Starting to Hear the Voice of God

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John 10:27 CSB
My sheep hear my voice, I know them, and they follow me.
Prayer
...
I believe you can hear the voice of God.
I believe that the same God who spoke to the people we read about in Scripture
is the same God who can speak to you today.
....
Maybe,
you have felt like you can’t hear the voice of God.
You hear these stories about people having encounters with God,
and you just think,
“That can’t happen to me.”
You feel confused,
or upset.
You feel like,
God likes you less since you haven’t heard his voice.
---
But let me tell you,
it is very likely,
that you have heard the voice of God,
but you don’t know it,
you don’t recognize it.
Maybe you don’t know it,
because you have a wrong perception on hearing the voice of God.
You might have heard of others having experiences where they hear an audible voice.
Or “getting a word” after letting a Bible fall open.
While those things can happen,
it hasn’t happened to me.
These things can be unfortunate if they are overly highlighted,
because then people reduce God’s relationship to an audible voice that only some appear to hear.
But in my experience,
I hear God,
I hear God’s will through the intimacy of our relationship.
I hear God because I am close to him.
And in our relationship,
it’s a two-way street.
...
We pray to God,
and we need to learn to perceive what he is saying to us.
Talking to God is easy.
Or at least it should be.
You just tell him what’s going on.
You could pray the Lord’s prayer.
You could tell him your problems.
You could give thanks.
Telling God stuff—easy.
But the part that is challenging is perceiving what he is telling us.
For many,
it seems difficult or even unapproachable.
Many think that God doesn’t speak.
But let’s say you do believe
then,
if he does speak,
how can you be confident that it is God who is speaking to you.
...
All I can say,
is that you gain confidence through experience.
And your focus when hearing God should be on building a personal relationship with your Creator.
When your focus is on Him and less on individual actions or decisions,
that is when you begin to hear God’s direction for your life.
Yes, we want specifics,
and God does reveal that at times,
but our main goal in hearing from God is so that we can grow with him.
So that we can worship him
So that we can adore him
So that we can do his will
So that we can bring his kingdom
So that we delight in his creation.
Our ultimate goal in this life is to glorify him.
And hearing from God does not make us cooler,
or superior,
but we hear so that we can glorify God
and grow in our relationship with him.
...
We cannot forget that we are social and spiritual beings.
We were designed for an intimate friendship with God.
Dallas Willard who really helped me out and has influenced this message,
he said this:

Learning to hear God is much more about becoming comfortable in a continuing conversation, and learning to constantly lean on the goodness and love of God, than it is about turning God into an ATM for advice, or treating the Bible as a crystal ball.

Hearing God is not like an 8 ball,
telling us what we should do.
It’s not something we go and approach just to get answers.
Learning to hear God is about building a conversation, a relationship, with God,
and learning to lean on God for everything.
That is my goal with this sermon:
grow in your relationship with God by hearing God.
...
Hearing God?
Hearing God?
Mhmm
This is a crazy idea.
And it can be dangerous.
People have said they have heard from God and then do horrible things in the name of God.
To be honest, it kinda pushes me not to say, “Thus says the Lord.”
But still,
hearing God is super important.
According to the Scriptures,
since the very beginning,
people have heard the voice of God.
And that makes me think.
What if we were made for it?
What if humans cannot function properly without hearing from God?
I think it’s even more dangerous to exist without hearing from God.
We need his help as we navigate in this life.
Our hearts cannot handle making all of the decisions of life.
And then feeling responsible and guilty for our decisions.
We need to partner with God.
We are created to be friends with him.
We want to do God’s will.
And generally speaking,
we are doing God’s will when we are leading the kind of lives he wants for us.
That kind of life that follows the principles which he has revealed to us.
But even then,
it seems like we don’t hear what he wants us to do in the area of work,
or at home,
or for our entire lives.
Like we understand,
we show love.
But like how does that love look like in our lives.
Like,
who does God want us to be,
and what does he want us to do?
My goal is to help you become confident in your personal walk,
a walk that comes from your ongoing, conversational, relationship with God.
...
Brother Lawrence was a monk from the seventeenth century in France.
He said this:

There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful than that of a continual conversation with God. Those only can comprehend it who practice and experience it; yet I do not advise you to do it from that motive. It is not pleasure which we ought to seek in this exercise; but let us do it from a principle of love, and because God would have us.

