Communication
Part 4 in series
Relating to God: What We Can Learn About God Through Our Closest Relationships On Earth
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
February 28, 2009
We’re in part 4 of our series called Relating to God: What We Can Learn About God Through Our Closest Relationships On Earth. So far we have looked at Trust, Commitment, and Faithfulness. I want to talk to you tonight about communication. I’m excited about what I have to share with you tonight because there may not be any area of the spiritual life that promises more of a thrill, and often delivers more frustration, than the area of communication with God. We get so excited to think that maybe God might speak to us. Then we wonder who we are to think he would bother. Then we wonder how we’d know if he actually did, and why he doesn’t seem to be speaking even though we are listening. Then we wonder if he’s listening when we’re speaking. We say things like, “God told me to do this or that,” and “I’m seeking God’s guidance” on such and such issue. BTW, this is true whether you are a committed believer or not. I was watching a TV show a few weeks ago where the lead character was in a hospital chapel praying for her sick brother. Someone else came in and sat next to her and this lead character said, “I have no clout with God.” In other words, when I speak to God, God doesn’t listen. Committed believers are interested in almost nothing more than knowing and doing the will of God, and how do you know what God’s will is unless God communicates with you and reveals it to you? So in the living of our daily lives, most people are extremely interested in whether God is communicating with them, and whether it’s possible for them to communicate back.
So I want to talk to you today about communication and what we can learn about communication with God from our everyday efforts to communicate with people. I have to start by saying that communication determines the environment of every relationship. You show me a relationship where communication is bad, or lacking, and I’ll show you a chilly environment in that relationship. I’ll also show you a high level of frustration and maybe even anger and resentment. Show me a relationship where the partners are skilled communicators, and I’ll show you a relationship with there is warmth and peace and connection and understanding and companionship. If you believe that right now you are in a bad relationship, I am willing to bet that, whatever else may be the problem, you are not communicating well with your spouse. When I do premarital counseling I start with an assessment that measures couple compatibility across 12 dimensions critical for success in marriage. One of these dimensions is communication. If a couple scores low in several areas, that’s usually not a big deal. But if one of those areas is communication, we have a potential problem on our hands. How are we going to resolve the issues in the other areas if we don’t communicate well? So communication determines the environment of every relationship.
Since communication determines the environment of every relationship, and since a relationship with God, whatever else it may be, is still a relationship, then we can say that communication determines the environment of our relationship with God. When we talk about communicating with God, we are talking, really, about prayer. Many Christians can’t understand why they do not feel connected to God, but when you ask about their prayer life, you realize they don’t really have one. Or it completely lacks consistency. Or they don’t even really understand prayer at all. Many non-believers – like the one on the TV show I watched – pray, but they pray outside of the context of a relationship with God. And then when God doesn’t come through they say, “I have no clout with God.” My friends, I could write a letter to Barack Obama today and ask him to do something huge for the Flint area. Let’s say he received my letter and actually read it. Apart from an actual relationship with me, my letter is just words on a page. It is abstract. It lacks context. (Interestingly, that’s how the Bible often reads for people without a relationship with God – words on a page.) But if Michelle Obama writes a letter to Barack and says, “Here are some things I hope you’ll consider doing in the Flint area,” you better believe Barack will listen. Why? Because he has a relationship with Michelle. He knows her and loves her. He trusts her heart and her intuition.
For both Christians and non-believers, the area of communication with God shows a lot of naivety we have about spiritual things. Everyone in this room immediately understands the difference between a letter I might write to Barack Obama and a letter Michelle Obama might write to him. Not only do we understand it, but we realize that this difference is not because Obama is cruel or uncaring. It’s simply a fact that you listen to those you know on a totally different level than those you don’t. God says that’s the way it is with him too!
Matthew 7:21-23 (NIV)
21 "Not everyone who says to me, ’Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.
22 Many will say to me on that day, ’Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’
23 Then I will tell them plainly, ’I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’
Remember, we’re talking about relationships here. What God wants from us is to know us. God wants a relationship. Within the context of a relationship, God will be extremely responsive to our prayers – to our efforts to communicate with him.
Matthew 7:9-11 (NIV)
9 "Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone?
10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake?
11 If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!
So communication, then, is the environment for every relationship, but we have to remember that relationship is the context for communication! I communicate with most of you because we know each other though church. Church is our “relationship context.” Communication that occurs outside of some kind of context (like my letter out of the blue to Barack Obama) will likely not accomplish much. So non-believers face the challenge of asking themselves, “If I want to be able to communicate with God, am I willing to actually maintain an ongoing relationship with him where communication can actually have some impact?” Christians must ask, “If I’m already living in this relationship, then why is communicating with God not more important to me than it is?” It seems that often what both believers and non-believers have in common is that they both seek to communicate with God for the purpose of getting something they need, rather than for the purpose of maintaining a relationship with him. It is that relationship that provides a context within which prayer can be effective and powerful.
