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Sep 02, 2012

Hearing The Coach's Voice

Preacher: John Repsold

Series: Getting Your Head in the Game

Keywords: god's voice, hearing, divine communication

Summary:

Hearing the voice of God can be challenging in life. This message takes us through the Old and New Testament scriptures dealing with HOW God has chosen to communicate with us and still speaks with us.

Detail:

Hearing Life’s Coach

Part 1—Getting Your Head in the Game

Sept. 2, 2012

 

Connect Question: Share with someone an experience in your life where you believe God really spoke to you and HOW he did that.  It can be as recent as something today or this week that was perhaps small or ordinary or something that really stands out in your memory as big and momentous.

 

Intro:  This past week, the Ferris football coach had a “Huddles & Heals” night where all the moms of guys in football at Ferris could come out, enjoy good food and drinks…and ask all the questions they’ve ever wanted to ask about what all those kids are doing on the field when they hit each other and run back and forth.  He lined the moms up in the back yard like they were the line and backfield in a game.  Then he explained what each position was and did and how the game is played.  I really think it was a genius attempt at keeping moms from screaming at the refs for something they don’t understand about the game.  J

 

Now that we’re officially starting fall living in Spokane, we thought it would be valuable for all of us to take a few Sundays to “get our head back in the game.”  Not that living in Christ is a “game” per se.  But summer, especially in Spokane, tends to upset routines and get everyone casting about.  Just as the routines of work and school actually grow and develop us, so the “routines” of life in the Spirit, as long as they are filled with real and meaningful divine connections grow and develop us in Christ. 

 

Last week we began to take a look at how it is that God speaks with us and what we need to do to listen and hear.  We actually came at it through the back door.  We talked about those times in our lives when God seems strangely and usually frustratingly quiet.  And we saw from Job that it isn’t always because there is some particular sin in our life that God is trying to root out; sometimes it is simply that God wants us to move to the next level of maturity in Him, and to do that requires that we experience what St. John of the Cross called “The Dark Night of the Soul.”  (If you missed that sermon, please go to our web page www.mosaicspokane.com to read the notes of listen to the podcast.  It is a message every one of us will need at sometime in our lives and many of us need right now.)

            This week I want us to poke around a bit more inside the issue of hearing from God.  In football parlance, we’re talking about hearing and listening to the voice of the coach or, spiritually speaking, hearing God’s voice. 

  • What does his voice sound like?  Some raving coach who loves to scream at his players every time they mess up his play?  Or the kind of coach that you can’t even hear when you’re out on the field?
  • How does he communicate?  Is there some divine headset we need to get our hands on that goes directly to our spiritual helmet?  Or does God use time-outs and substitutions to run the plays into the game?

Just how does God speak and how are we to listen?

 

So today I would like to pose two very important questions that are essential if we are to correctly discern the voice of God in our lives.  The stakes are high.  Failure to correctly discern God’s voice can lead to catastrophic decisions and choices.  Confusion about whether or not it is really God who I think I’m hearing or whether it is my own thoughts or the lies of the Enemy or the desires of others around me can be frustrating at best and sinful at worst. 

 

So here are the questions:

1.)     How has God spoken in the past according to both the Old Testament and the New?

2.)    Does God still speak that way today?  If so, what does that have to teach us about hearing from Him?

 

Since we do want to get out before Labor Day is over, I won’t go through every occurrence of God communicating with people in the Bible because, well, basically that is what the Bible is all about:  God’s working out of history and His communicating with people.  What we will try to do today is get as far as we can with the different ways and means God used to speak to His people.  We’ll start with God speaking to people in the Old Testament and ask ourselves in every case, “Do we have any record of God speaking that same way to people in the New Testament and church history?” So let’s get started. 

