Knowing God’s Voice November 17, 2002
John 10
The Shepherd and His Flock
1"I tell you the truth, the man who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs in by some other way, is a thief and a robber. 2The man who enters by the gate is the shepherd of his sheep. 3The watchman opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. 4When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. 5But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a strangers voice." 6Jesus used this figure of speech, but they did not understand what he was telling them.
The Bible says that if we are His Sheep, we will recognize his voice in our lives.
Recognizing the Shepherd’s voice.
We are a church that wants to hear God’s voice – for our personal lives, for the corporate life of the church, in prophetic utterance for the world.
How do we know it’s his voice? How do we know when it is not just some thought that has come to our head that we are thrilled with?
Samuel was one of the greatest prophets in the scripture, he was one f the last judges of Israel before the era of the kings, and he led the nation trough the transition by the voice of God, but even Samuel didn’t recognize God’s voice when he first heard it.
1 Samuel 3
1 The boy Samuel ministered before the LORD under Eli. In those days the word of the LORD was rare; there were not many visions.
2 One night Eli, whose eyes were becoming so weak that he could barely see, was lying down in his usual place. 3 The lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the temple [1] of the LORD , where the ark of God was. 4 Then the LORD called Samuel.
Samuel answered, "Here I am." 5 And he ran to Eli and said, "Here I am; you called me."
But Eli said, "I did not call; go back and lie down." So he went and lay down.
6 Again the LORD called, "Samuel!" And Samuel got up and went to Eli and said, "Here I am; you called me."
"My son," Eli said, "I did not call; go back and lie down."
7 Now Samuel did not yet know the LORD : The word of the LORD had not yet been revealed to him.
8 The LORD called Samuel a third time, and Samuel got up and went to Eli and said, "Here I am; you called me."
Then Eli realized that the LORD was calling the boy. 9 So Eli told Samuel, "Go and lie down, and if he calls you, say, ’Speak, LORD , for your servant is listening.’ " So Samuel went and lay down in his place.
10 The LORD came and stood there, calling as at the other times, "Samuel! Samuel!"
Then Samuel said, "Speak, for your servant is listening."
There may be times that God is speaking to us and we just don’t know it because we don’t recognize the voice.
We begin to recognize God’s voice in Scripture
The scriptures are the place where the voice of the shepherd is most likely to be heard.
2 Timothy 3:16
16All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
How to hear God’s Voice in Scripture
Read the Word
Most of us here graduated from high school, some of us even have some letters either behind or in front of our names. We are an educated people. And because we are an educated people, we have been trained how to read. We have been trained not just how to take the symbols of from the page and convert them into the language that we speak, but we have been trained how to master the text. Particularly in university, we have been taught how to get into the book, find out what we need to know and get out fast. We live in an information society, and books are full of information that we need to get, so we read them in order to get more information
Most of us tackle the Bible in the same way. This is a book of facts, and it is our job to read it find out the facts install them into our data base.
There are times when I can go overboard. When I’m writing some sermons, I get out as many commentaries as I can find, I get out my dictionaries, and my Greek text and my tools to help me read the Greek text. And then I rightly divide the word, I take it apart, and do a word study on this word, find out the exact verb tense of this word, find out the cultural significance of this phrase, and somewhere along the line out comes a sermon, but not before I have collected a great mountain of data and information.
There is nothing wrong in studying the Bible in this way: it is the way that we have been taught, and for many of us, because of our culture it is the easiest way to function.
But it is not the only way to approach the Word.
M. Robert Mulholland, Jr. in his book, "Shaped by the Word" makes a distinction between reading the Bible for information, and reading it for formation.
In reading the Word for information we seek to master the text, to get what we want out of it, so that we can speak to the situation that we find ourselves in.
An extreme example of this is the little boy spread out on the floor with his Bible in front of him, and he says to his sister, "Would you please be quiet, I’m trying to find a passage to back up my pre-conceived notion!"
In reading the word for formation we seek to have the text master us.
Informational reading often seeks to find the objective universal principle, whereas formational reading seeks to hear subjectively what God is saying directly to me through this passage. We need to come to the word with the question, where is God’s voice to me in this passage.
