Patterned Relationship
The Voice of God: Part 2
This is the second article in a series. See the first post here.
Few of us Christians would ignore God if we knew He was speaking. But since few of us recognize His voice we chalk up His voice as merely a strange thought that was, at best, influenced by the sermon last week or our quiet time that morning.
The thing is, God has a way of honoring the consistent pattern of our actions.
In Scripture, Pharaoh is a pretty easy example of this. Five times Pharaoh hardened his own heart to the words of the LORD spoken through Moses and Aaron. Then the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart for him, five more times. Or consider Judas Iscariot, who steals from the money bag (for years, perhaps?) and so God allowed Satan to enter Judas and betray Jesus for silver coins.
But there is a beautiful side to this as well. Moses, even with all his failures, had a deep pattern of humility and submission to the LORD and so God defines His relationship with Moses not by the outlier mistakes, but by the general pattern of Moses’ actions. In the New Testament we can consider Peter, who (even as rash as he is) has a pattern of pursuing deeper relationship with his Teacher, and so his life is not defined by his denial of Christ but by his pursuit of Him.
What I’m getting at is this: God seems to act in accordance with our patterns of behavior, and this has incredible implications in relation to hearing His voice.
Each of us will have moments like I described last time, when God told me to feed that man. And I don’t mean each of us will have the choice to do a nice thing for someone else, (though that is surely true), I mean that each of us will hear the inner prompting of God, His voice, and then we will choose what to do with it. What we do with that inner prompting is one step in setting a pattern with God.
For most of us, I don’t think we would ever want to ignore God’s voice, I’m just not sure most of us know how to recognize it. I believe our imaginations just haven’t been trained to be prepared to hear God, and so we haven’t the slightest clue what to do when He speaks.
In his phenomenal book, Hearing God1, Dallas Willard argues that it is the duty of those further along in their faith to teach others how to hear and recognize the voice of God.
I never had that sort of discipleship, and I don’t think I’m alone.
At one point or another, we are all Samuel: the boy laying in bed when God calls his name. But Samuel ran to Eli, the priest, for he “did not yet know the Lord, nor had the word of the Lord yet been revealed to him”. In the end, Samuel received sound advice (though it came from a suspect source) and when God called again Samuel said, “Speak, for Your servant is listening”2.
And then Samuel hears God, and together they begin a pattern of relationship that would continue on throughout Samuel’s life: God speaks, Samuel listens and obeys.
But this brings us to an uncomfortable question then: what is the pattern of relationship each of us have created with God?
Is it a pattern in which God speaks and then we obey, like Samuel? Or is it another pattern, one in which God has spoken dozens of times in small ways (perhaps. thoughts that did not originate from within ourselves) and we ignored it, and not even due to selfish “I don’t want to” motives, but instead because of a lack of faith.
Have we created patterns that sounds something like, “God doesn’t speak to me” rather than “Speak, Lord, for Your servant is listening.”
But if we choose to be brave enough to believe God can speak, how can we parse through the noise of our own minds, of this world, of the enemy, and know the voice we hear is actually God’s?
Stay tuned for part 3.
We don’t advertise, so growth is only by “word of mouth”, so spread the word.
It’s amazing. Go read it. Stop reading this and go read that. If you have Spotify Premium, it’s included as an audiobook. If not, check your Library or go buy it. You can probably get it used somewhere for cheap. It’s amazing. Go read it.
See 1 Samuel 3.