So communication is the environment of a relationship. For this reason, communication must be ongoing. The man who tells his wife he loves her on their wedding day and expects that to be sufficient has another thing coming. The person who prays to God in a moment of trouble or difficulty and expects that to be sufficient has another thing coming! The woman who gets so busy around the house that she only pays attention to her husband on the weekends might well find that he’s so frustrated by Saturday that meaningful communication isn’t possible. Likewise the person who tunes into God once a week on church days will certainly find that to be inadequate to maintain the relationship. Generally it is safe to say that the closer you want a relationship with someone to be, the more often and the more deeply you must communicate with that person. This is true with human beings. And it is true with God.
Philippians 4:6 (NIV)
6 …in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.
Next we see that there are different kinds of communication. We find in our human relationships that communication is verbal and non-verbal and that what we say actually accounts for only about 10% of our communication. The other 90% of what we communicate is non-verbal – in other words, it comes through what we do. Faces we make, things we do with our eyes, etc. The vast majority of what you communicate to other people comes through means other than what you say. Now that is true with God as well. The vast majority of what you communicate to God comes through means other than what you say. We’ll come back to that in a minute, but let’s look at how God has communicated with us.
God communicated with us verbally in his book, The Bible. He communicated with us verbally in the person of Jesus Christ. He has communicated with us verbally in the messages of preachers and prophets. Sometimes he even communicates verbally by impressing certain words into our minds. We don’t actually HEAR them out loud, but it’s still verbal communication because God has used words. What about non-verbally? First there is creation itself:
Romans 1:19-20 (MSG)
19 But the basic reality of God is plain enough. Open your eyes and there it is!
20 By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being. So nobody has a good excuse.
What other non-verbal forms of communication has God used to connect with us? Perhaps there is no greater non-verbal symbol of God’s love than the birth of Jesus in that quiet stable. Or the suffering and death of Jesus, described beautifully 700 years before it happened by the prophet Isaiah:
Isaiah 53:7 (NIV)
7 He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.
Then, if you have your eyes open, I believe you will come to a place where you can see attempts by God to communicate non-verbally all the time – in your circumstances (things others would call coincidence), in your emotions, and in the ways other people react to you. God is speaking. He has used words and he has used symbols. So too, in your speaking to God, you will use both verbal and non-verbal communication. You will sometimes pray to God out loud – that’s verbal. Other times you will pray silently, thinking the words to yourself – that too is verbal. Other times you will write in a journal – that is verbal. But there are times when you will communicate with God simply by learning to sit in his presence. You will discipline yourself to sit in silence, to cast distractions aside and focus not on words but simply on the presence of Christ. That is non-verbal. But like I said a moment ago, only about 10% of communication is verbal. If so, in ways ways do we communicate with God non-verbally? Well, the most powerful non-verbal communication is obedience and disobedience.
1 John 2:3-6 (NIV)
3 We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands.
4 The man who says, "I know him," but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him.
5 But if anyone obeys his word, God’s love is truly made complete in him. This is how we know we are in him:
6 Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did.
There is no greater form of communication with God than to do what God has told us to do, to fashion our lives according to his will. Remember, we’re talking about relationships here. And this passage starts with “We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands.” In other words, if you do not do what God has said, you do not even KNOW God. When we obey God, we show that we have heard what he has said to us (both verbally and non-verbally) and we have accurately picked up his message. That is what it means to know God. And this, by the way, is the reason so many people (both believers and non-believers) would say, “I have no clout with God.” If communication is 10% verbal and 90% nonverbal, then what are we truly saying to God when we ask him for something, yet by our actions we show over and over again that we do not know him and do not love him? If someone told you they loved you, but then constantly and willfully did things that hurt and offended you, would you believe they loved you? Of course not. Likewise, God knows that people who do not seek to live obediently do not love him because despite what they may say, they do things that constantly and willfully hurt and offend him. This shows they do not love him. If they do not love him, there is no relationship there, not by his choice but by theirs. If there is no relationship, then God does not know them. If God does not know them, then it’s Dave Flowers writing to Barack Obama. The words are there, but there is no relational context.
Matthew 7:23 (NIV)
23 Then I will tell them plainly, ’I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’
Evil why? Because despite the 10% you say that communicates your love for me, the 90% that you live shows that you do not know me, love me, regard me, or respect me. We have no relationship. If you know me, you will do what I have asked you to do.
