I am thrilled to get to share with you today. This topic that I get to talk about today is probably one of the most frequent topics of conversation that I have with other pastors, with coaching clients, with just people in general. And it’s because I think that it’s so important and it’s so foundational to how we function in daily life, and it really is about hearing from God. And this kind of came to me yesterday. There was a social media post and somebody was saying something and they had a lot to say and a lot to condemn, and they were quoting a lot of Bible. And I’m like, you know, man, I need to. I need to respond to that, you know, And I’m like, okay, so what kind of Facebook posts do I need to put out there? What do I need to say? And do I need to respond to their post? Do I put up my own post? You know, because I really feel like, you know, there’s some things that they should know. And I, I landed on, you know, I only say what I hear my father say, and I only do what I hear my father do.
That’s. That’s good. That. That’s really good. And, And I should. I should put something up about that. How do I. How do I make that succinct? How do I make that hit home? How do I make that, you know, hard hitting? As if anybody’s gonna, you know, really have their mind changed in one post on social media anyway.
But I’m. I’m wrapped up in it. I’m like, only hear. I only do what I hear my father tell me to do. I only say what my father tells me to say. How do I. How do I. How do I say that? And I only say what my father tells me to say.
I only say what my father tells me to say. And, you know, sometimes I can be a little dense, but it finally occurred to me that God wasn’t telling me to say anything at all. And I’m like, oh, I see what you did there. Got it. Yeah. But we go off and we’re doing things, not hearing from God, and it gets us in trouble. I mean, talk about open mouth, insert foot. It’s a huge disease in my life and I’m coming against it.
But, man, it’s just one of those things we gotta. We gotta look at, make sure that we’re paying attention to what God tells us and only doing what God tells us to do. So then the question always becomes, well, how do you hear from God? It’s a really good question. You know, we don’t really. We don’t really get a lot of teaching on that. We get a lot of teaching about how to be good, or at least I did growing up. You know, you get your salvation, you get your ticket to heaven, and then you just really be good until it’s time to cash in. It’s really not what God intended if you actually sit down and read the Word.
But hearing from God enriches your everyday life. It accelerates God’s plan for you. It enables you to speak light and life into others. It’s a really good thing. It’s something we really should know how to do. And it’s something I think I’ve really only kind of become aware of in the last maybe eight to 10 years of my life. And I know I don’t seem that old, but that’s kind of a smallish chunk of my life. So I wanted to talk today about how do we hear from God and then how do we do what he asks us to do, right? And that may be a talk for another sermon, but the verse that I was pulling from for my social media post that was going to get everybody, you know, zing them and knock them right into shape is John 8.
There’s so much that gets put out there that’s just not fruitful because God didn’t tell us to say it. And he is not going to actually back us up on anything that he didn’t tell us to do. One of my favorite examples of this is Joyce Meyers. She talks about when she was a young Christian wife and how she was really trying to be the good Christian wife. And she didn’t know how to go about that because nobody really ever taught her. And she’s got this example of this neighbor that lives next door. And the neighbor that lives next door is, you know, Betty Crocker incarnate, right? And the neighbor that lives next door does all her home cooking and feeds her kids really well and takes care of her house really well. And this woman every year makes her garden in their backyard, grows tomatoes and cans tomatoes.
So Joyce decides she’s going to do what her next door neighbor does, and she’s going to do that because this next door neighbor is this shining example of what you’re supposed to be as a wife and a mom. And she goes through the whole season. She learns how to prepare the beds. She learns how to trim everything back. She learns how to make sure that they’re ripe. And she gets her canning equipment. You know, she’s got this, the big steam canner. I don’t know if you guys remember those from when we were kids.
Big old steam canner. And you got your jars and your lids and. And all the things that it takes to can tomatoes. And she’s ready. She’s ready. And, you know, the next day they’re looking at, oh, they’re ripe, they’re ripe. And the next day they’re going to can their tomatoes. And she wakes up in the morning, she goes out, and some insect has just obliterated every tomato that she had on the vines.
And she calls up her neighbor and she says, oh, my gosh, our tomatoes. What happened? And the neighbor says, my tomatoes are fine. They are great. I’m getting ready to can now. And Joyce is hot. She’s like, lord, I am trying so hard, so hard to be this good wife and this good mother. And I’ve grown these tomatoes, and I’ve tended to the plants, and it’s seed time at harvest, and I planted and I made sure the soil was good and all the things. And how come you didn’t protect my tomatoes? And she heard God tell her in her spirit, I never told you to plant tomatoes, so I’m not responsible for your tomatoes.