Read the word to recognized the voice of the Shepherd.
David and Nathan after David’s sin
What has happened is that David, the king stays home while all of his men are in battle. One day he goes up on his roof and looks dwn on Jerusalem where he sees a beautiful woman bathing on her roof. He lusts after her, and finds out that she is Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, the Hittite, one of David’s mighty men. He still calls her to himself, they sleep together, and she becomes pregnant. David finds out and calls Uriah back from the front so that he will sleep with his wife and cover up their sin. Uriah refuses to visit his wife because “how can I sleep under a roof when my men are under canvas in battle. David tries everything – he gets him drunk, but Uriah will not go to his house. Finally, David sends Uriah back to the front with his own death warrant in his pocket. He tells his general to put Uriah where the fighting is most fierce and then to pull back from him, letting the enemy do David’s dirty work. Uriah is killed, and David takes Bathsheba as one of his many wives.
Later, The prophet Nathan visits him
1 The LORD sent Nathan to David. When he came to him, he said, "There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other poor. 2 The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle, 3 but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb he had bought. He raised it, and it grew up with him and his children. It shared his food, drank from his cup and even slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to him.
4 "Now a traveler came to the rich man, but the rich man refrained from taking one of his own sheep or cattle to prepare a meal for the traveler who had come to him. Instead, he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and prepared it for the one who had come to him."
5 David burned with anger against the man and said to Nathan, "As surely as the LORD lives, the man who did this deserves to die! 6 He must pay for that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity."
7 Then Nathan said to David, "You are the man! This is what the LORD , the God of Israel, says: ’I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you from the hand of Saul. 8 I gave your master’s house to you, and your master’s wives into your arms. I gave you the house of Israel and Judah. And if all this had been too little, I would have given you even more. 9 Why did you despise the word of the LORD by doing what is evil in his eyes? You struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and took his wife to be your own. You killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. 10 Now, therefore, the sword will never depart from your house, because you despised me and took the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your own.’
David exegetes the passage well "All rich men with lots of sheep should never steal their poor neighbour’s only sheep for their parties - on penalty of death, or at least they should pay back 4x as much"
- a wonderful universal principle!, but David misses the point of the story until God hits him over the head by saying to him "That man is you"
We too can read the Word, and miss the point – miss the voice of the Shepherd
In John 5, Jesus accuses the Pharisees of having their noses in the Bible, but not their hearts. He says:
37And the Father who sent me has himself testified concerning me. You have never heard his voice nor seen his form, 38nor does his word dwell in you, for you do not believe the one he sent. 39You diligently study[3] the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, 40yet you refuse to come to me to have life.
“We need to read (the Bible) for the right reasons. C. S. Lewis wrote that we when come to the Scripture it’s not a "question of learning a subject but of steeping ourselves in a Personality." In other words, our primary purpose for reading the Bible and meditating on it should be to meet Christ, to hear his voice, and to see him more clearly that we might love him more passionately. Scripture reading is meant to aid in the process of “forming Christ within us.” - Jack Deere in “Surprised by the Voice of God”
Read the Word to Obey
Matthew 7
24"Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. 26But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash."
James 1
22Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. 23Those who listen to the word but do not do what it says are like people who looks at their faces in a mirror 24and, after looking at themselves, go away and immediately forget what they look like. 25But those who look intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continue to do this, not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it--they will be blessed in what they do.
I think that there are times in our life when we are desperate to hear God’s voice for us and our lives. We cry out to him and say, “O God why won’t you talk to me!” and God says, “You haven’t done anything about the last time I talked to you!”
Although there are times that God speaks to us just to show us that he loves us and is a comfort to us, he can also give firm direction – in following that direction we give him the go ahead to continue to speak.
Read the Word for You
It can become very easy to read the Bible for everyone else in our lives – we read a passage and say: “Boy do I know who should hear this verse!” This is what David did. Jesus tells us not to try to remove the speck from someone else’s eye until we deal with the plank in our own!
