Growing in Intimacy with God - Does God Talk To Us?

How do we learn to lean into God, to experience him more fully, and to come to rest in his love for us? To relate to God not just as a distant King who we’ve read a book about, but as a real, present, loving Father who “walks with us and talks with us and tells us we are his own.” Because for me, everything God wants to do in us and through us hinges on an unfolding relationship and growing intimacy with God. That's the subject of today's show, and in particular, we're going to talk about what communication looks like in the relationship between us and the Father.

If we’re going to develop real intimacy with God, there has to be communication, and that communication has to be both ways. And that’s often where we as Christians stumble. Because we understand talking to God. But it doesn’t always seem like God talks to us. Or maybe some of us don’t believe God talks to us. I’ve spent much of my adult life as part of a denomination that largely denies that God speaks to us. He spoke to us in creating the Bible, and that’s the only way he speaks.

So, what about this idea that God talks to us? Should we expect it? Does Scripture affirm it? Yes. There are loads of examples of God talking to individuals, and there just seems to be the overwhelming expectation on the part of the biblical writers that God speaks to his people. For example:

1. Ps. 4:1 — “Answer me when I call to you, O my righteous God. Give me relief from my distress; be merciful to me and hear my prayer.”
2. Ps. 16:7-8 — “I will praise the Lord who counsels me; even at night my heart instructs me. I have set the Lord always before me. Because he is at my right hand.” This is parallelism. The Lord counsels me; my heart instructs me.
3. Ps. 17:6 — “I call on you, O God, for you will answer me; give ear to me and hear my prayer.” Again, there’s the expectation of an answer.
4. Ps. 28:1 — “To you I call, O Lord my rock; do not turn a deaf ear to me. For if you remain silent, I will be like those who have gone to the pit.”
5. Matt. 4:4 — “Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
6. John 10:1-18 — The sheep follow him because they know his voice. Hearing God is about relationship with him. Calling his sheep by name = personal. He created us to encounter him.
7. John 14:15-18 — The Spirit (Counselor) - “you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.” You can’t know him if he’s silent and invisible.
8. John 16:12-13 — The Spirit will speak and guide you.

Okay, so Scripture affirms both God’s willingness to speak to us and the expectation of his people throughout history that he will. Speaking words is one form of communication, but God can speak to us without words, too, just like we do.

So take a few minutes and think: How many different ways in can you think of in Scripture that God has communicated with people? Here are a few:

1. Audibly (Paul on the Damascus Road — Acts 9:1-9)
2. Through a donkey (Balaam’s donkey — Num. 22:21-39)
3. Through a burning bush (Moses — Ex. 3)
4. Writing on the wall (Daniel 5)
5. Through other people
6. Through prophets (Agabus re. Paul’s imprisonment)
7. Through his Word (which is the plumb line for hearing God in other ways)
8. Dreams/visions (Paul/Man from Macedonia — Acts 16:6-10)
9. Through creation (Psalm 19:1; Rom. 1:18-20)
10. Through confirmation from two or more sources saying the same thing

How about some more modern ways? What other ways have you experienced in your own life where you felt like God was speaking to you? Where he got your attention in a way that felt like time stopped for a minute and revealed something brand new to you that changed the way you saw yourself or the world around you.

1. Music (God used the song Desperado to get my attention one time)
2. Books
3. Movies
4. The Bible (the first time I ever "heard" God speak to me I was reading Ps. 139)

The point is that God is endlessly creative. He has every means of communication at his disposal to communicate with you. So we shouldn’t expect that it’s only gonna happen in just one way.

So what are some of the barriers to hearing from God?

1. The first one is disbelief. If you don’t believe God speaks to you, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t or won’t. He’s not limited by your disbelief. But it does mean you won’t recognize it as God.
2. Another barrier is simply the lack of training & examples. If no one guides us, how can we learn? Only once in my life have I ever seen a church that put forth any real effort to help its people learn how to discern the Lord’s voice for themselves. And that leaves people uncertain, unsteady in their faith, feeling like they should be able to hear from the Lord, but because they can’t, it must be because they lack faith, or they’re not good enough in some way. And it can really end up undermining people’s faith.
3. "The UFO Syndrome” -- If you saw a UFO, would you tell anyone about it? Maybe not because of the fear of ridicule). Why is it that when we speak to God we are said to be praying, but when God speaks to us we are said to be schizophrenic? Why does it seem like such a bizarre thing to admit to people that we might actually hear from the Lord who created us?
4. Some people get derailed by the fear that maybe it’s just all in our head. But why on earth should we expect the voice of God to arise from outside us when he has placed his own Spirit within us??!! Paul talks in both Gal. 5:25 and Rom. 8:16-17 about the Spirit living inside us and that we’re to “walk by the Spirit” and be “led by the Spirit.” How do you think that works? We should expect God to speak to us from within. We should expect that God’s “voice” is going to probably come from within and is probably gonna sound a lot like our voice.
5. But that leads to the fear of being unable to distinguish our voice (or the enemy’s voice) from God’s voice. Well, discernment is something we struggle with sometimes, isn’t it? And it’s definitely healthy to want to make sure we’re discerning things correctly. “Do not believe every spirit,” we’re told in 1 John 4:1, “but test the spirits to determine if they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.” Discernment is a skill we’re supposed to grow in. But just because something requires spiritual discernment doesn’t mean we should avoid it, or disbelieve in it. It means we need to be careful, yes, and mature in our thinking, but we don’t reject it simply because it’s not easy.

Here are a few book recommendations that have helped me tremendously in learning to discern God's voice in my own life:

1. Armchair Mystic: How Contemplative Prayer Can Lead You Closer to God, by Mark E. Thibodeaux SJ (2001, updated 2019)
2. Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God, by Dallas Willard (2012)
3. Walking with God: How to Hear His Voice, by John Eldredge (2016)

Dallas Willard says, “Today, there is a desperate need for large numbers of people throughout our various social groupings who are competent and confident in their own practice of life in Christ and in hearing his voice. Such people would have the effect of concretely redefining Christian spirituality for our times. They would show us an individual and corporate human existence freely and intelligently lived from a hand-in-hand, conversational walk with God. That is the biblical ideal for human life.”

Arthur F. Miller says something that has helped me tremendously. He says, “How does [God] so communicate with you? How will you know? Because God has designed your frame and understands how you are put together, and how you function, what you notice and what you ignore, what you read, what you hear, and what gets your attention. Because the Spirit of God is resident within you and has a job to do as you do yours — leading, nudging, instructing, guiding, opening new doors, reminding, questioning, affirming, prodding, sometimes engineering circumstances — strange, extraordinary things happen. If you need a knock on the side of your head, or a sense of God’s love that will take your breath away — that will happen in God’s time and in a way only you will understand.” - Arthur F. Miller, Jr.

Thanks for spending time with us today. Please like and subscribe, and tell others about the podcast, if it's been helpful to you.

And remember, you are greatly loved.

 

Music Provided by Nathan Longwell Music