This is another example of where people regularly suspend all rules of basic communication and act totally different toward God than we would act in any other relationship. We say, “We’re all God’s children – God loves all of us.” Well, that’s true in a sense. But God does not have a relationship with all of us and that’s not God’s choice, it’s ours. It’s our choice whether or not to live in relationship with God. So communication is verbal and non-verbal. We may be the best verbal prayers in the world, but what do our lives communicate to God? What are we saying by the way we live?
Next, please understand that in every relationship, no matter how close, misunderstandings are common. Men and women speak different languages and despite how we love each other, we often simply do not understand one another. Sometimes somebody will do something believing it to be God’s will, believing God “spoke to them” and told them to do thus and such. Then it turns out to be a disaster, implodes around them, and they end up right back where they started. And they say, “I was positive God told me to do this. But it was a disaster – what’s going on?”
Of course we can’t discount that God might tell us to do something that would not have the results we would expect. But also, perhaps what we thought was God simply wasn’t. Perhaps we misunderstood. I mean let’s face it, given how often husbands and wives misunderstand each other – when they are standing and talking – out loud – right in the same room – isn’t it even more likely that no matter how sincere we are in seeking God’s voice we could sincerely misunderstand it? Rather than this rocking our faith in God, it should spur us on, like in human relationships, to continue studying the mind and intentions of the one we seek to understand.
Isaiah 55:8 (GW)
8 “My thoughts are not your thoughts, and my ways are not your ways,” declares the Lord.
…to his created human beings. Declares the woman to the man. Declares the man to the woman. This is just part of being in relationships. No man will ever fully comprehend his wife. No woman will ever fully understand her husband. No man or woman will ever fully understand God. But here’s the good news:
1 Corinthians 2:16 (NIV)
16 "… we have the mind of Christ.
Because God places his spirit in us, God’s spirit gradually shows us God’s mind and God’s heart and we CAN come to understand God with greater and greater accuracy. After all, Jesus said
John 10:27 (NIV)
27 My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.
When you first met your husband, wife, fiancé, boyfriend/girlfriend, you wouldn’t have recognized their voice from anyone else’s. But after a while you got to where you instantly knew it was them on the phone, just by the sound of that voice. Then you got to where that voice brought you comfort and joy and gave you a sense of place. That’s the way it is with the people of God. At first we will NOT know his voice when he communicates with us. But after a while we’ll start to recognize the voice. We’ll get better and better at it and eventually the sound of that voice will bring us peace, like when sheep hear the voice of the shepherd. We’ll know when we hear that voice that we’re in the place we need to be.
Finally tonight, all communication is profoundly spiritual. Even between human beings. Let’s go back to:
1 Corinthians 2:16 (NIV)
16 "… we have the mind of Christ.
Mind is spiritual! Think about it. You are more than your physical properties. Your brain is located in your head, but to date no one has ever found where your mind is! Your mind goes above and beyond your brain and its chemical and molecular functions. Your mind is your essence – it is who you are. And when you communicate with me, you help me understand not molecules and atoms, but your mind – this spiritual part of you that has no precise physical location. All communication between human beings is happening from one spirit to another spirit. And all communication between human beings and God is happening between the human spirit and the spirit of God!
Romans 8:16 (MSG)
16 God’s Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children.
Let’s not be fooled into thinking that only communication between us and God is spiritual. All of it is! It is through communication that we reveal our minds to others and they reveal their minds to us.
1 Corinthians 2:16 (NIV)
16 "… we have the mind of Christ.
What this tells us is that something happens when we commit our lives to Christ – we put ourselves in a position to come to have his mind. And this isn’t all that mystical either. When you committed yourself to your spouse, you put yourself in a position to come to have their mind – to come to understand them on a level you would never have been capable of without that commitment. Who’s in a position to know Heidi Nutter’s mind? Me? Nope. Only Chuck, who has committed to living with her in a relationship where that potential can be realized. Who is in a position to know the mind of Christ? Only those who have committed to living with God in a relationship where that potential can be realized.
When I married Christy, she gave me all of her, including her mind. It could be said on my wedding day that that I was given the mind of Christy. Her mind became available to me. That doesn’t mean I have to listen to it, or respect it, or take the time to understand it. It just means it is now available to me, and in the same way, God’s mind is available for all who are willing to commit themselves to him and put themselves in a position to come to have his mind. You do not have to listen to it, respect it, or take the time to understand it. But it is available to you.
I packed a lot about communication into tonight’s sermon. First it is the environment of every relationship. Second, communication must be ongoing. Third, there are different kinds of communication and non-verbal communicates a lot more than verbal. Fourth, misunderstandings are common between people and between us and God. Fifth, all communication is profoundly spiritual. Do you believe God might have an intention to speak to you? Are you living your life in such as way as to come to know his voice and have his mind?
