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November 27, 2005
Does God Still Speak to Us?
Psalm 119: 33-40 / Jonah 3: 1-10
Galatians 1: 11-23
November 27th, 2005
“Does God still speak to us?” It is fitting to speak of this question today that is the first Sunday in Advent. Advent season reaches its peak at Christmas. On Christmas Day we remember that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Jesus was born as God’s clearest word to us. For thirty years people had the chance to see and hear, even to feel, to taste, to smell God. It seems almost irreverent to say all this. But this was how it was the Gospels tell us.
To whom did God speak His Word when Jesus came? Jesus came not to the most righteous people but to sinners. He was called the friend of sinners. If this were said of you and me maybe good people wouldn’t take this as a compliment.
Jesus was born in poverty as God spoke to the most needy to demonstrate how deeply He loved a world made up of people who think they have no need as well as of people who know they are desperate with need. Jesus enjoyed the devoted friendship of both women and men. Dan Brown would have had no basis for his idea in The Da Vinci Code of Jesus’ relationship to Mary Magdalene unless Jesus had risked being a close friend with women in a day when men didn’t have close friendships with women. Shortly after He was born old people held him in their arms and heard the sounds He made. As an adult Jesus sat little children on His lap and spoke to them. How intimately God spoke to all kinds of people when Jesus was here.
But God can seem far away now. This is why someone asked me, “Does God still speak to us?” I told a friend I was going to speak about this question today and she told me very forcefully, “God does speak today.” She said she’d heard God’s voice speaking to her. This is a friend I trust.
But there are many of us who have not had her experience. Does God still speak to us? I think we ask that question self-consciously. We believe that God has spoken and that God still speaks, but we have missed out, and we’re guilty because of it.
It may be that we can’t hear God because we’re not in the mood to listen. Scripture tells us, “If I regard iniquity in my heart the Lord will not hear me.” By the same token, God may not speak to those who have no desire to hear.” Sometimes God intrudes with a sharp word, but not with that reassuring word we desire.
We believe the Bible is the Word of God, but we capitalize the word “Word,” and probably put the word “hear” in quotation marks because we don’t hear God speak when we read the Bible. In fact we’re embarrassed that most of us have given up on reading the Bible. We buy it. We give it as a present to children. But we don’t read it because when we tried to read it, it didn’t make sense. We couldn’t understand it.
But we don’t give up on the idea that God speaks because something inside of us keeps the hope alive. We know that life is deep with meaning beyond the obvious. We have feelings. We have longings that are not satisfied with what we can buy. All the gold in Ft. Knox isn’t enough to satisfy the gnawing inside. We need to hear God’s voice. When we say we need “meaning” in life, we are, I believe, saying we need to hear that voice that ties everything together—the voice of the One who made us for fellowship with Him—and with one another—and for simple peace of mind inside.
I see on the television how mad is the search for satisfaction, how surreal the images of bodily glamour and consumption of material things and exploitation of all the senses in the quest for sensations that satisfy. Pop music has taken to screams and violent, primal rhythms, abandoning all refinement. On one of the channels I see women so miserably demeaned, and they allow it and even cultivate their own demeanment. It makes me very sad and I turn the channel. When that deep instinct of our sexuality is probed far beyond its capacity to satisfy, so that it leads to further despair, I see a desperate attempt of the soul to satisfy that deep longing inside without God. When all along what will satisfy is to hear the voice of our Creator who can calm the storm not only on the Sea of Galilee but in the heart.
When the need is so great, why is the sound of God’s voice so elusive? What keeps us from hearing the voice of God? Or perhaps do we hear the voice of God but do not recognize it? We don’t know what to listen for. We maybe expect a masculine voice, preferably a deep voice, maybe like Charlton Heston’s voice. When Israel heard God speak from Mt. Sinai they heard thunder and saw lightning and the mountain shook. We’d prefer God not speak to us in this way.
We cast about for clues in the Bible to how God may still be speaking today. God told Jonah to go to Ninevah, but who hears God speak this way now? In our Old Testament reading this morning we learn that God spoke “a second time” to Jonah. That means there was a first time, and there were more times that God spoke to him. These moments of Divine discourse were specific enough that Jonah did specifically the opposite of what God told him. He didn’t want to go to Ninevah.
We read of Elijah feeling desperately lonely after fleeing for his life from Jezebel after that contest with the priests and prophets of Baal that ended in their slaughter. God told Elijah to stand on a mountain before Him. So he went to the mountain. We read that “the Lord passed by [but did not speak as He passed by Elijah—as though to taunt him], and a great and strong wind rent the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.”
