"A matter of hearing God's Voice and making a response"

Various Passages

March 19, 2000

Introduction: The musicians among us and the music lovers here today will recognize the name Carlos Santana. Mr. Santana is a guitarist who has sold 40 million albums and won 10 Grammy awards. He came to Christ in 1981 under the influence of his wife, Deborah, and would testify today that divine intervention has guided his life. He is quoted by Mike Angell in an article as saying: “My reality is that God speaks to you every day.”
While meditating one day Santana had a vision with a message. As he described it to Guitar Player magazine’s Andy Ellis, he was told in his vision to “hook up with people at junior high schools, high schools, and universities.” He was told “the youth of today need more positive music.” Out of that vision came the album, “Supernatural” which won 9 Grammys this year and has sold 8 million copies.
Andy Ellis says that Santana doesn’t so much create music as he receives it. Carlos sees himself as a channel. While many guitarists select their instruments based on wood or wires, Carlos Santana picks equipment that allows his spirit to come through.
Carlos Santana’s reality is that God speaks every day!
Reading through the monthly letter from Focus on the Family this week, I noticed Diane Passno saying, “People often wonder what it is like to serve under an organizational president who views ‘success’ in terms of listening to God’s voice, rather than experiencing rapid growth or receiving worldly praise.” Dr. James Dobson apparently also thinks that his reality is listening to God’s voice.
So what are we to make of meditation, visions, and hearing God’s voice? Is it possible that God still speaks today? Is that a daring idea? Or is the idea of God speaking today presumptuous and maybe dangerous? Or could it be even more dangerous and presumptuous to try to live life with any hope of success without hearing God’s voice? Could it be that God will make known His vision for us by speaking to us? I have shared with you my experience as a young Marine in Vietnam reading the book of Jeremiah, when God spoke so very clearly in response to my need for direction. I have told you about my days in Indonesia as a veteran missionary when God spoke to me so very clearly in response to my need for direction.
So what do the Scriptures say? For who is Carlos Santana… and James Dobson… and Jerry Cline? And what does it mean that God speaks, that we might hear His voice? Were our souls made for a rich, interactive relationship with the Creator, or were they not? How does that happen practically speaking, hearing God’s voice? How can I know it is His voice I hear? What if it is His pattern to speak and just now in my circumstances I don’t know what to do, but He is not speaking now? Well, this morning, we will answer some of these questions, but we may not get to all of them!
Consider with me this morning a number of questions and a number of Bible passages, and let’s see if we can go from this place this morning with more understanding than we came with.
Let’s ask first, Does God speak today? Hebrews 3 and 4 would say yes.
Heb 3:7-8 -- Therefore, just as the Holy Spirit says, "TODAY IF YOU HEAR HIS VOICE, DO NOT HARDEN YOUR HEARTS…”
Heb 3:15 -- While it is said, "TODAY IF YOU HEAR HIS VOICE, DO NOT HARDEN YOUR HEARTS…”
Heb 4:7 -- He again fixes a certain day, "Today," saying through David after so long a time just as has been said before, "TODAY IF YOU HEAR HIS VOICE, DO NOT HARDEN YOUR HEARTS…”
What has always interested me about these verses is this: As part of the book of Hebrews, they were written in the first century. That’s the first time frame to keep in mind – “Today” is at least the time in the first century when the writer of Hebrews said it to his readers. If his readers heard God’s voice, they were not to harden their hearts.
But the writer of these first century words in Hebrews is quoting verbatim from Psalm 95: 7-8 – “For He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand. Today, if you would hear His voice, do not harden your hearts…” That’s why in our Bibles these words are set apart in some way. The NKJV puts them in italics and sets them off with quote marks. The NASV puts them in quotes and uses upper case letters. So “Today” is also the day of the Psalm writer, several hundred years before the first century.
