You hear from God? And fairies too right?

Even some Christians look at me as if I'm a little crazy, when I tell them I hear from God.   “It sounds a little scary Phil. What if He tells you to kill somebody?”.  Well that would not be God. Its not rocket Science you know, its fairly simple “God good, Devil bad”!

But that Christians are supposed to hear from God is very Biblical. In John 10:27 Jesus says it explicitly “My sheep know my voice”.  If He is the Good Shepherd (and He is) then we who believe and follow are the sheep. If we want to hear His voice though, then we have to follow, and we have to stop believing that He does not want to communicate.  When we don't believe that He wants to "talk" to us, we are going to miss it  even when He does (unless He hits us over the head with a two by four!).

If a man told me that he loves his wife, but that he never speaks to her, I would be strongly inclined to disbelieve him. If you tell me God loves me (and He does John 3:16), but that He never speaks to me, I would be inclined to disbelieve you too.

So you are hearing voices are you Phil? Should we send for those nice men with the white coats from the Waterford to come and take you away?  Well Paul on the Damascus road heard  God's  audible voice, but I never have, not His audible voice. Sometimes God's voice “sounds” a lot like my own thoughts. I first noticed that it was Him though,  when I was talking to somebody else about Him, and wanted to take notes because I had no idea I knew anything about what I was saying.

Some people do hear God's  audible voice, and I do not by any means dismiss it. But you have to test it, in the same way that you have to test if the inner voice is of God (I John 4:1).  From the example of Paul on the Damascus road, it seems that God might use His audible voice when we are not listening, and He needs to get our attention. Perhaps it also does it when He wants to make something very, very clear.

The main way that God speaks to us is through His Word. Most Christians (and some who do not profess to be Christians) have had this experience of particular verses “jumping out at them”. It is as though God is underlining the verses to draw our attentions to them. At other times there is a sudden understanding of a passage that was incomprehensible to us a moment before. I will say more about this in “A trinity of revelations”.  Sometimes God speaks to us through others who may or may not know that God is speaking through them. There are signs everywhere, in movies, in books, in magazines in a sunset. I always have this sensation of God waving to me in a sunset. “Its your imagination Phil” - well God can even use my imagination, but it all needs to be tested. I mean sometimes it is really bizarre, like when God changes the amalgam fillings in teeth into gold (http://www.therisinglight.com/tag/gold-teeth-miracles/).  It is controversial of course, and we do need to ask “Is that God?”, and “Why would He do that?” I would find it hard to believe if I had not seen it for myself. I asked a lady I know personally who received a gold tooth in a meeting in Toronto  “How did it make you feel”. 'Loved' she replied.  Sounds like God to me, and the message she heard was “I love you”. But if it came with the message “go kill Tom” - I would not believe that it was God.

So testing to see if it is the voice of God is important. He will not tell you to murder someone, because in His Word, He tells us “Do not kill”. Likewise He will not tell you to commit adultery. As I say it's not rocket science.  We do need to be aware though, of our ability to be deceived (see future post the heart is deceitful … ). Many times our own desires get in the way.  In particular, in the process of learning to hear God's voice (its the same as the process of learning to follow Him, or to learn to walk) we will make mistakes. That was not God's voice. We will know. But we can learn to recognize the voice of loved ones on the phone, so why not God's voice? 

There seem to be two errors the Christian can fall into. He or she can refuse to believe that anything out of the ordinary is of Him, the other is that God only uses the bizarre. I could conceive of a church called “The church of golden teeth” where, unless you received at least one gold tooth, you were not considered to be saved. Perhaps you did not notice, but we can be creatures of extremes :)

The point though is that the more radical the “thought”, the more careful we need to be. If I believe that God is speaking to me in a sunset, or in a piece of music and I am wrong, there is no real harm done. If I believe that he is telling me to divorce my wife and I am wrong,  the consequences are devastating. The process of confirmation is important. We need to ask for example if it is it consistent with the Word, is it in accord with godly counsel, has the Lord Himself confirmed it in a variety of ways? I have experienced this last form of confirmation when the very same verse,  which seems very pertinent to my situation,  comes at me multiple times in just a few days, and from completely independent sources.  There is a saying that “coincidences are little miracles that God does not get the credit for”. But even here we need to be careful, because  the fellow with the pitchfork can manufacture coincidences too.  A friend of mine took 666 on his speedometer as a sign to do something that later turned out to be a disaster. I could have told him (but I think he knew anyway) that 666 is the number of the Beast (the Devil - Revelation 13:18)!  Sometimes the full confirmation comes only after we have started the path of obedience. “When you walk in the way, you will hear a voice behind you saying “This is the way, walk in it!?

One last thought. I get a little nervous when Christians start of their sharing what they heard from God with “Thus sayth the Lord”. It somehow takes away my right to test it. But I will not let them take away my right, indeed my obligation, to test it.