How do you know if God is talking
to you? How do you distinguish between
the voice of God and the rumblings of the refried beans you ate the night
before? Seriously, with all of the
advice we get day after day, how do you pick out God’s voice from worldly
counsel?
It reminds me of a phone call I
got recently. I wrote a letter to Jim
Cymbala, Pastor and founder of the Brooklyn Tabernacle in Brooklyn New
York. After I read his book Fresh Wind Fresh Fire I realized much of
my story is like his. So I wrote him a
letter in a moment of discouragement hoping for a response, but not expecting
one (he has a church of 20,000 people).
About a week later, I started
receiving phone calls from a number I didn’t recognize. I will often times get sales calls on my cell
phone, so I don’t typically answer these calls.
After the third phone call in three days I started to get perturbed at
this person’s persistence, so I answered it, but disguised my voice in my best
Mexican accent I could muster (why do I do these things?). It was Jim Cymbala.
I felt like a fool. Here is a man who has tried to call me
several times in order to physically respond to my letter. Being taken back at the voice I was hearing
on the other end, I told Jim I was busy at the moment and asked him if I could
call him back (I was busy with a church that was .035% of his church.)
How do we know when God is
calling us? How do we learn to recognize
God’s voice when He is speaking?
Unfortunately I do not have a
scientific method to enable you to know the divine voice from other
voices. But I can at least point you in
the right direction.
First, we do know that the Bible
is God’s voice. Start there. Do not search the web, or turn on the radio
when you are looking for God to speak to you.
Open the Bible and begin reading it.
The more you hide the Scriptures in your heart, the easier it will be
for you to recognize God’s voice and guidance when it comes. Because, if the guidance you are receiving
contradicts the Word of God, then it isn’t from God.
Second, learning to hear from God
takes some practice. When God called
Samuel for the first time in 1 Samuel 3, it took Samuel three tries to
recognize it was God. He had to receive
some guidance from an elderly friend who was close to God for him to learn to
recognize God’s voice. But eventually he
got it.
Because we are in this fallen
world, we can easily mistaken God’s voice for another voice or miss it when God
does call. Get wise counsel from mature
believers. Ask them if what you are
thinking is of God or not. Then once you
have been given the counsel, act on it.
Samuel had to act on Eli’s counsel, and respond back to God.
The bottom line is found in John
10:3, “…The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads
them out.”
We do have a God who leads his
children. His voice is not always
audible, but it is known by his children.
In return, we need to know our shepherd.
We need to learn to recognize his voice among the many voices of today’s
post modern world. And we need the
strength of his son, Jesus Christ, to act upon what we hear.
Last point, when you do answer
him, or speak to him, go ahead and talk like a Mexican, or a northerner, or any
other accent you want to use, because he is not offended with you being in your
raw form. In fact, he invites it.