When Elijah heard the still small voice, he wrapped his mantel around his face and stood at the entrance of the cave on the mountain to which he had gone. Wrapping his mantel around his face was an action suggesting he was comfortable. God took notice of him and spoke in a way that resonated with his deep need. He knew that God spoke in that still, small voice. We cling to that term, “a still, small voice,” so that we listen for God to speak in this way away from the bombast of much of the religious marketplace.
God said to David, “Be still and know that I am God.” Often I remember that.
Of course. But having said this, tell me how to hear God’s voice. Let me begin with once again saying what you’ve heard so often, “Read your Bible.” One of the illuminating aspects of our time with people in the County Correctional System on Tuesday evenings has been to see how much the Bible speaks to them. There is a lady that comes to our study that we find copying out, word for word, what the Bible says about needs that she feels. With beautiful penmanship she has copied many pages of the Bible so she can go right to these words in her own handwriting when she needs God’s reassurance to her. Folk in jail have time on their hands. How often I’ve been inspired to see that when people there take the time to linger long with the Bible how it opens to them. Few of these folk have the kind of education that is common in this congregation.
Try again to hear God speak when you read your Bible. But it will take time and there is no method I can or anyone can give you to make it happen.
Soon after I became a Christian—I was nineteen years old—I began to memorize the Bible. I memorized verses that I knew were important, but then whole chapters too—Romans 12, Isaiah 53, various of the Psalms. I memorized just about all of the Book of James for its practical advice. I memorized Paul’s exquisite letter to the Philippians. I have found that the sections of the Bible I memorized back then have stayed with me. I still memorize. The words come to my mind when I need to remember them. They come to me sometimes as advice, sometimes as comfort, sometimes as rebuke. I have found, as so many others have found, that when God’s word is in my heart, in my mind so that it informs how I think, I am aware that God is speaking to me.
We teach our children at every Vacation Bible School, “Thy word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” “Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against Thee.” When we read the Bible publicly we say, “Listen to the word of God.” This is not a fruitless emphasis. If we allow ourselves to be exposed to Scripture, we will hear God speak. Most often it will be “a still, small voice” arising in your mind as the words play back in your thoughts.
There is a lot of talk nowadays about theories of how God speaks. There are carefully thought out doctrines of how God inspired Scripture, and how it is authoritative for us. There is some use in these efforts that show a high regard for the written Word of God. But far more important to us is that we read it and allow to happen in our hearts whatever God will accomplish. We derive no benefit from having a high regard for Scripture if we do not read it and let it speak to us, and listen to it—and then act on what we understand.
Christians separate from one another on the basis of theories of inspiration and authority of the Bible. But if we would all humbly read the Bible and say, as Samuel did in the Temple, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening,” the Bible would become to us far more than a holy book about which to say nice things.
But it has been the experience of God’s people that He speaks not only through the Bible and long ago when Jesus lived on earth, but through intimate personal experiences.
The prophet Amos, writing to Israel twenty-eight hundred years ago said a fearful word.
The days are coming when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread . . . but of hearing the words of the Lord. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, to seek the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.
The famine of the words of the Lord that Amos referred to probably meant that God would no longer send prophets along to remind the people to set their lives in order. But God does not only speak as a means of getting His people to behave themselves.
Very often it seems that this is the case in the Bible. But this is only a means to an end. The goal of the prophets of the Old Testament was to restore fellowship between God and His people.
We read in Paul’s letter to the Galatians this morning that he learned directly from Jesus Christ the things that were at the heart of his teaching. The things Paul learned from Jesus Christ had to do with the cross, not only as the cruel means of Jesus’ death, but as the sign of how to live. This passage ends with Paul saying, “And they glorified God because of me.” The effect of Paul’s acceptance of the meaning of the cross that Jesus Christ taught Him was to change Paul’s life. In the next chapter Paul writes, “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I but Christ lives in me.”
And as Christians through the ages have read those words of Paul, they’ve heard the note of triumph in them. Rather than being a confession of resignation, they are like a trumpet call of excitement—not because life is not worth living, so give up and die. Far from that, a life wholly given over intentionally to obedience to Jesus Christ from the heart, a life where self-satisfaction is found in Christ-satisfaction, is a joy-filled life. Rather than life being stripped of its meaning, it finds it.