And finally, of course, the “Today” of Hebrews 3 and Psalm 95 is the day of Israel’s rebellion in the day of Moses, several hundred years before the days of the psalmist. If “Today” is Moses’ day, if it is David’s day, and if it is a day in the first century, then we can conclude that “Today” is also today, this day, March 19, 2000. And “Today” is each day that we live and breathe. See how the writer of Hebrews says it: “(3:13) …but exhort one another daily, while it is called “Today,” lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin…”
The Scriptures make this same point that God speaks today in other ways. Did you notice the reference in Ps. 95 to us being the people of His pasture, the sheep of His hand? When the Lord Jesus speaks to the disciples in John 10, He describes Himself as the good shepherd. John 10:1-5 says, "Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter by the door into the fold of the sheep, but climbs up some other way, he is a thief and a robber.
2 But he who enters by the door is a shepherd of the sheep. 3 To him the doorkeeper opens, and the sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. 4 When he puts forth all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. 5 A stranger they simply will not follow, but will flee from him, because they do not know the voice of strangers."
As the Lord used these images with His disciples, so we who are His disciples today can expect to have the same kind of relationship with Him.
Does God speak today? I’m persuaded the Scriptures say He does. If we are His sheep, and if we are alive today, there is opportunity to hear His voice.
A second question: How does He speak? The Bible tells us He speaks in several ways. First, we know He speaks with a voice. (That may strike you as absurd, and not worth saying, but stay with me!) When the young boy, Samuel, in I Samuel 3, is lying down, the Lord calls to him. Samuel answers, “Here I am!” and runs to Eli’s bed. But Eli hasn’t called him. Samuel goes back to bed. Two more times he hears a voice calling him, and twice more he goes to Eli. Finally, (1 Sam 3:8-10) “… Eli discerned that the Lord was calling the boy. Then Eli said to Samuel, ‘Go lie down, and it shall be if He calls you, that you shall say, "Speak, Lord, for Your servant is listening.”’ So Samuel went and lay down in his place. Then the Lord came and stood and called as at other times, ‘Samuel! Samuel!’ and Samuel said, ‘Speak, for Your servant is listening.’” Samuel was hearing a voice, a voice that sounded like Eli’s.
The new president of the university was introduced in chapel this past Monday. Dr. David Gyertson shared his testimony and told about his father hearing a voice as he put the car in reverse and started to let the clutch out. The voice said, “Where is David?” The dad didn’t know, so he got out of the car and found his 2 year old son sitting on the ground, straddling the right rear tire. His left leg was on the inside of the tire, his right leg on the outside, and he was pretending to play the drums. Dr. Gyertson attributes the voice his father heard as the voice of God or one of God’s angels.
When Peter Marshall, the great minister of the Gospel, still lived in Scotland (before coming to the States and rising to the position of Chaplain of the United States Senate), he took a shortcut home one foggy, pitch-black night across the moors of Northumberland where there was a deep, deserted limestone quarry. As he walked along, he heard a voice calling him with great urgency, “Peter!” He paused in his walk and answered, “Yes, who is it? What do you want?” Because there was no answer and thinking he was mistaken, he started walking again.
Then he heard the same voice, with more urgency, say, “Peter!” Marshall stopped again, and while trying to look into the darkness, he stumbled. Falling to his knees, he put his hand out to catch himself, and felt nothing. He felt in a semicircle around his knees and realized he was at the very edge of the abandoned quarry. One more step and he could have lost his life. (Catherine Marshall tells that story in A Man Called Peter, and Dallas Willard retells it in his book, Hearing God.)
Peter Marshall heard the voice of God or the voice of one of His messengers.
And who can forget the account of Paul on the road to Damascus where Acts 9 tells us he heard a voice? “And the men who journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice but seeing no one.”
God speaks in a voice.