 

PRAY

 

Adam & Eve:

Genesis 1:27-30 is the first record we have of God speaking to human beings.  It begins with a critically important statement about us when vs. 27 says, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” 

            What is so important about that verse is that it sets human beings apart from every other created thing—plants, animals, rocks and mountains, stars and galaxies, even angels and demons.  Nothing else in all creation has the capacity to relate to God like we do.  It is the singular fact that we bear the image of God that give us both the ability and desire to communicate thoughts, ideas, facts and feelings like no other part of creation. That is why, in every part of this world, every tribe, tongue and nation, you will find that the vast majority of people desire to connect with their Creator and the spiritual realm albeit through a variety of different means and beliefs. 

 

So having told us that this wonderful capacity to communicate and be in relationship that humans have is because of the image of God upon us, the Bible then moves immediately to talking about HOW and WHAT God communicated to the first human beings, Adam and Eve.

            “God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over….”

 

For our purposes here today, were simply asking, HOW did God communicate and does he still do so today?  We are simply told that God “said to them” both here and in the other encounters he had apparently daily with them as they were in the Garden.  In 2:16 we are told that “the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”  Again, God seems to be speaking with Adam with human words, language and sounds. 

            But this doesn’t stop when Adam and Eve enter into sin either.  God keeps speaking.  3:8—“Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.  But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”  He answered, “I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” 

            So here there is sound associated with the very presence of God coming near as well as human words/sounds that are spoken from God to Adam. 

 

So, we can safely say that God did in the O.T. times sometimes speak with an audible voice as one person speaks to another.

 

Next question:  Do we have any record in the N.T. of God speaking that way with N.T. saints?

  • Gospels: 
    • Jesus (God the Son) speaking to people all the time.  Hebrews 1:1-2 is important in this regard as it says, “In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son….”  While this verse jumps ahead of the whole issue of God speaking to and through prophets, what is clear is that God literally “spoke” to us “by his Son” Jesus.
    • God the Father speaking at various times from heaven to affirm Jesus’ role (Jesus’ baptism—Mt. 3:17; Mk. 1:11; Lk. 3:22; the Mt. of Transfiguration—Mt. 17:1; Mk. 9:22; Lk 9:28)
    • Epistles?  Not without using the medium of dreams or visions that I can think of.

 

So the question for us becomes, “Does God still speak to people in a humanly audible voice using the sounds and words of their particular language?” 

Answer:  while there seems to be nothing in the Bible that would prohibit that from happening, the audible voice from heaven method of communicating seems at best very limited in the N.T.  The fact that we only have one occurrence in the book of Acts (Paul, ch. 9) and no others in the N.T. would at least lead us to believe that it is not the preferred or frequent way God has chosen to communicate today with his children.  But neither can we say God is not going to use that method at all today.

 

O.K.  moving on.  Back in Genesis we see God speaking to…

  • Cain about his anger and hatred towards Abel.  He hears but chooses not to listen. 
  • Next up is Noah who gets very specific directions in Gen. 6-8, apparently again through an audible voice using human language (6:13; 7:1; 9:1—covenant). 
  • Abram:  Genesis 12:1ff—“The Lord had said to Abram, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you….”  God speaks like this with Abram apparently 4 times between the age of 75 and 85.  And that’s all he had to go on from what we know. 
  • Then in Gen. 15:1, we have a couple of new ways of communication.  “After this, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision….”  A vision is not the same as God speaking audibly.  In a vision, only the person receiving the vision has the experience of communication with God.  Nobody around a person receiving a vision hears the voice of God or sees what God is revealing.  As far as I can tell, a vision is much like a waking dream in which the recipient is receiving communication form God but no one else around is. 
  • Now look at Gen. 15:12—“As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him.  Then the Lord said to him, “Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years….”  I think it is safe to say that this is a dream in which God is speaking to Abram. 

So now we have two more ways in which God used to speak to people in the Old Testament:  visions and dreams.  In fact, from Genesis to Zechariah you have visions refereed to over 90 times and dreams over 95 times. 

 

Back to the second part of the question:  did God use dreams and vision in the N.T. to communicate with people? 

