Hearing God's Voice

Transcript S2E4

Hearing God’s Voice

[00:00]

Welcome to Led Into Love. 

In 1970, when I was 28, God unexpectedly called me to go to Moscow for Him. Those were the days of the Soviet Union. Moscow was the heart of the communist Soviet Union – and that call from God was to take me on an adventure of faith such as not only had I never experienced before, I never thought I would ever experience!

I wrote a book about that called, ‘Led Into Love’ and the title of that book is what's become the title for this podcast and the name of my website.

 [00:54] 

The reason I'm telling you about this isn't to tell you that story right now. I think I've referred to it in at least one of my podcasts before this, and I'll tell you more at other times … because there were many experiences during that.

But actually the only link I want to make with that right now is concerning a young man in his mid-20s who's very serious about God – by that I mean he's someone who really wants to live for God. And he also has read my book Led into Love. And first time I met him was on a FaceTime call. 

He wanted to ask me a question, and he prefaced his question by saying to me how that when he is praying about something that he needs God's guidance in, he prays about it and then in different ways – maybe he'll read something in the Bible or someone will say something to him, or he'll hear something in a sermon in church, or in some way something will come to him that he will identify as God's reply.

[02:05] 

So I could understand all that. Then he went on to ask the real question concerning me, and he said, “When you talk about God speaking to you, do you hear an audible voice?” 

And I said to him, “No, I don't, and I'm not sure that I've ever met anybody who actually has. But the one thing I know is that God does speak to me. I know when He speaks to me. I don't know that He's going to speak to me. I don't necessarily know the wayHe'll speak to me, but when it comes to me … when God speaks … sometimes it will be an answer to prayer, sometimes it will be because of something He wants to get my attention about. But I will know so clearly that God has spoken to me, that when I talk about it and I say, “God told me this,” you could be forgiven for thinking, ah, so does God talk to him in an audible voice?

[03:09] 

Now I want to share in this episode today about the need for all of those (hopefully you) … listening to me right now, who belong to Him or want to belong to Him … the need for you to know God's voice.

[03:32] 

Jesus said something very beautiful. He said many beautiful things, but I'm going to quote one of them right now. And he said: “My sheep hear my voice”.

Now, we know – if you know your Bible – that He was likening himself to a shepherd, and we, His followers, to sheep. And he was using an illustration, a scenario, that would be very familiar to people in that place in that time, when there were shepherds who had small flocks of sheep that they would keep in a sheep-pen overnight. And then they would take them out of the sheep-pen and lead them to pasture. And the sheep – who certainly couldn't speak the language that the shepherds spoke – didn't really understand what he was saying, but the one thing they knew was the voice of their shepherd. And when he spoke, they felt secure. Where he went, they followed.

[04:33] 

Now, that's a simple illustration, but you've probably heard me say already – if you listen to some of my podcast episodes – that God always speaks to His people in a voice that we can hear and in a language that we can understand.

It's easy for you, perhaps – if you've read accounts of God speaking to people, and particularly if you read the many, many accounts in the Bible, Old and New Testaments – you could easily think, “Ah, so there are people that God actually speaks to and, like, they hear Him … like, like an audible voice!”

And I, as a young Christian, heard stories like that, read the same things in the Bible, and I used to long for God to speak to me in an audible voice. I mean, I really wouldn't mind if He did at some point in time!

[05:29] 

But what I've discovered is that getting through to me is God's business. Listening to Him and recognizing His voice is mybusiness.

“My sheep hear my voice,” He said. God will – If you want to hear God's voice and you are willing not only to hear, but willing to obey what He says. Then God will speak to you in a voice you can hear. 

But better than any of the sheep that follow their shepherd, He will also speak to you in a language that you understand – and you will know what it is that He wants to say to you.

[06:16]

Now, this is imperative. It really is imperative. Because what is the point of you knowing God – if you know Him, if you have come to Jesus and opened your heart to Him and you know that you know him … you already have experienced the reality of God.

Now, I talk about that a lot in my previous episode. I talked about the fact that our relationship with God is experiential. To me, that's fundamental. I talked in that episode about our life – the life that we were made for – is the life that comes from God … the life that God breathed into Adam … the life that was in Jesus … the life that the Holy Spirit poured out on (into) those first believers on the day of Pentecost that transformed them.

[07:11] 

But I want to, to focus this down now, today, on the … the … I was going to say ‘necessity’. I sort of hesitate a word to use a word like ‘necessity’ but it's … it's vital!

You can't … you can't … live for God unless God is able to personally communicate with you.

You know, as a young Christian – as a very, very young Christian – my earliest days as a Christian – I was very quickly taught about the need to pray. But praying was kind of like a … I don't know … like a formal affair or, like, like a routine. You know, like you'd get aside and spend time – you used to always call it quiet time – with God. You'd read your Bible, maybe you'd read a chapter from the Old Testament, you'd read a Psalm, you’d read something from the New Testament, and you'd have a prayer list of people and situations that you wanted to pray about, or you were committed to pray for. And then, having done your duty, you'd get up off your knees – or whatever position you'd adopted – and you went about your way, and you could tick that box. 

