God’s Speaking… But How Does He Speak? (Part 1)

It was an amazing thing to witness, but when my children were growing up, they were all a little hard of hearing. They passed all their hearing tests, but it was strange. They never seemed to be able to hear the word “chores,” but they could hear “let’s eat” from the next county.

It’s funny how that works. Their hearing was fine, but they didn’t always listen. To hear what was said to them, they had to make a conscious decision to listen.

Today, we start a series on hearing God and how to listen when He speaks. My initial reaction is that hearing God should be easy—after all, in the Bible, God never mumbled. Yet, in reality, I know there have been times when God spoke, and I wouldn’t listen. He might as well have been shouting the word “chores.”

When I first wrote about this topic many years ago, I mentioned that thousands of voices are coming at us every day. I was talking about other people, voices on the radio, in songs, in the newspaper, and on TV. We still have all that, well, except maybe the newspaper, I mean, the type of newspaper that’s made of actual paper. We now, however, have the world of social media. It’s a game-changer, both good and bad. Open an app, and you can read and hear voices blaring at you about any topic, and many of those voices are calling us far away from God and his ways.

In the midst of all those voices, there may be nothing more urgent and necessary today than hearing what God has to say. God does speak today. And he wants us to listen to him when he does so.

The first question many of us have at this point is, “How does God speak?” There are many ways God speaks to us today, some more common than others, some more important than others. But let’s look at a few.

First, God speaks to us through nature. Listen to what the psalmist says here:

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the expanse proclaims the work of his hands. Day after day they pour out speech; night after night they communicate knowledge. (Psalm 19:1-2)

So is the Bible encouraging astrology? Not at all! But when you look at the skies at night, and if you listen, you can hear the heavens declaring the glory of God. I love stargazing. I have an app on my phone that allows me to point to any star and know its name, including whether it’s actually a planet. My oldest child and I spent a few hours late one night, lying on our backs in our front yard, watching a meteor shower. If your ears are listening, you can’t look at the sky without hearing it praise God and his awesomeness.

It doesn’t have to be the sky, of course. Maybe you’ve experienced this at the beach, in the mountains, or alone in the woods, wherever, and you’ve felt close to God. That’s what I mean when I say that God speaks through nature.

Another way God speaks to us is through other people. Yes, those voices we’re bombarded with every day can sometimes communicate the voice of God. Proverbs tells us it’s important to get advice from others:

Without guidance, a people will fall, but with many counselors there is deliverance. (Proverbs 11:14)

There are many folks out there who have good advice for us if we’ll only ask them, and many times God will use them to speak to us.

Of course, hearing God in others can be an iffy thing. In my ministry, when someone came up to me and said, “God told me to tell you…” I was skeptical. If God actually told you to tell me something, I couldn’t argue with that. Maybe it’s something I really did need to hear. I also know people who have done some wacky things because “God told me to.” God gets blamed for a lot of our mistakes.

I had a lady in a previous church tell me that in her prayer time, God told her that if we didn’t do one small thing, he wouldn’t bless us. What it was isn’t important; it was just a small thing and definitely not a matter of Biblical teaching. I’m sorry, but God doesn’t normally bless or withhold his blessing from a church based on something trivial like that. Unrepentant sin among the people or leaders, having an inward focus instead of desiring to reach others for Christ, allowing culture instead of the Bible to determine its theology, those are some reasons that God might not bless a church, but not this.

Of course, it didn’t matter because this lady went and told several other people what she had told me, and suddenly, we were bombarded with people wanting to know why the staff refused to obey God. You can’t win in that situation.

There have been many more times, though, when someone spoke to me, and I immediately knew God was telling me something. I will never forget when my wife and I were praying about, and honestly, wrestling with, a call to the ministry, and there was a point when we finally surrendered completely to God and his call. Days later, my company told me that I could either quit or attend seminary, but not both. I had only days to decide since classes were about to start. What’s worse, I was only a few weeks away from being fully vested in my retirement account. I gave Kim the bad news. Her next words were, “Do you think this took God by surprise? Didn’t he clearly give us his answer already?” And there it was – God speaking.

A word of warning: when you listen for God’s voice through others, you must thoroughly examine both the message (is it biblical?) and the messenger. Know, though, that often God uses the counsel of wise, godly, mature Christians to speak truth into our lives.

More to come…