  • Dreams:  we have 8 references to God using dreams or promising to use them. Six of them are in Matthew alone, 5 in relationship to Joseph and the birth of Jesus, two in Peter’s quote at Pentecost of Joel’s prophecy that “your young men will see visions and your old men will dream dreams.”  If Pentecost is the fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy, then it would be hard to say that dreams and visions are not for the church.  If the coming of the Holy Spirit upon young and old, men and women was going to produce dreams and visions among them all, how can we say that God no longer uses these means to speak from time to time?  (This still begs the question, “Is this normative (i.e. the norm) for believers today?”)
  • Visions:  Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, gets an angelic vision in Luke 1 telling him he and his wife will have a baby in their old age. 

Then in Luke 24:23 we are told that the two disciples who encounter the resurrected Lord Jesus on the road to Emmaus when they think all is lost, tell Jesus that some of the women who had gone to Jesus’ tomb that morning “told us that they had seen a vision of angels, who said he [Jesus] was alive.” 

According to the first part of that same chapter, what the women experienced was an angelic encounter there at the tomb.  Since it was, in fact, an angelic encounter with visual and auditory effects, that would seem to indicate that actual encounters with angels were classified as “visions,” something much more than a dream. 

In the book of Acts, in fact, we see Peter thinking he is experiencing a vision of an angel waking him up with a whack on the side and springing him from prison when in reality it was…well…reality, not a vision.  The text says, “Peter followed him [the angel] out of the prison, but he had no idea that what the angel was doing was really happening; he thought he was seeing a vision.” (Acts 12:9)

Acts contains several other visions: 

  • Ananias’ vision of the Lord telling him to Go and find Paul  in Damascus, lay hands on him and pray for him (Ac. 9:10-16)…and Paul’s vision of Ananias (Ac. 9:12).
  • Cornelius, the centurion, had a vision of an angel telling him to send for Peter who was in Joppa (Acts 10:1-8).  Peter gets a vision on his end the next day about noon as Cornelius’ servants and a soldier are about to knock on his door in Joppa.  This is the vision of the large sheet being let down to earth containing all kinds of animals, reptiles and birds God will command him to eat. 
  • The remaining visions in Acts are all Paul’s experiences on at least two different occasion (16:10; 18:9), one when he sees the man from Macedonia pleading with him to come over and help them (16:9) and the other when Jesus speaks to Paul in a vision while he is in Corinth saying, “Do not be afraid; keep on speaking, do not be silent.  For I am with you, and no one is going to attack and harm you, because I have many people in this city” (18:9-10).  So Paul stays in Corinth for a year and a half, teaching the word of God.
  • There is one more chunk of scripture that, uses the term “vision”.  It is what John sees in the entire book of Revelation.  In Rev. 1:10 John tells us, “On the Lord’s Day I was in the Spirit, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet, which said:  “Write on a scroll what you see and send it to the 7 churches….”  While he doesn’t use the term “vision” here, John does use it of the entire revelation in 9:17 to describe a portion of the vision of the trumpets.  “The horses and riders I saw in my visions looked like this….”

 

So let’s ask the next question for dreams and visions, “Does God still use them to speak to his people?” 

Answer:  Lacking any statement in the N.T. that God will no longer use dreams and visions and seeing that God continued to give his servants of all races and classes and ages of the early church visions and dreams, I see nothing in scripture that prohibits God from continuing to use them.  In fact, there is a pretty large body of evidence from every period of the church that God is still using dreams and visions today to communicate truth to his people. 

 

NOTE:  I’m not saying that dreams and visions you and I may have are on a par with the authority of the written, infallible Word of God.  But I know many a believer and many a pre-believer who have had dreams and visions that were clearly God speaking to them in regard to some specific think He wanted to communicate to them.  I would venture to say that right here in this small gathering of God’s people today there are many of you who have had dreams or visions at some point in your life that God used to speak comfort, encouragement, help or direction into your life. 