Oh, and that’s. She heard God in her spirit. It’s not like she heard a voice out here. There’s not like. I think sometimes there’s an audible voice, but that’s rare. That’s. That’s. I think that’s really only when God really needs to get your attention.
Most of the time when you’re hearing from God, it comes up from. From deep within. That’s why people tell you to go with your gut, because it comes from within us. It comes from our spirit. When God is talking to us. There’s things that come into your head, and that’s all kinds of outside sources, but your inside source, which is God, comes up from your gut. So that’s a pretty good way to tell when God’s talking to you, but you don’t want to do anything that he didn’t ask you to do because he’s not responsible for what you say or what you do if you’re not doing what he asked you to do. And then Jesus goes on in the book of John, for I’ve spoken on my own authority.
He says in chapter 12, but the Father who sent me gave me a command on what I should say and what I should speak. So Jesus was really cognizant about. I ain’t saying nothing that God didn’t tell me to say. And he knew. He knew why. And we’re going to find out why. And he shared with us why. Okay, so understanding that God is talking to you has to start with why God put you here to begin with.
And we talked about that a few weeks back. God put us here for relationship with us. That’s why we’re here. He didn’t plan for all the nastiness that the enemy had. Satan, when he was cast out from heaven and he take the humans, gave him the rights to earth and all those things. God didn’t plan for all that. That wasn’t what he wanted. He knew it was going to happen, but it’s not what he wanted.
If we had listened, if Adam and Eve had only done what the Father told them to do and only said what the Father told them to say, then we wouldn’t be have been in this predicament to begin with, because we were here for relationship. God put Adam here, put Eve here for relationship with him. It’s to have that joy of that relationship. And Revelation 3:20 kind of brings this out. It says, behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him. And he with me sitting down at the table has lost, I think, some of its meaning to us. There’s a lot of things that have lost their meaning that we really need to make sure that we go back and look at what was the original intended meaning.
And the breaking of the bread and the supper, right? And the meals that you’re supposed to sit down and eat together. The point of that is the relationship. Breaking bread together is a symbol of this deep relationship that you have with one another. That’s why when Jesus broke bread with the tax collectors, it was such a big deal, is because this breaking bread is the symbol of this great relationship that we have. So revelation kind of points to us and says, hey, this is the whole point. Hear God’s voice, open the door, let him in, and he will come and eat with you, and you will have this great relationship. So understanding that hearing from God is really starting with the fact that we have this relationship. And it’s a multifaceted relationship.
One of the ones that I had the hardest time with is letting God be my comforter. I could look at God as a provider. Yes, Father, God is supposed to provide for us. I got that one. I got that. He loved me in kind of just a very limited version of love because he was supposed to, is what I thought. Well, God loves me because he’s supposed to. He loves all his children.
God loves me. I could do that, but I couldn’t get to the comforter part. God’s the healer. God’s our provider. God is our source and our supply. And there’s so many things that God is. That we won’t understand if we don’t hear from Him. So hear from him.
First of all, get into the word. Psalm 119, 105, tells us, Your Word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. It’s so important in our world. We’ve got so much light, artificial light, that comes at us everywhere. So here again, understanding what this light in this lamp means loses some of its significance when we are bombarded with and surrounded by this artificial light all the time. Think about it. Biblical times. Light was scarce after the sun went down.
And so in the times of what are seeming darkness, God is light. He is always there. And that comes from His Word. And you go back to the very beginning of the Book of John, and it says, in the beginning, the Word was God, and the Word was with God. And then the Word became flesh. Okay, so getting this idea of Jesus is the Word. The Word is Jesus, that he’s embedded, the Word is imbued with Jesus will help you understand that God is speaking to you through His Word. And sometimes when you’re reading this written word on the page, just because there’s a denotative meaning, meaning the definition of these words, the connotation will rise up in you.
God will speak to you and reveal to you other things that may not be technically written right there on the page, he’ll reveal to you other truths through those words. We talk about this a lot when we’re doing sermons and when we’re speaking at other places, somebody will come up to us and say, oh, that thing that you said was so fantastic. And then they’ll quote it for us. And I’ll look at David or he’ll look at me like, did I say those words? And he’s like, no, that was the Holy Spirit. Oh, got it. But because that person was yielded, because they were paying attention, because God had their attention, he could speak to them and reveal to them that they, that they needed in that moment. So God’s word, it’s that lamp, it’s that light, it gives you direction in the darkness. Okay? So that’s part of, that’s the beginning of how we hear.
