That’s the nature of the spirit. So, when we think about hearing God, living in the conversation with Him, then we are thinking about laying down all of our devices to use Him and to impress other people and we are able to just move into the area of simplicity and truth. [45:40] What a relief! How sweet it is not to try to manipulate God—to go to the Bible and not try to dig something out that we can perhaps use to get Him to do something or perhaps to get someone else to do something. Just to sit before it and receive the word that comes from Him through the scriptures. The scripture is an unbelievable treasure and you know, one of the things that is so sad is to see people who have good hearts and they are trying to do justice to a partial vision of God and then they wind up having to confront the scriptures and it’s saying things they don’t want to hear and it’s the story that’s repeated over and over for sincere people is they wind up taking a vacation from what God has laid out and made available to everyone but in a form where it can be abused. The living word, Jesus came in an incarnation that allowed Him to be abused and crucified. The written word also gets crucified because people don’t come to hear what God has to say and often, they become just what Calvin called, “a letter learned scribe” [47:20] and they basically use it to work up things that are their own. Whereas, if you come before the scripture with a true heart–an open heart to God; you are not trying to engineer anything or get an answer, grind something out—then it will speak to you not just as a written word, but you will see the word light up. One reason why I encourage people to memorize passages is, once they begin to take that in, it becomes a substance in them and in their bodies as well as their minds and things begin to come out of that that they have never seen before. The connection between that and reading something into it—the test is always the same—is this serving what I want or is this serving what God wants? The test there again is more –is it an act of love—an act of God’s power—or an act of my will and an act of my power? Now, the conversation breaks down—that tendency to try to take control of the word of God—and it is a very troubling and dangerous thing. Paul watched it going on all around him and he was very careful not to do that—not to corrupt the word of God by injecting his own ideas and his own abilities but to turn it loose, watch it work as a living voice in the hearts of the people that he was speaking to. That’s what made him so confident of the gospel. You remember, he says in Romans 1, “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ because it is the power, the power of God to salvation.” He saw that in action. That’s what he depended upon when he went—without any preparation—wondered into a town, goes to a place where the people start speaking and watched the word of God speaking now in public. A public presence as it seized the lives of people, and he describes that over and over and that’s what we come to know when we come to the point where we live in the conversation and watch its effect all around us. A conversation is not a private conversation.
OK, I think we’ve done it for this morning. Thank you very much.