It is in deliberately following this kind of life that God speaks in the still, small voice that we read of in the story about Elijah. The forum in which God speaks to us today most often is in the community of those who purposefully attempt to live together under the authority of Jesus.
I don’t at all put it past God to speak directly to people so that they hear a voice. But I believe God’s usual way of speaking is different from this. If it is true that Jesus is with us when we are met in His name so we can expect that among the impressions that come to us when we are in close communion with each other are impressions on our hearts that Jesus is making. You hear a voice that sounds like the voice of a friend, but that friend, whom you love and trust, has become the implement God is using—because your heart is open to the sound of this friend’s voice.
The reason why fellowship with one another is so vital to life is that here you and I will find that range of communications from God that we need to hear—most of the time. God may speak personally, in a mysterious way, from time to time, but as a rule His chosen method is through the Body of Christ—which we are. We hear from this person or that an accent we understand.
I have sometimes wondered, in times when I find being a pastor a very stress-filled task, how did I ever think I was to be a pastor to begin with? And I think back and see how I was nudged by my fellowship with Christians in this church and that in such a way that I was steered toward the work I have now done for more than three decades. The first impulse came through a Bible study at Great Lakes Naval Training Center as this multi-racial group jovially turned to me for leadership I didn’t feel fit to give. And the chaplain there turned over his pulpit to me when I didn’t have a clue how to preach. And a Baptist pastor who happened to by my uncle made me preach once when I think he didn’t want to preach the weekend I visited him—and though my sermon was a colossal flop, it was a piece of the puzzle. It was a syllable of God’s word directing my life.
And so it will be with you and me if we will live in communion with each other. All that the New Testament tells us about how to keep in close communion with one another has as one of its purposes to keep alive the means by which God can speak to us from day to day. If you and I love, trust, respect, serve, forgive, build up, and otherwise care for one another, God speaks to us in a still, small voice that we don’t even realize until after we’ve realized its good effect. We don’t need to ask if it was God speaking. We know it was, though we might not speak of it in this way.
Indeed, I believe you and I should be very careful about announcing that God has spoken to us. To some who hear us it is discouraging to hear this because they don’t know how the word from God came and assume that since they’ve heard no audible voice they have never heard from God. They are inadequate.
It is best to let God’s voice guide you if you have heard it. You will know if it is from God when you follow it and see its good effects. Let others see the effects and sense how God is blessing them through you.
Does God still speak to us today? Yes. God still speaks to us in the Bible. God spoke most clearly at one moment of history in His Son who revealed more than we realize about God. And God speaks today. The Holy Spirit of God may use various means of communicating with you and me. If God surrounds us; if God is everywhere, we may expect Him to speak even in the rustling grass, as the Gospel song puts it so beautifully. God may speak in a dream. God may speak through the voice of your friend. The means God will use are varied, according to how you best hear.
If we want to hear God speak, we need to keep our hearts open. Be a faithful, loving part of the Body of Christ so that God may not only speak to you, but may use you as part of the means to some other needy person here. There is an out-working momentum that gets going when God speaks. He moves us to do something, and this something will make Jesus visible in a way people can understand.
If Jesus were to appear dressed in first-century clothes, speaking in Aramaic, nobody could understand Him. But when Jesus uses someone dressed in 21st century clothes, to speak for Him, whether it be in American dress or in Indian or Zambian dress and language, people can understand.
My father told me in the sermon he preached at my ordination that my life was the only book a lot of people would read to know about Jesus. The same goes for you if you are a Christian. People read us, actually hear us, because we’re talking books. And it is so by God’s design. Not everyone likes to hear the same kind of talking book. God may have made you a comic book—your sense of humor reaches one kind of person. God may have made you a science book—so you can be read by people who read science books. Maybe God made you a history book, or a sports book, or a nursing book or a mothering-book. But you and I are books of one kind or another, if we are Christians, where people will read all they’ll ever read about Jesus.
Isn’t it wonderful that God should offer such a library, such a menu of means by which the world may hear God and know that He loves them and invites them to find forgiveness, purpose, and rest in Him.
If you think this idea of how God speaks takes away from God as the one actually speaking then you may have forgotten who made you. The God who made you and me can use us for many purposes, even against our will. We know that one of the purposes for which God uses us is a means by which He can speak today.
Let us pray: O Lord God, we thank You for speaking through Moses and the prophets, for speaking most clearly in the person of Your Son, Jesus. We thank You that You still speak to us today. Help us to want to hear, so that we may indeed hear your voice and do Your bidding. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at November 27, 2005 09:30 AM