A Feel For The Real Series

Hearing God’s Voice – 2

“A Feel for the Real”

Acts 17:27-28

“So that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; 28 For in Him we live and move and have our being.”

I am so excited about this series. Last week was amazing. I believe God revealed some things to us that needed to be revealed before we get into the depth of what we are going to be talking about over the next few weeks.

Last week we started in the book of Genesis and ended when Jesus came on the scene in the Gospels. What a powerful time! I encourage everyone that wasn’t here to get online and download that sermon. We talked about the love/fear relationship between God and man. In the Garden, man and God talked in the cool of the day. Then man fell and a separation happened. Things got so bad that at the end of the Old Testament, God goes silent for over 400 years. The devil thought he had won until at Jesus’ baptism, the very voice of God speaks and says, “This is my beloved Son of whom I am well pleased.” It was the first time that anyone had heard that voice for over 400 years. From that moment on, God has set up a plan to be able to communicate with mankind again. So, from this week on, we are going to discover how to hear God’s voice and how to know it is Him. Over the next few weeks we want to discover how to discern the Lord’s voice in our lives. We need to develop “A Feel for the Real.” I want to be intimate with Jesus Christ. I want to know Him more and hear him more clearly.

I. A FEEL FOR GOD’S VOICE

I believe we had a very powerful time last week. We talked about the voice of God. I told you that this week we were going to get more personal. It is great to know that God still speaks today, which was last week’s message, but we really need to know how God speaks to “US” today. How do I activate this discernment of God’s voice in my life? How do I recognize the still, small voice of God?

I read about a U.S. Treasury officer who had the job of identifying counterfeit dollar bills. He said, “The key to identifying a false bill is to spend hours and hours handling the real thing.” In other words, you have to get a “feel for the real” if you want to identify the fake. There are all kinds of voices in our world today. The only way we can determine what is God and what is not is by spending more time with God then with the world. We wonder why we don’t hear from God more, this is probably one of the main reasons. We just don’t spend enough time with Him to know when it is Him.

As we spend time with God praying and studying His Word, we will automatically develop a feel for the voice of God. We will instantly begin to recognize when something doesn’t feel right in our spirit. We must be careful because it is so easy to be deceived by other voices.

A perfect illustration of this is found in Genesis 27. We don’t have time to read the whole story, but let me explain it to you. In Genesis 27, Isaac could have avoided being deceived if he had had a “feel for the real.” Jacob, Isaac’s younger son, wanted the blessing that belonged to his older brother, Esau. In order to get it, Jacob had to convince his father to speak the blessing over him. So, Jacob’s mother, Rebekah, came up with a clever idea to fool the aging father, whose eyesight was extremely bad. Jacob disguised his voice to sound like Esau’s and covered his arms with animal hair to be more hairy like his brother. Jacob deceived his father and received the blessing that was meant for the firstborn son, Esau.

Genesis 27:21-24, “Isaac said to Jacob, “Please come near, that I may feel you, my son, whether you are really my son Esau or not.” 22 So Jacob went near to Isaac his father, and he felt him and said, “The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau.” 23 And he did not recognize him, because his hands were hairy like his brother Esau's hands; so he blessed him. 24 Then he said, “ Are you really my son Esau?”

I want you to notice in this story that Isaac could have determined the counterfeit had he only listened to Jacob’s voice and trusted his ears. If he had only not trusted his feeling, but his ears instead, Jacob would have never been able to get away with it. We must be careful because the counterfeit can look real and can be nearly identical to the real, but we must learn to trust our spiritual ears.