Secondly, we know from the Scriptures that God speaks with a small voice. Stay with me. This is an important distinction from our first point. Some who wonder whether God still speaks today have never had the dramatic experiences like those I’ve just described. It is not hard to remember Elijah’s experience of hearing the voice of God. In 1 Kings 19, the Lord was not in the great wind that tore into the mountains and broke rocks in pieces. He also was not in the earthquake that shook Elijah’s cave, nor was He in the fire that passed by the lonely prophet. Elijah heard the voice of God in a still small voice that followed all these spectacular events. God’s still small voice was “the sound of a gentle stillness,” a gentle whisper of a voice. I think we can safely say that God more often speaks in a small voice than He does in the urgent, dramatic illustrations I’ve shared.
Consider with me Proverbs 20:27. “The spirit of a man is the lamp of the LORD, searching all the inner depths of his heart.” In the Jerusalem Bible this proverb says, “Man’s spirit is the lamp of Yahweh, searching his deepest self.” God uses our spirit to communicate with us. Those communications take the form of our thoughts, though the thoughts do not originate with us.
This is how Willard says it in his book: “As we grow in grace, God’s laws increasingly form the foundation of our hearts; His love is our love, His faith our faith. Our very awareness of our actions, intentions and surroundings then bears within it the view that God takes, bringing things into the clarity of His vision just as a candle might illuminate what is on our dinner table. Therefore, the spirit of the individual truly is the ‘candle of the Lord,’ in the light of which we see ourselves and our world as God sees. In this way we are addressed by Him, spoken to by Him, through our own thoughts.
This is something you can and should test by experiment. Those who begin to pray that God will enlighten them as to the nature and meaning of the processes that go on in their own soul will begin to understand. They will begin to see their spirit functioning as the candle of the Lord.” (end quote)
So the light of God begins to shine on all our parts, “the inner depths of our hearts.”: what we think about our family, our profession, our fears, our sexuality, our reputations, our appearances, and a 1000 other parts of who we are. When we realize that those thoughts, the things we are thinking, continue to recur or persist, then we ought to give them special attention. What might God be trying to say to us? This is no doubt what the Psalmist had in mind in 139:23 – “Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me and know my anxious thoughts…”
G. Campbell Morgan, one of the great expositor’s of a previous day, said it this way: “To the individual believer indwelt by the Holy Spirit there is granted the direct impression of the Spirit of God on the spirit of man, imparting the knowledge of His will in matters of the smallest and greatest importance. This has to be sought and waited for.”
One of our youth pastors in Texas used to say quite regularly, “Give expression to those impressions.” What he meant was that we should find ways to express the things that we are being impressed with. When I feel a nudging of the Lord, when a thought is going round and round in my head, I need to do something. How many times have we thought to call someone and it turns out our call was so timely and helpful? Mike Manganello shared with the church family one Sunday evening about being burdened to visit someone. When he rang the doorbell of the person he was to visit, that person had just hung up from a call with a parent where the parent had said he/she would pray that someone would come by and encourage this son/daughter.
Many of us have had these experiences where God spoke to us in a still, small voice. He used our thoughts to communicate His will.
God speaks in other ways as well. Not only does He speak audibly, not only does He speak quietly, He also speaks by way of messengers. I read this past week a verse that makes this point. In Acts 23:9, the scribes of the Pharisees stand up to defend the apostle Paul from the Sadducees with this comment: “We find no evil in this man; but if a spirit or an angel has spoken to him, let us not fight against God.”
The Christmas story is full of accounts of the angels of God coming as messengers to deliver God’s words to His servants. Hebrews 1:14 makes the point further: “Are they (the angels of vs. 13) not all ministering spirits sent forth to minister for those who will inherit salvation?” And, of course, there is that famous verse in Hebrews 13, verse 2: “Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some have unwittingly entertained angels.” What might God have said to a godly host over a meal where angels were the guests???
I could tell you a recent story related to me by a friend, but we’ve got more questions to answer this morning. You have heard these kinds of stories, and often they have come from solid, mature people of faith who give us little reason to doubt their experiences.