But this is not relationship, it is religiosity!

[08:28] 

Now I've discovered that to relate to God personally, moment by moment, day by day, is – and should be for every one of God's people – as natural as breathing.

He is our Life, He is our God, and if His spirit dwells inside you then you need to be directed and led and you need to be given wisdom. You need to be given revelation. You need to have understanding that comes from him alone.

God is very jealous about His personal relationship with you.The night I came to know Jesus at that Billy Graham crusade in 1959, something happened that changed me then and there. I knew it, but I did not know one verse of the Bible that I could quote to anybody. Nothing that would explain what had happened. I could tell them the externals: I was there, Billy Graham preached, and to my surprise I felt I wanted to respond to his invitation. And eventually I did. And this happened. But that didn't give me an inkling of what had happened. But it had happened.

What was more than an inkling was what had already taken place in my life. Now the reason why I'm saying this is because that, for me, was the beginning of my relationship with God, the beginning of my relationship with Jesus, the beginning of my experience of God's Spirit in my life. It wasn't something I had any theoretical knowledge about.

[10:13] 

Now, before I came to Jesus, I had times – particularly one time, and I think I was about 12 or 13 years old – that I had a kind of a religious urge to get the Bible and start reading it. And I read it, and I read it … well, for a while, pretty diligently. But nothing touched … nothing leapt out at me. It was really very unmemorable.

After I came to Him – once I knew Jesus – the same Bible began to light up to me. There was something special about that book. It wasn't only because people said there was, but I knew there was. I knew what the Scripture was. We call it the Bible, but it's the Scripture. It's what God has given us to teach us, to inform us, to state truths. There were so many precious things in there.

But now I'm going to say something else. It will never replace God's Spirit!

Now you know that in Jesus’ time, the real opposition, the greatest opposition, that He had was not from the people – if you like, the ‘common people’ … the people who gathered to hear Him preach, the people that He went to, to preach. But it was from the people, of all people, who should have known better. It was the Scribes, the teachers, the leaders … the religious leaders … of God's people – the ones who were the keepers of the Scriptures, the ones who knew the Scriptures so well, the ones who pored over them, the ones who studied them, the ones who expounded them endlessly.

And what did Jesus say to them? One day He addressed these men directly and He said: “You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have life. Yet it is these that testify about me, and you are unwilling to come to me so that you may have life!

[12:22] 

Just think about it. The very scriptures that God had provided – the Law and the Prophets that these people had, the Scriptures that we call the Old Testament, that God intended to be the written form that pointed to Jesus – was the very thing that these people used, not only as a means of not recognizing Him, but as a means of rejecting and condemning Him! Because they had already created their own religion, built on their scriptures – not built on what God had put in their scriptures, that was to point them to Jesus when He came, that in the meantime was to point them to God.

[13:10] 

Open your Old Testament. Read the prophets, read the Psalms. Many of the Psalms are written by David. Read the heart of David. What do you read when you read the psalms that David wrote? You're reading words that are the cry of his heart … the expression of his heart. Who to? To God.

David had a vibrant relationship with God. You know, in one, one psalm, when he said, “I've only desired one thing of God, that I might dwell in His house all the days of my life – to behold the beauty of the Lord…” He just wanted to be in God's house, gazing at God. This was David, the great King of Israel! Yet David, who just wanted to be with God.

So what do people do with many of these scriptures? They treat them like a textbook. They treat them like a body of knowledge. They treat them as a basis for religious systems – not as the Scripture, the God given Scripture that points to Him.

[14:19] 

When Jesus came, He came to reveal God in man, in the way that God wanted to be in you. As I talked about in my previous episode, He didn't come to compete with these great teachers and expounders of the Scriptures. He came to be the fulfillment of the things that they claimed they believed. 

People that these same ‘men of God’ so-called, referred to as “ignorant and unlearned” – they were the disciples of Jesus.They couldn't understand the why He had such a rabble, why He had such a bunch of followers that were ignorant and unlearned men. They weren't people with a head full of knowledge … but they had a heart for God.

[15:10] 

Let's bring it back to you personally, and what I'm saying about my own experience.

Do not settle for a second-hand experience of God. Do not settle for knowing about God. Do not settle for information and knowledge which claims, directly or indirectly, to give you the security that you only can find in a vibrant living relationship with God. And, more than anything else, do not settle for anything in your life but to be spoken to and led by God!

God speaks in contrast to the way that God is sometimes presented. God is not the strong silent type. Believe me, God loves to speak! Give Him an open heart. Give Him your willingness to hear and to obey. God will speak to you in a way that you'll recognize, and you'll learn more and more to recognize. “God is saying something to me!”