But again, this is not to say that dreams and visions are to be the norm for all of God’s people or even the most frequent way God chooses to communicate with us. 

 

So, thus far we have direct, audible conversations with God, we have dreams and visions, and we have, as we’ve already acknowledged, words of both the incarnate Christ and what the Old Testament refers to as the pre-incarnate Christ as “the angel of the Lord” who would appear from time to time and communicate with people. 

Examples of this would be Hagar when she went out to the desert to die with Ishmael (Gen. 16), Abraham when he was pleading for Sodom (Gen. 18) and Gen. 22 when he was sacrificing Isaac on Mt. Moriah, Moses when he met God at the burning bush, Balaam when his donkey saw the angel of the Lord standing in the roadway ready to kill him and thus crushed his foot between the donkey and a stone wall in Number 22. Numerous judges in the book of Judges, David, Elijah, and numerous other prophets of the O.T. 

 

I think it is pretty safe to say that everything we have noted so far about HOW God spoke to his people in the O. T. covers the vast majority of the ways in which He communicated.  Yes, there was the occasional writing in stone as on Mt. Sinai for Moses or on the wall of King Bellshazar’s Babylonian palace.  There is the voice of wisdom that cries out in the book of Proverbs as coming through wise people, parents and good counselors.  On rare occasions, the Spirit of the Lord came upon other than prophets in the O.T. and gave them a message to speak, such as Saul (I Sam. 10:6) and David (I Sam. 16:13; 23:2). 

 

In the Old Testament, the way in which God spoke to most people most of the time was fairly limited and clear:  God spoke to a prophet or leader the truths, laws and messages he wanted the people of God to follow.  Those prophets and messengers wrote down and spoke God’s word to the people who either accepted or rejected, obeyed or disobeyed God’s word.  Since few if any people held personal copies of this Word of God, the leaders of God’s people were to continually proclaim verbally the Word of God. 

 

But what about God speaking in the church age?  What about how God desires to communicate with us nowadays? What has changed…and what has stayed the same?

            I do not have time in this message to flesh out what I think the Bible clearly teaches is God’s primary, predominant and ever-present way of speaking to his children today:  the Word of God.  We will look at the way God longs to speak to us through this Word more next week.  But for today, let me just remind you of what the Apostle Peter said and pointed to when he was trying to prepare the church for his departure.  Go to 2 Peter 1.

3 His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. 4 Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.

5 For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; 6 and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; 7 and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love. 8 For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 But if anyone does not have them, he is nearsighted and blind, and has forgotten that he has been cleansed from his past sins.

10 Therefore, my brothers, be all the more eager to make your calling and election sure. For if you do these things, you will never fall, 11 and you will receive a rich welcome into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

[Prophecy of Scripture]

12 So I will always remind you of these things, even though you know them and are firmly established in the truth you now have. 13 I think it is right to refresh your memory as long as I live in the tent of this body, 14 because I know that I will soon put it aside, as our Lord Jesus Christ has made clear to me. 15 And I will make every effort to see that after my departure you will always be able to remember these things.

16 We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. 17 For he received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice came to him from the Majestic Glory, saying, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”[a] 18 We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with him on the sacred mountain.

19 And we have the word of the prophets made more certain, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. 20 Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. 21 For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

 

Clearly the unchanging, eternal, trustworthy and inspired Word of God is the most sure, consistent, objective, clear and accessible way for any of us to daily, regularly hear and know the voice of God. 

 

But the N.T. adds something vital to the presence of the word of God.  Everywhere you go from the Gospels to Revelation, it is the Spirit of God abiding in every believer that now brings an entirely new dimension to the voice of God to us. 

 

Jesus himself said this to his troubled disciples who had grown so familiar with hearing the voice of God in his voice:

John 16—

7 But very truly I tell you, it is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. 8 When he comes, he will prove the world to be in the wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment: 9 about sin, because people do not believe in me; 10 about righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you can see me no longer; 11 and about judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned.