God also speaks in dreams and visions. Paul was led into Europe by God speaking in a dream through the man of Macedonia in Acts 16. We all remember Peter’s rooftop vision in Acts 10, and who can forget Ananias’ feelings when God told him in a dream to go and lay hands on the fire-breathing Saul, now blind in Damascus (Acts 9)?
I’ve shared with you from this pulpit the dream the high school girl in our Texas church had. She had been looking for her watch, had looked high and low, prayed, and during the night dreamed that she saw her watch in the Kleenex box on the bathroom counter. When she awoke, she went to the tissue box and there found her watch!
Fifth, and finally, God also speaks by His Spirit and by His Word. We know the Word of God “is living and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” How often have we been reading the Word and have been pricked by the Holy Spirit as to something we need to do or stop doing, etc? That, my friends, is the voice of God.
There is a third question I want to address this morning, and it is this: How do we hear God speak to us? If He still speaks to His children, His sheep, and if He uses different mediums, what do we have to do to hear His voice? I want to offer several suggestions by way of an answer.
First of all, we will not hear God speak if He is not speaking! Profound, right? The verses of Hebrews 3 and 4 say, “Today, IF you hear His voice…” We must let God be God, and we must acknowledge that He speaks when He wants, and He is silent when He wants. The text surrounding Samuel and his first experiences with the voice of God make it very clear that “the word of the Lord was rare in those days; there was no widespread revelation.” (1 Sam 3:1) Consider also Job, who had no clue what God and Satan were up to when he began to suffer horribly, and God chose to be silent during those early days of his pain.
As much as we might like to have a word from God about any particular issue or request, we must allow Him to be silent if He chooses to be silent. After all, it is His voice!
Secondly, we can hear His voice if we seek to hear it. Saul, who would become the apostle Paul, is the rare exception where God bowls him over and takes his sight from him. It is rare that God will vie for our attention. Our experience will be more like what God says to Jeremiah: (29:12-13) “Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart.” The book of Proverbs makes the same point over and over.
So how do we seek him with all our heart? We might fast, showing God that our desire for spiritual realities is more important than physical needs. We might designate a certain period every day that we set aside to pray and listen. We must certainly deal with any known sin in our lives that would block His voice from our hearing.
Thirdly, in knowing how we hear God speaking, we expect that His voice will be in accordance with His written Word. We can immediately reject all the voices, dreams and visions that would be contrary to His Word. What He has said in His word is sure. What I hear, and what I think I hear, may not be as positive or indisputable as what is written. I like how Tony Evans said it this week on the radio. There are three dimensions to the will of God. One is comprehensive. That covers everything, and only God fully knows that dimension. A second dimension is His moral will. We have that in the Scriptures and we can all know it to the depth we want to study the Book. The third dimension is His personal will for us. We won’t find in the Scriptures whether God wants us in Indiana or Indonesia. But He does have a place where He wants us to be. So we need to hear Him tell us what His will is for us personally. And that will of His will never be contrary to what He has defined by way of guidelines and principles from the Bible.
As we look to God for the vision He has for us, for us personally and for us together as a church family, we must expect to hear His voice. He will let us know the avenues we should take. We know those avenues will be within the principles outlined in His Word. We must wait upon Him for His direction. He will reveal it in His time through some medium of His voice.
Friends, we are surrounded in our world by people who need to see and understand that God is at work in our world. These are people in our neighborhoods, on our campuses, in our workplaces, in our families who are looking for someone who has a handle on life.
Who else lives better than the one who has a relationship to God through Jesus Christ? Who else lives better than the one who knows his calling, who has a vision, who understands when God speaks to him/her?
I invite you today to decide to become that kind of individual! I invite you today to become a Jacob’s ladder—one who connects this world with heaven’s kingdom! I invite you today to decide to become an envoy who brings a word from God into a world of human affairs run amok!


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