…
We seek God for God,
We seek God for no other reason than God himself.
We need to get in the mentality of the song we sang.
In the song, Nothing Else,
it says,
I'm not here for blessings Jesus, You don't owe me anything More than anything that You can do I just want You
Nothing else will do.
It is not pleasure which we seek God—but seek God for God.
And we do that we find God and pleasure.
If we seek God for pleasure,
we’re probably not gonna find God nor pleasure.
But if we seek God for God,
we find God and he will give us much more than what we can ever ask for,
because that is the type of God we serve.
...
Have you ever heard pastors,
or preachers say,
“God has told me x”?
I don’t say that often because I like bringing attention to the Scriptures,
but I have said it a couple of times.
I more say, I feel God has led me to x.
But anyways,
I know that when we hear people say,
“God told me”
we feel like,
why hasn’t God told me anything like that.
And then we feel like we are outsiders.
...
God never intended his children to be outsiders in his family.
In fact,
God probably speaks to you as he speaks to pastors and preachers.
You just don’t understand or recognize it as such.
You don’t have the same language or paradigm to understand how God speaks to you.
God accepts you and speaks to you.
It is just very likely that you don’t relate your experience of God’s presence in your life,
and you’re certain that he is present in your life,
but you don’t equate it with the idea of God speaking to you.
...
I’ve mentioned before.
I haven’t heard God’s audible voice.
I’ve gotten ideas that feel like God’s voice.
Like,
I know when I started my walk.
I knew God was with me through prayer,
through the Bible.
I knew God was moving in my life since my heart and mind had changed.
I felt an attraction to teaching,
and letting others know about what God was saying through the Bible.
Experience revealed to me that it wasn’t just me,
it wasn’t just a natural change in my life,
it wasn’t just me having natural gifting or passions,
it was God speaking to me,
God moving in me.
The same Spirit that spoke to people to become prophets,
was the same Spirit that led me to teach and pastor.
The same Spirit that gave us the Scriptures through the words of holy men
is the same Spirit that speaks to the hearts of those who gather around the written Word.
We need God’s Spirit to talk to our hearts.
We need much more than the Word in just our heads.
We need God’s word in our hearts.
We need to live in an ongoing conversation with God, speaking and being spoken to.
A conversation that does not just take place on Sundays.
God’s visits to Adam and Eve in the Garden,
Enoch’s walks with God
and the face-to-face conversations between Moses and YHWH
are all experiences of what a normal human life God intends for us.
God desires to dwell with his people through personal presence and fellowship.
And we need to live by every word that comes from the mouth of God.
...
Saying that we hear from God might be weird to say
because people might think we’re crazy.
But,
as a comedian, Lily Tomlin, once asked,
“Why is it that when we speak to God we are said to be praying but when God speaks to us we are said to be schizophrenic?”
So many people will pray to God this week at least once,
but most of them don’t expect to hear from God.
I’ve alluded to this before:
But I do feel like a reason we are scared to hear from God is that so many people have gotten things wrong,
when they have said that they have heard from God.
Like a false prophet would say that God told him that Donald Trump would be inaugurated as president for a second term in 2020.
Or that the world was going to end in 2012 or 2000.
Like we don’t want to look like them.
We don’t want to give God a bad rep.
...
But,
God does speak.
And not just to church leaders.
Before Jesus was crucified,
He promised his disciples that he would still be with them even though he was leaving them.
John 14:22–23 CSB
Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it you’re going to reveal yourself to us and not to the world?” Jesus answered, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.
The Father and the Son would enter the disciples, including us, and they do this through the Spirit.
Dallas Willard said,

The Spirit who inhabits us is not mute, restricting himself to an occasional nudge, a hot flash, a brilliant image or a case of goose bumps.