12 “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. 13 But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. 14 He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you. 15 All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will receive from me what he will make known to you.”

 

The Holy Spirit of God residing in every believer, teaching us, leading us, convicting us, doing miracles in and through us—that is THE Game Changer!  Learning to follow His leadership, learning to hear his voice, learning to be taught by Him, to not grieve him, to be filled with Him and to keep in step with him is our privilege. 

Can I close with an illustration of how that worked in my own life just yesterday? 

I had been wrestling with this message all week long.  I had read numerous books about hearing the voice of God, the myriad of obstacles to that which come our way, the various means God may choose to speak to us at any given moment.  It was all becoming a whole lot like a knotted-up tangle of string in my brain. I didn’t know whether to try and tackle today the topic of the things that get in the way of hearing God speak or the spectrum of how God has spoken.  I couldn’t decide whether to focus on what the N.T. says or what the O.T. teaches.  My mental ball of string was getting bigger and messier.

            So yesterday morning, I got up relatively early for a Saturday and had my regular devotional time with God.  I wrote out a paragraph about what I thought the Spirit of God was saying to me from my scheduled reading in I Kings 5 where Solomon prepares to build the temple. It had nothing to do, really, with this topic which was churning away in the back of my mind.  But it did speak to my now life-long yearning for revival and renewal of God’s church in Spokane and the Pacific Northwest.  I prayed a bit for others and about life and then started pleading with God for clarity and direction on what to share with you today.  The more I prayed, the more I got that anxious pit in my stomach.  I reminded God that, at least here on earth, I only had about 24 hours in which to hear his voice and prepare this message. 

            Then I left my Bible and journal and prayer list and went running. 

As I’ve shared before, over the years, I’ve discovered that God speaks to me most often and most consistently after I’ve spent some time in his word, prayed about a few things and then get outside, away from people and go running alone with God.  Time and time again, God meets me there as I run and pray and ask God to clarify and sort out some of the frustrations and issues of my life. 

Well, yesterday, as I was talking this subject over with God, he just started walking me mentally through the times, the ways and the places in the Bible where he communicated with his people, literally from Adam & Eve in Genesis to the Apostle John in Revelation. And I knew it was Him because that way of looking at hearing His voice was not anything I had thought of all this past week.  So I got the direction and answer I was needing from the Holy Spirit and immediately felt  that inner calm and tranquility. 

So I continue my run and figured that God was probably done speaking to me for the morning.  He wasn’t. 

On Saturdays especially, there are often other people running or walking the track.  Yesterday was no exception.  There were exactly two couples, (one with 3 young children), and two women walking, running or playing with a soccer ball. 

We were all lapping the track in the same direction so those of us who were running would occasionally lap those walking.  Here’s where things get humbling.

One of the women walking the track was, at least as far as I could see in my semi-exhausted and delusional state, was pretty attractive…at least from the back side.  So as I pumped out my last 100 meter sprint at the end of the last ½ mile, I had a decision to make.  Would I turn back in the opposite direction to go grab our dog in another part of the track thus giving me the opportunity to check out this woman head-on OR would I listen to that ever so still, small voice of the Holy Spirit that was whispering, “Do you want obedience or eye-candy?”  The Spirit of God was speaking.  I just wasn’t sure whether or not I wanted to listen all that much right then. 

I’m at least relieved to be able to tell you that I couldn’t pick this woman out of a police line-up today if I had to…unless, of course, everyone had their backs to us. J  It wasn’t a huge thing.  It was just a fleeting battle.  But God was speaking…and I knew it.  As our dog and I walked back home moments later, God kept speaking.  “Little responses to my voice,” he said, “lead to more sensitive ears to my speaking.” 

It made me wonder if we don’t sometimes have a hard time hearing God’s voice because we haven’t really cultivated the consistency of responding to God’s smaller, quieter whispers about stuff we tend to see as inconsequential. 

 

PRAY