Hebrews 4:12 goes on to say, for the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any two edged sword. Piercing, sounds, kind of violent. The division of soul and spirit and of joints and marrow, discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. Okay. There’s a lot in there, but we don’t want to be soulish, we want to be spiritual. So you want to, you want to rightly divide, right? And that’s what the word does for us. It tells us whether what’s coming into us or coming out of us, actually in this case, what’s coming out of us is human kind of fleshly, soulish realm or whether it’s spirit realm.
Okay. One of the best examples of why reading this word is important and being able to understand that God speaks to us through that word is that everything in the Word is authentic. It is the real thing. So if you’re reading the Word, you’re reading the real thing, okay? So if you’re understanding that from top to bottom, this word is, is part of God. It is. God breathed. Holy Spirit breathed into these people who wrote these chapter and verse, which it wasn’t written chapter and verse to begin with. It was written as a narrative.
We do chapter and verses so we can have some great references so we can get through all of the things and so we can come back and go, hey, that verse, it helps you. It was spirit breathed. Holy Spirit breathed that through the writers. And it was God at its writing, it becomes God at its writing. So when we understand that, and we understand that that is the authentic and the true place. Now the counterfeit, the things that aren’t of God stands out, okay? When they take people to show them what a counterfeit bill is, a dollar bill, a hundred dollar bill especially. And when they start teaching people how to recognize a counterfeit, they don’t show them the counterfeit. Those people are made to study intently the real thing.
And if you study intently the real thing, the word of God, then you will be able to recognize immediately when a Counterfeit comes your way, it will stand out like a sore thumb. So when you want to hear from God, you really want to start with his word because he’s in. He’s part of. He comes out of his word. So that’s where you start there. The next thing is this relationship, this back and forth that you have with him, and it’s a conversation. One of the books that we recommend all the time, that we are just so thrilled with because it breaks it down very simply, is Bob Boudin’s Two Chairs. And if you’ve never read this book, you got to read the book.
You haven’t been around David and I very long. If you’ve never read this book, because we’re going to tell you read this book, it breaks this down super, super simply. And the idea of the two chairs is there’s one chair for you and one chair for God. And you want to meet with the creator of the universe because he has all the answers. One of the questions Bob poses in his book is, if Warren Buffet. If there’s a 1% chance that Warren Buffett would come to your house and sit with you and give you financial advice, would you make a place for him? And I think the answer for all of us is, yes, I would absolutely. He’s the authority on money. He knows what to do with it.
Oh, my gosh, he’s got this proven track record. Isn’t he amazing? I would absolutely. Heck, I’d clean up. I dust. You know, if he was coming home, there is a hundred percent chance that if you make good room for God, he will show up. He will. He will absolutely show up and be with you. So set a place.
Set your two chairs. The other part of this is when you’re making a place for God, you really have to listen to him. So Bob suggests whatever amount of time you have, even if you only have five minutes, you set aside the first 20% for you and you give the next 80% to God and let him talk to you. This can be difficult for some of us because we stop talking for about 15 seconds, and then all of a sudden we really have more ideas and more things that we want to talk about. And then we have suggestions for God about how he should do what we’re thinking he should do. And wouldn’t it be fun, Lord, if you did it this way? And, oh, yeah, maybe we should add these people into it and, oh, we could do it in this time frame. God’s just sitting there waiting. He’s such a gentleman.
He will Wait for you to finish. So for me, and we can talk more about this at another time. The journaling is key in hearing from God. Journal what you’re hearing. Write it down. It’ll become important later on. Bob Bodine asks three chairs. Three chairs.
Three questions into chairs. One is, does God know your situation? The answer is always yes. He’s omnipotent. He knows everything. And he knew it long before you had the situation. He knew it before you were born. Is it too hard for him to handle? Once again, creator of the universe spoke worlds into existence. Probably whatever.
Your little problem is not too hard for him to handle. And oh yeah, he probably already has the solution. Which yields the third question. Does he have a good plan for you? Well, we know. Go back to the scripture, Jeremiah 29:11, for I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord plans to prosper you and not to harm you, to give you hope in a future right there in writing in your Bible. Read your Bible. It’s important. It’ll tell you all the good stuff.