The Spirit invites us to a relationship with God.
And there is no way to have a relationship without communication.
...
God walks and talks in our midst.
That is part of the kingdom being present.
Luke 17:21 (CSB)
For you see, the kingdom of God is in your midst.”
...
Our relationship with God is not a consumerist relationship.
Christianity is not a consumer religion.
We don’t just benefit from the merits of Christ.
We are participants,
not spectators.
We seek to interact with God in a relationship of listening and speaking.
Nothing is more central to the Christian life than the relationship you have with God.
In fact,
you cannot be a Christian without a relationship with God.
Look at the titles of popular hymns from church history:

Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us,” “All the Way My Savior Leads Me,” “Lead On, O King Eternal,” “Where He Leads Me,” “Lead Kindly Light,” “He Leadeth Me,” “Holy Spirit, Faithful Guide,” “Jesus Savior, Pilot Me,” “If Thou But Suffer God to Guide Thee,” “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah” and “Jesus, Still Lead On.”

A song I would regularly sing at a senior retirement home would go like this:

He walks with me, and He talks with me,

And He tells me I am His own,

And the joy we share as we tarry there,

None other has ever known.[5]

A relationship with God is key.
In order to have a life that stems from conversations with God,
you need a relationship with God.
...
Before going any further,
I must admit that
yes God speaks to us,
and guides us through his relationship,
but sometimes,
even when we hear his word,
things don’t go as we fully perceived it to go,
God gives us enough information to do what we should do,
but he withholds information,
so that we still do what we should do.
Sometimes, if we had all the information,
we wouldn’t do what we should do.
So while God will speak to us,
some things will remain a secret.
...
Nevertheless,
as disciples of Christ,
we must continue to believe that we can hear from God,
because of our relationship with him.
...
Some guidelines before we look at the nitty-gritty.
Dallas Willard provides these helpful guidelines. // write this
Very helpful.
God communicates to us in many forms.
Humans communicate in different forms:
Facial expressions, texts, likes, speech, written form.
Why don’t we then expect the possibility that God could communicate to his children in different ways?
2. Having the wrong motives
We might be anxious about the future.
So we might try to manipulate God so that we know the future.
That is having the wrong motives.
We don’t want to have the wrong motives.
We want to hear God because of our relationship with him and to do his will,
not because we want comfort and security from our future.
3. Misconceiving the nature of our heavenly Father
If you have the wrong picture of who God is,
you might be thinking he is saying something he is not.
Yes, God is for you,
but he is also for others.
He is also for holiness and goodness.
And that might require you to change, for the good of course.
4. No messages a minute
I don’t think God is going to tell you what to do at every turn.
Maybe at times, he will.
What has happened with me is that he gives me a guiding principle.
But I don’t see the Apostles always receiving communications from God on what specific roads to always take.
5. It’s not all in the Bible
The Bible is important and sufficient for us to live godly lives.
It is enough for us to live the lives God intended us to live.
The Bible does give us direct instructions about many situations in our lives.
Like about honor, illicit sex, idol worship.
It’s enough for us to live fulfilled lives.
But there are things that the Bible is not explicit about.
Like,
the Bible didn’t tell us specifically what songs to sing today,
or what sermon I should preach.
Neither will it tell us specifics about raising your child—it’ll give us principles,
but not every detail.
...
Now let’s get into the nitty-gritty.
There are a lot of exercises you could do to help you recognize the voice of God.
I’m just going to present one today because of time.
Next year,
I’ll present another.
...
But before telling you the exercise,
let me talk about our nature and some guidelines with any practice.
...
God could have created a world of robots,
instead of people who love him and understand his role in the kingdom and their work.
But if we were just robots,
there would be no conversations.
There would simply be listening and obedience.
That robs us from taking the initiative and freedom that is part of a true friendship with God.
God wants us to cooperate.
He wants us to be his partner.
And because we understand what he wants,
and we want what he wants,
we do what he wants.
What does he want?
He wants,
first of all,
for us to love him.
We are to love God.
We love him; therefore we want to please him.
Second,
we understand that humans can talk with God
Something that could help us, and this fits with the exercise that we are going to do.
We need to understand that the events that happen within the Bible could happen to us.
