There is not a lot of good teaching in the body of Christ on hearing from God. I remember being a young minister in the mid-1980s. I went to work for the Assemblies of God around 1986 or 1987, traveling all over the United Kingdom, helping with church plants and things like that.
Back then, at least in Europe, and probably even more so in America, there would be a Christian bookstore in nearly every little town, every market town. Hundreds of bookshops. They were an ordinary part of life. It is sad, at least from my perspective, that we no longer have that. I will go to London once or twice a year, and it is hard to find even two or three of them in a massive city like London. With Amazon, any book you imagine can arrive the next day. What we often lack is discovery. There are times you know what you want. You order it. It arrives. Other times you do not know what you want.
I remember a season in my life when I would go to every bookstore in every town. I was traveling a lot in the UK. In every bookstore I would search the shelves and ask the staff, “Do you have any books on how to hear God’s voice?” I would always get this blank stare. Of course I would be told, “Well, we have the Bible.” Thank God for the Bible. Amen. We will talk about that as we go along. I discovered there was hardly any teaching around this subject.
So often the teaching was, do not try to hear God’s voice. It is dangerous to hear from God. Full disclosure: I get it. I do not disagree with some of those thoughts. It can be dangerous to hear from God. It can be dangerous to drive. It can be dangerous to fly. It can be dangerous to invest money. It can be dangerous to believe for healing. A lot of things can be dangerous.
Rightly so, a bunch of people in that season, and still now, would teach, look, you can get yourself or your church or your Christian life in a heap of trouble by trying to hear from God. Better not to do that. Better just stick with the Bible. That sounds good in a way. If safety is the summum bonum, the ultimate good of our life, then that is probably the teaching we should go with.
Yet Jesus does not call us to the safety of anything. He calls us to danger. He calls us to living on the edge. He calls us to live this glorious roller coaster ride of following the Holy Spirit.
**A God Who Speaks**
*My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me.* (John 10:27, NKJV)
I want to challenge you to think about the realities, the challenges, the promise, and the dangers of hearing from God, and how we as believers can do that. What place it should or should not take in the life of a believer, in the life of the church, in the life of the corporate body of Christ.
We cannot have the relationship we are called to have with God if we do not learn to hear His voice, if we do not learn to listen to Him, if we do not learn to walk and talk with Him. At so many levels, whether a personal, devotional level of you walking out your relationship with God, God wants to speak to you. I believe God wants to speak to you every day: My son, My daughter, I love you. I am with you. That is sin. Do not do that. Do this. He wants to have that communication with us.
It is vital that we grasp this. We have a God who speaks. The sheep are not left to guess. They hear. That is not a rare exception for a few special people. That is the normal life of those who belong to Him.
**Do Them Correctly**
*Therefore, brethren, desire earnestly to prophesy, and do not forbid to speak with tongues. Let all things be done decently and in order.* (1 Corinthians 14:39–40, NKJV)
The very danger of creating a separation between the things of the Word and the things of the Spirit is that it actually contradicts the things of the Word. I have literally heard pastors and churches say, well, we do not do any of that prophecy and gifts stuff. We just follow the Bible. I lovingly want to tell them, no. Your problem is not that you do not do this. The problem is you are not following the Bible, because if you say you follow the Bible, the very Bible you speak of speaks of doing these things.
A lot of people have taken out of context what Paul says to the Corinthians. Paul rebukes them for the misuse of the gift of tongues. In rebuking them for the misuse of the gift of tongues, Paul says again and again things like, I want you all to speak in tongues. He says, I speak in tongues more than all of you.
People misquote the second-to-last verse in those three chapters, 1 Corinthians 12, 13, and 14. Paul says, let all things be done decently and in order. In the very next verse he says, do not forbid anybody to speak in tongues or forbid anybody to prophesy. I would lovingly say to you, if you go to a church where they forbid people to speak in tongues or prophesy, your church is indecent and out of order.
The teaching of the Bible is not, do not do these things, but do them correctly. Do them with safeguards. They have a place. They neither become the main thing nor become nothing.
**If It Matters to You, It Matters to Him**
*Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths.* (Proverbs 3:5–6, NKJV)
At a slightly higher level, He wants to guide us and lead us, even as we go through the smaller things of life. I think He wants to guide and lead us in the decisions we take every day. I am not suggesting you pray in tongues for five hours about what colour socks you wear. I am suggesting God wants to get involved in the decisions of your life.
My rule of thumb would be this. If it is important to you, it is important to Him, because it is important for you. He does not want the separation between the secular and the sacred, this separation between the spiritual life and then we go and do real stuff. He wants to get involved in every part of our life.
He wants to get involved in the really big decisions as well. The life-arc decisions: who you marry, where you live, the church you go to, ministry, finances. He wants to be involved in the really big things.
My humble but accurate contention, my proposition to you, is that most Christians who are born again, who love God, who are sincere, live a long-distance relationship with God. They are never quite sure what God is thinking, what God is saying. They know somebody in their family, but they never actually really talk to them.
