Hearing from God (Part 3 of 4)

In the first two posts, we’ve looked at the wisdom of being careful about what we say, and that this is difficult because what we speak reflects what is on our hearts.  Reading the Bible and praying regularly will make our hearts more like God’s heart (add praise and worship to the list too, I forget to mention them).  Now let’s circle back to the original question and look practically at when we should speak and who we should share with in our daily lives. 

Unfortunately, there isn’t a simple black and white rule we can use in this area.  God rarely makes things that straightforward.  Proverbs 16:1 says, “The preparations of the heart belong to man, but the answer of the tongue is from the LORD.”  From this, it seems that our job is draw closer to God so our hearts can be cleansed or prepared.  He then will guide us with what we should say in every situation we find ourselves in.  Many times He will use what we read in the Bible, hear in sermons, or even our own judgment to guide us.  However, He may also speak to you in a still small voice and we need to be open to hearing and obeying it.  I would highly recommend you Google and listen to Jamie Winship’s “Hearing from God” sermon series to learn a bunch more about hearing and obeying.  He also talks about how God created each of us with a unique identity He wants to use for a specific purpose, and the many tactics the enemy uses to keep us from fulfilling that purpose. 

In case the idea of God speaking directly to you is new or you’re not sure you believe it is possible, I’d like to share a couple quick examples I’ve seen personally in the last couple of months.  First, while I was on the road moving from Florida to California, I stopped and filled up on gas around lunchtime in a little town in Colorado or Arizona.  I was headed towards the Grand Canyon and had been fasting and praying that day.  As I started to drive out of town, I heard a voice telling me to stop and eat at Denny’s.  I felt like I was supposed to share with someone there.  The voice also said that I would need it for the Grand Canyon.  The voice wasn’t really audible, but more like a thought.  My initial reaction was that my stomach was trying to trick me out of fasting for the day.  However, it seemed odd that I would be resisting and feel annoyed about not fasting, if it was just me trying to convince myself.  So I swung my trusty Honda into Denny’s and went in to get some food.  The waitress was a girl a few years younger than me, and she was pretty brief with me, so I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to share.  However, as I sat there, I noticed the restaurant had been decorated with paper hearts for Valentine’s day, and the hearts had words written on them.  There were typical words you see on heart candy like “Love”, “Sweet”, etc, but some also had words like “Respect”, “Hope”, and “Faith”.  Like a tracker stumbling across a game trail, the second set of words that aren’t present in the romance vocabulary of popular culture made me realize a Christian was in the area.  I told the waitress I liked the decorations, and she brightened up quite a bit.  I then said a Christian must have put them up because of those words, and she acted unsure at first, but then agreed the girl who put them up was a Christian who was really nice.  That was the extent of our conservation and I don’t know if it had an impact, but it was what God had wanted me to do.  Also, a direct impact I do know about is the Grand Slamwich I ate helped me to get out of the Grand Canyon the next day.  I won’t go into the whole story now, but suffice it to say I pushed a little too close to my limit by hiking to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back in an afternoon without any food or enough water, and in below freezing temperatures.  I got back to the top as the sunset was fading into night, and my calories were so completely spent that it felt like all the cells in my body were quivering.  When I got back to the warm lodge, I took a hot shower for a half hour, but was cold again as soon as I got out because my body had nothing left to burn.  I was fine as soon as I dragged myself to a restaurant and ate something, but it could’ve been much more difficult to get out of the Canyon if I had fasted the entire day before like I had originally planned.  Good thing I listened to the voice in my head.

Something important I want to point out is that I had no idea what it meant when the voice the day before told me I would need it [food at Denny’s] for the Grand Canyon.  I was puzzled at the time, but the meaning became abundantly clear by the end of the next day, and it is a good thing I obeyed even though I didn’t understand.  Too often we refuse to do what God tells us to do because we don’t see the logic in it.  How could it possibly be what He wants, what is best for us, or fit into His plan for our life?  However, we damage ourselves, and usually others as well, when we refuse to follow Him, and we lose blessings He wants to give us.  We are in effect saying we are smarter and have a more complete understanding of the situation and a better plan than Him.  We may tell ourselves we don’t think that, but our actions show what we really believe.  This lack of trust comes from our incomplete realization of how deeply God loves us.  