That the humans God dealt within the Bible could have been one of us.
This book is not just a book about doctrine,
about abstract truths concerning God.
The Bible actually prepares you,
trains you to see how God works.
But this leads us to another problem,
and it’s a massive problem within Christianity.
We have simply stopped reading the Bible altogether.
And that pains me.
The Bible is something we take like medicine because someone told us that it would be good for us.
Let me tell you,
that type of mentality,
it won’t get you far.
My mom told me to take these detox pills for my kidney (procedure tomorrow),
I did good for a couple of weeks,
just listening to my mom.
But I have stopped now for several weeks.
Why?
Because I didn’t see the good of it myself.
...
You need to see the goodness of Scripture.
You might see it as God’s word.
Many churches do,
but sadly, only a small percentage of Christians study the Bible with some degree of interest, intelligence or joy.
Most people would rather watch a good show on Netflix or a Youtube video, than read the Bible.
...
Let me help you read your Bible.
We could talk about it.
You can understand it.
And the lives of the people of the Bible can change your life.
Through their stories and writings, you can hear God.
Why?
Their experience was like ours.
They are humans like us.
When we read the Bible,
we need to use our imagination.
How would you respond if you were Moses standing by the bush,
Samuel lying in his room hearing God,
Ananias receiving a vision about Paul,
or Peter getting a dream about dirty animals?
While your reading,
pray for faith,
believing that these things can happen to you.
And whatever you hear,
receive it with humility.
...
Now to the exercise.
This exercise is called lectio divina
Latin for Divine Reading
This has been a common way for Christians to hear from God.
I’ll give you a structure for it,
you could follow it as you grow,
but feel free to change it.
Let’s do it together today.
Before getting started,
it’s important to have a portion of Scripture ready.
You could look it up.
Or pray about it.
When I was preparing for this message,
I was getting a nudge to look at 1 John.
So let’s go to 1 John.
Then,
I would pick an entire section.
Most Bibles have different sections, divided by headers.
Let’s pick 1 John 4:7-21.
Now I haven’t prepared any of the answers so we could do this together and you could see it live, in 4k.
So, I’ve included the different steps on your notes.
But the first first thing
is lectio
which is reading
When you are reading,
listen with the ear of your heart.
So let’s read 1 John 4:7-21
1 John 4:7–21 CSB
Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his one and only Son into the world so that we might live through him. Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, if God loved us in this way, we also must love one another. No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God remains in us and his love is made complete in us. This is how we know that we remain in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and we testify that the Father has sent his Son as the world’s Savior. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God—God remains in him and he in God. And we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and the one who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him. In this, love is made complete with us so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment, because as he is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love; instead, perfect love drives out fear, because fear involves punishment. So the one who fears is not complete in love. We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” and yet hates his brother or sister, he is a liar. For the person who does not love his brother or sister whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And we have this command from him: The one who loves God must also love his brother and sister.
....
The next part is
meditatio
which is reflect or meditate
Read the passage again, slowly,
reflect on one of the following,

• The word or phrase that stood out to you. Why do you think these words resonated with you?

• Who or what you found yourself to be in the passage. How does it feel to be this person or object? What draws you? What are you thinking or feeling about God?

Give yourself a few minutes to do this.
Then ask God.
How doe this connect with my life today?
What do I need to know or be or do?
...
Then
oratio
pray.
Pray about what you have discovered.
Pray however you are led.
You may thank God for something or ask God for something.
Lastly
comtemplatio
rest or contemplate.
Do what you are let to do.
Or just wait on God.
You listen to God.
How did God appear in the passage?
What are you doing to do in response?
Sit in the presence of God,
and just be with him.
...
Take some time this week and practice,
and you’ll see that you’re training your ears to recognize God’s voice.
Make sure again that you do this to grow in God,
not for selfish desires.
Stay meek and humble.
Let’s pray.
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