I would suggest to you, most Christians know more about God that comes vicariously through the means of other people than directly from God themselves. It would be like having a relationship with somebody, but anytime you have a question for them, you go through their friends. What does he think about this? What does she think about this? Instead of having a walking, talking relationship with them.
I want to suggest to you that a vast majority of Christians live in a realm of sin and shame, and just this nagging sense of, I do not really know what God really thinks about me, because they are not secure in the relationship with God. Maybe they are theologically secure, but they are not actually, practically, relationally secure about who they are and where they stand in that relationship with God. These things should not be.
At such a practical level, I think we miss opportunities every day because we are not hearing from God. God wants to say things that are dramatic and things that are simple.
**The Word She Needed Was Grace**
*And he arose and came to his father. But when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him.* (Luke 15:20, NKJV)
Years ago, when I was living in France, I would come over to the United States several times a year to minister. I was once in the town I now live in, Sturbridge, Massachusetts. I had been preaching that weekend. I went into a store, Stop & Shop, one day, and I am walking around this store, and I am actually literally praying, God, I want to speak to somebody. Give me a word for somebody. I am getting no word, no leading, no guidance. I walk around. I cannot find anybody in the store.
In the end I grab my things and I go to the checkout. A young lady starts ringing me out, passing my groceries through the scanner. She said to me, as people do in America, “How’s your day going?” I said, “Great. How’s your adultery going?”
She looked at me. I think she dropped a grocery item on the floor. I did not think it. God did not say it to me. God said it through me. “How’s your adultery going?” She stood there shocked, angry, terrified, exposed like an animal caught in a trap. Who told you?
I opened my mouth and began to prophesy. I said, you are a Christian. You gave your life to Jesus as a young person, but you are no longer walking with Him. You are involved in an adulterous affair, and it is going nowhere. Here is the thing I really want you to catch. I then said to her, God has a message for you. He loves you. His message to you is grace, grace, grace. Not grace on an adulterous affair, of course, but grace on you. He wants you to come back. You are like the prodigal daughter, and His arms are open. He is saying, come to Me, and I will give you a life worth living. I got to pray with her. She came back to the Lord.
For years, when I was teaching on this subject, I would tell this story. If I am honest, it was probably like a really cool story: me going to a checkout girl saying, how’s your adultery going? A few years later I suddenly got this revelation. The important word I gave her was not, how’s your adultery going? She knew she was having an adulterous affair. She did not need some prophetic guy to tell her she was having an affair. What she needed me to tell her was that God loved her and wanted her back. That is what she did not know. That is the revelation that left her.
If I had just come along with a tract and a smile and a “Jesus loves you” T-shirt and tried to witness to her, all of her defenses probably would have gone up. She needed the revelation that opened her heart. The love of God healed her heart.
Simply put, hearing God is not a carnival trick. It is not a substitute for Scripture. It is not a toy for the spiritually restless. It is the ordinary conversation of sons and daughters with a Father who still runs down the road. I am convinced we will not walk out the life we are called to live if we refuse the voice of the One who called us.
Let me challenge you. Learn to hear Him. Learn to listen. Learn to walk and talk with Him in the small things and in the life-arc decisions. Do it with the Word open. Do it with safeguards. Do it without making the gifts the main thing or making them nothing. Press into the relationship. Draw near. He still speaks.
Selah
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**Scriptures for Study**
John 10:3–5, John 10:27, John 16:13, Isaiah 30:21, Proverbs 3:5–6, Psalm 32:8, 1 Samuel 3:9–10, 1 Kings 19:11–13, Acts 13:2, Acts 16:6–10, Romans 8:14, Romans 8:16, 1 Corinthians 12:1–11, 1 Corinthians 14:1, 1 Corinthians 14:3, 1 Corinthians 14:29–33, 1 Corinthians 14:39–40, Galatians 5:16, Galatians 5:25, Hebrews 3:7–8, Hebrews 4:7, Hebrews 4:12, Revelation 3:20, Luke 15:20, John 1:16–17.
**10 Questions for Reflection**
1. Where have you treated hearing God as too dangerous to pursue, and what has that cost you in relationship with Him?
2. How have you allowed other voices — preachers, books, friends — to stand in the place of a walking, talking relationship with God Himself?
3. What would change if you truly believed that if a matter is important to you, it is important to Him?
4. In what ways have you separated the Word from the Spirit, and how does that separation contradict the Bible you say you follow?
5. Does your church forbid what Paul commanded the church not to forbid, and what does that reveal about its claim to follow Scripture?
6. Where are you theologically secure in God, yet not relationally secure about what He thinks of you?
7. What daily decisions have you kept in the “secular” box, as if God had no interest in them?
8. When God last spoke to you, was the weight of the word exposure, or was it grace that opened a heart?
9. Who around you already knows their failure and still needs to hear that the Father’s arms are open?
10. What safeguard will you put in place so that hearing God neither becomes the main thing nor becomes nothing?