And He will not only speak to you. If you respond to Him, He will lead you. And that's living by faith. I'll explain why. Because faith – to do anything in faith, to make any faith response – it immediately infers that God has said something to you, or revealed something to you, that requires a response from you.

[16:47] 

When you know that God has spoken to you, there will always be something for you to do in response – and that response will require faith.

You know the definition of faith that Christians love to quote: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for…” (This is Hebrews chapter 11, the beginning of the chapter.) “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

When God speaks, and all you know is that God has said something to you that's more tangible than the most substantial thing that you could see and feel and touch? That's God speaking. When you respond in faith, it's because you will stake everything on the fact that God has spoken to you. 

Now, I've had many, many, many such experiences of faith. The one that I mentioned at the beginning of this podcast was the one where God took me to Russia. And within that were contained many such experiences. 

But it's not the spectacular stuff. Not the … I don't know … the kind of things that are so easy for Christians to talk about and even get excited about: “Wow, God said this, and this happened…” and so on. What it is … it's the stuff of relationship!

[18:07]

When you have a God who is the Living God – not just the living God outside of you, but the living God who is within you – when you have opened your heart to Him and given Him that place in your life … when you open yourself to Him and long to hear His voice and to be led by Him … don't you think that He will lead you? 

Jesus said: (I'm sorry, Jesus didn't say it. Paul said it!) “As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.” Sonship means you're an heir of God … you're inheriting God's Kingdom … being led by the Spirit. 

You cannot be led by the things that you have learned. I'm sorry, but you can't. You'll see many wonderful truths, you'll receive many wonderful truths, you'll learn many wonderful truths from the things that you read in the Scripture. But all that will always point Him … you to Him.

[19:12] 

Don't have a second-hand relationship with God! If you had the ability to know me personally (and for many of you, this might be as personal as we ever get this side of Heaven) and I told you about a book I'd written, and I was trying to say things to you, and you'd be saying, “Now, wait a minute. Just don't talk. I want to read about you in this book.” I’d say, “But I'm here. I'm here. What would you like to hear? What would you like to know?”

I love to be known. I love to live in relationship. We humans, made in God's image, are made for relationship. And for whom is the greatest relationship for which we are made? The one for which Adam was made? The one that Jesus longed for … Jesus lived in? 

Jesus said that everything that He did was for His Father, that He only spoke His Father's words and He only did His Father's works. And then He said to his disciples, “…the works that I do should you do also”.

And that was because He was going to go to the Father and would send the Spirit. And the Spirit would lead and speak to, and speak through, His followers. Well, we are his followers. I'm one of his followers.

There is no substitute for God speaking to you. There is no … for you personally, you and God … there is no substitute for your living relationship with God. There is no substitute.

[20:41] 

“Without faith, it is impossible to please God…”. You cannot have faith in something that you learn with your mind. You might love it. You might love the truth that is there. But a truth that is just words on a page will not bring a response of faith. But when you know that God has spoken to you – whether it's through the Scripture or any other means that He chooses – and you recognize that God has spoken to you, then that's what you can have faith in. Because you are not responding … you're not having faith in a truth. You're having faith in God!

What does it say about Abraham? “Abraham believed” …what? … who? “Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.”

[21:33] 

May that be true of you too. Draw near to God. You cannot get too close to God. Believe me, the closer I draw to God over all these years, the further there is still to go. Draw closer to God and allow Him to be your God in the fullest sense that He wants – to allow Him to show you the thrill for you to experience. It's not meant to be some great religious experience. It's the reality of walking with God day-by-day.

Believe Him. That means so much to Him. When people don't only talk about Him … don't only become well informed and expert about Him, and sing about Him and even build great organizations or edifices in His name. What He loves is when people allow Him to speak to them. 

Do you remember the time that Jesus was asking His disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And they said, “Oh, some people say you're Moses, some say you're Elijah, some say you're one of the prophets”. And then He said, “Who do you say that I am?”And one man … one of His disciples, Peter, said, “You're the Christ, the Son of the living God!” And Jesus said to him, “You are blessed, because flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in Heaven!” He just knew it. 

I mean, this is a guy … he was one of the 12 disciples, and he, probably … as much as any of the others … had listened to what different people's speculation was, trying to figure out, “Who is this man? We know he's from God.” But at that moment, God spoke to Peter's heart, and Peter spoke what God said. And that meant so much to Jesus (I'm sure it meant a lot to Peter, too). It meant so much to Jesus that he said that.

But then Jesus said to him, “You didn't find this out. No flesh and blood, no person, told you this. There are people speculating. This is my Father in Heaven … just showed you something!”

[23:44] 

Don't you (I'm saying this to you now) … never limit what God will say to you … what God will ask of you … what God will invite you to believe and respond to Him in faith with.

Because when you do that, then you are in a living relationship with the living God, and He can reveal Himself to you in ways that only He can, and in ways that He knows you can receive.

You know, with all of that, it boils down to one very simple thing:

Just do it. Because God has made the way, and it's for you to live in with Him.