In my position, I can move quickly from reading the text to thinking about how I can communicate it to you. I need to hear this instruction as much as anyone – If I am going to hear the Shepherd’s voice in the Word, I need to be open to him speaking to me first.
Just Read it
Big portions, small portions, medium…
How God can speak to us through Scripture
Once when my sister was working for a Christian man it came time for her to move on and she quit her job. The man was not happy with her decision and he asked her if she had sought the Lord’s will on this. She had, but she found out that his definition of seeking God’s will was to set your bible on the ground, stand on it, ask god your question, pick the bible up, open it randomly put you finger on the page and begin to read your answer!
My father told me of a man who made his decisions in a similar way. He wanted to know God’s will for his life and opened the bible, put his finger down and found Matthew 27:5 “So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself.” He said “Oh that can’t be right and tried again only to fall on Luke 10:37 “Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.” He tried again and came across John 13:28"What you are about to do, do quickly,"
The Bible is not a sanctified ouji board – you cannot tell fortunes with it, but God will speak specifically to people and into situations using His Word.
Jump’n off the page syndrome
That said, there are times when a piece of scripture almost jumps off the page and grabs us by the throat! There are times when we cannot take our eyes off a certain passage – this often means God is speaking to us through His word.
Comfort
It is the Holy Spirit who illunmines the scriptures to us and speaks to our hearts through them. The holy Spirit is called the comforter, so often times when a specific scripture gives us comfort in a specific situation – that is God’s Spirit comforting us.
Ouch
There are times when the Spirit uses the Bible to convict us, like Nathan and David. Or there is an area in our life that needs to be brought to the surface to be healed. Or a mindset that needs to be changed. When a passage hurts – convicts us, or cause pain we don’t understand, or we just can’t believe that God put that in the Bible, stick with it, ask God what are you trying to say to me through this painful piece?
Multiple incidences
Nicky Gumble Why and How should I read the Bible:
“Sometimes God speaks to us in a very specific way. God spoke to me very clearly about my father after he died on January 21, 1981. I had become a Christian seven years earlier and my parents’ initial reaction was one of complete horror. Gradually, over the years, they began to see a change in me. My mother became a committed Christian long before she died. My father was a man of few words. Initially, he was very unsure about my involvement in the Christian faith. By degrees, he started to become warmer about it. His death was quite sudden. What I found hardest about his death was that I wasn’t sure whether he was a Christian or not.
Exactly ten days after his death, I was reading the Bible. I had asked God to speak to me about my father that day because I was still worrying about him. I happened to be reading Romans and I came across the verse, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved" (Romans 10:13), I sensed at that moment God was saying to me that this verse was for my father; that he had called on the name of the Lord and been saved. About five minutes later my wife, Pippa, came in and said to me, "1 have been reading a verse in Acts 2:21 and I think this verse is for your father, It says, ’And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved."’ It was quite extraordinary, because that verse only appears twice in the New Testament and God had spoken to both of us through the same words at the same time in different parts of the Bible.
Three days later, we went to a Bible study in a friend’s home and the Bible study was on Romans 10:13, that same passage. So three times during those three days God spoke to me about my father through the same words. Nevertheless, on my way to work I was still thinking about my father and worrying about him. As I came out of the subway, I looked up and there was a huge poster saying, "Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved" (Romans 10:13), I remember talking to a friend about what had happened and he said, "Do you think the Lord may be trying to speak to you?"
Called to mind in Prayer
When I first went to Humber Blvd. Baptist Church, Pam and I were just coming alive to the things of the Spirit, exciting things were happening in our past church. We wondered how many of those things we to bring to Humber. As I went to God in prayer about it he gave me Isaiah 42: 3 A bruised reed he will not break,
and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.
When the renewal came in 1994 I went back to God with the same question, and he gave me the same verse. It was like he was saying that that much wind would snuff out the glowing wick. I would often return with the same question, and at one point I came to God, and the verse was no longer there, but instead the sense of a lightly blowing breeze. That week I received a call from one of the members who had the same experience while praying – it was God telling us that the flame had become strong enough to take a light breeze in the Spirit. It gave us great hope.
Conclusion:
If you want to hear the Shepherd’s voice – read his word!