Here are just a few verses that talk about His love, but realize it will take time for the reality to sink into your life.  Prior to being crucified, Jesus said, “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends” (John 15:13).  Psalms 139:17-18 says, “How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God! How great is the sum of them!  If I should count them, they would be more in number than the sand.”  Our view of God may also be warped from hurts in our past.  Pray and ask God to reveal and heal those issues, and also learn more about Him and His goodness.  An amazing thing about God is He meets us where we are at.  So if this is new to you, He’ll simply ask you to take a small step that will stretch and strengthen you, but won’t be insurmountable.  And if you’ve been walking with Him for a while and your trust and belief in Him has grown, He’ll ask you to take a bigger leap of faith and challenge you to press ahead into uncharted territory.  The correct answer is to always do what He says with the absolute assurance it is the best thing you can do.  Again, believing this in our minds is fairly easy, but believing through our actions is the tough part to learn.  Our wills don’t like to submit.  However, just like eating at Denny’s made a whole lot of sense to me two days later, if we obey God, especially when it’s against our “better” judgment, we will be able to look back on our lives and see how He steered us around countless pitfalls and into many hidden blessings. 

The second example of hearing from God is when a friend of mine was having a very difficult time recently.  A neighbor in her apartment complex who she didn’t even know knocked on her door and told her everything was going to be all right.  This neighbor couldn’t speak English very well, and as they talked, it turned out that God had nudged her multiple times to go talk to my friend and encourage her.  Her eventual obedience made a huge impact on my friend, who had never seen God work directly like that to reach her.  God speaks and works every day in ways more miraculous than these two examples, but there is nothing like first-hand, recent experience.  Ask God and He will speak to you too.

It is wise to wait to hear God yourself before you act, and also keep reading your Bible and listening to sermons, because it is more common for Him to speak through those methods than speaking in a still, small voice.  Counsel from people we respect is valuable, but God will give us confirmations as well.  Also, take advice with a grain of salt if the person giving you advice has a vested interest in the situation. 

Lastly, once we hear God tell us to do something, we should do it immediately.  We can tell ourselves we are too busy, need to fix something in our lives, or aren’t strong enough to do it yet.  However, this is again a lack of trust.  If He told us to do it, He is saying we are ready for it and He will give us the strength and time to accomplish it.  And if the craziness of life keeps us from moving towards where God is calling us, the enemy will be absolutely sure to keep us busy.  Life almost always gets more complicated and demanding as it progresses, not less.  We just need to trust in God and step out in faith today.

Sorry that rabbit hole went a little deep.  I’ll wrap up applications in the next post (hopefully).  But here’s the story I’ll use as an illustration, since I promised I’d put it in this post.

It was a beautiful early spring day and I was fishing in my kayak off Navarre.  There was zero wind and the Gulf was a mirror-calm lake that morning.  Although I didn’t have GPS coordinates to good bottom-fishing spots and the water was still too cold for pelagics to be around, I started paddling out because I could and the tranquil water beckoned.  It was peaceful and felt good to be alive as my paddle sliced the water and droplets made circles on the smooth surface.  The only noises were the swishing of water and slight hum of the line trolling a plug, and an occasional seabird shrieking overhead or barely audible engine whining ten miles distant.  As time slipped by, the condos on the beach shrunk into tiny rectangular teeth gleaming in the morning sun.  Suddenly, a huge explosion ripped through the morning’s stillness.  I instantly looked back towards the source of the startling noise and saw a huge splash like someone had dropped a cannon off a ship.  As the splash settled 40 yards behind my kayak, and with my heart already racing from the unexpected noise that had pierced the silence, a fin emerged.  All this took place in half a second, and as my eyes locked onto the fin, I was transfixed, or perhaps paralyzed is a better word.  It was two feet tall and headed directly towards me. 

If you know much about fish, you realize that the frequency a fish flaps its tail can tell you something of the size and type of fish it is.  Generally, the smaller the fish, the quicker it moves its tail to swim.  A small fish might flick its tail five times a second.  The shark behind me flexed his powerful body back and forth closer to one time every five seconds, demonstrating the supreme laziness and disdain of only the largest specimens.  Of course, just seeing the size of the fin gave me a pretty good idea of its size, probably five or six times times as long as the fin was tall.  If I had to guess, it was a hammerhead.  I was starting to feel rather vulnerable, and three and a half miles seemed like a very long way back to shore.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have paddled quite so far out, regardless of how calm it was.  The shark continued its ever so effortless and yet deliberate swim towards me.   To make things worse, over the course of a minute the fin gradually sunk beneath the surface and disappeared, still aimed directly at the thin piece of plastic separating me from its cold and watery domain…