So to answer Bob Bodine’s question, does he have a good plan for you? Why? Why, yes, yes, he does. But you won’t know what that plan is if you don’t sit down with him and find out. I always compare this to marching orders from a general. Now, then King David, he discovered this, and he was fighting battles and he would go to God and God would say, you know what? Hit him head on. I will guarantee you the victory. Now, it’s because King David had gone to God and said, hey, how do I approach this? Will I get the victory today? And God said, yes, hit them head on. I will give you the victory. Well, you would think, okay, I got that yesterday.
I’m just gonna keep hitting him head on today. We need to go get the. We need to go get the plan every day. And because the second time God goes, no, no, no, no, no, no, you gotta flank them this time. You got to go about it a different way, and I’ll guarantee you the victory. Now, if King David had not gone back and said, yo, God, are we doing it this way today? And not gotten the instructions? He would have gone on the way he did yesterday and been defeated. Don’t set yourself up for defeat. Set yourself up for success.
And you will find out that God’s already got the answers for you. Jeremiah, we like Jeremiah, not just a bullfrog. 33, 3. God says, call me and I will answer you. Get this. And I will tell you great and hidden things. You have not known. One of my favorite people to listen to is Bill Winston.
And he talks lot about Tuskegee, where he grew up, and George Washington Carver. It was. They would go to the George Washington Carver Museum, like, every year in school. I think every school district has, like, their place that they go. Mine wasn’t a museum. We went to the Wonder Bread factory. Not wonder. Mrs.
Baird’s bread factory in downtown Dallas. It was like the best place. And you came home with a loaf of bread and you smelled like bread for the rest of the day because you were in the Mrs. Baird’s bread factory. I’m not sure we got near the education that Bill Winston did. Did learning about George Washington Carver. But because he went every year, he understood deeply about George Washington Carver’s process. And he would say, I would go into my lab and I would take a blank notebook and I would ask God, how can I make something more out of this peanut? And he ended up with so much out of a peanut because he listened to God.
So the question becomes, how do you know it’s him? And we talked a little bit about this. At the top. You want to make sure a. It’s in the Word. Is it genuine? Right? Is it authentic? Does the word bear it out? And that’s where you have to do your research. So you. There’s not one. You can’t take one scripture.
You can’t just take one scripture and go, that’s God. You want to research it. Anything that you’re having issues with, whether it’s hearing from God, whether it’s forgiveness, whether it’s direction for your life, you want to do the research on it. And thank God for the Google. We have all kinds of resources now that will give us a roadmap to doing our research. The Google does not replace your own research. You really have to do your own. And you have to make sure that what God is telling you is for this is for you, right? And that God is telling you that there’s a lot of stuff out there.
You want to make sure that God is telling you, okay, that’s where the journaling comes in. That’s where you want to write it down and you want to see how it bears out. But you don’t want to weigh by one verse. You want the full counsel of scripture. Okay? So that’s part of how you know that God is speaking to you as if scripture bears out whatever unction you have within you. The other thing is it will always bring you peace. It may not be easy. So don’t Confuse peace with being easy.
It may not be easy to do. There may be fear that comes against you from the outside, but it will bring you go to your gut and inner peace. You will know that you know that you know that that’s what you’re supposed to do, even if it doesn’t make sense to your logical mind. Okay? If there’s an inner peace, God backs up everything that he asks you to do. And if he asks you to do it, he will back it up and there will be a peace about it. Okay? Hearing from God also will never, ever, ever lead you to sin. When you’re looking for somebody to do business with, when you’re looking for somebody to be in relationship, it will not come at the cost of sin of any kind. So if it’s leading you to sin, it is not God.
Okay? The other thing you do is you track it. And when I started journaling, I would start out sometimes with Lord, I think I hear you saying, confirm this for me. And so then I would start my research. Or he will use somebody who has a word that they’ll call you up and they’ll go, I don’t know why I’m calling you. I don’t know why I’m saying this, but I feel like I’m supposed to tell you this. And it will confirm what it was that you thought to begin with. There will be confirming signs for things that God tells you to do that will help you for the next time. And Mark Batterson says we thank God for the last miracle by looking for the next one.
We’ve talked about this before. He’s always more and better. So if it’s more and better than the last time, that’s a pretty good sign that it’s God and he’s really wanting to talk to you. He really wants you to hear him because he has great plans for you. But if you don’t hear from him, you won’t get the great plans. So if you’re a soldier in God’s army, you need to get up in the morning and report. Report, find out what your CO has to say to you today. Because he’s not going to lead you astray.
He’s going to lead you into places that are far better than you could ever dream or imagine your own. And he’s gonna keep you out of things that you shouldn’t be into anyway. He’ll keep you from posting social media posts that maybe you shouldn’t be posting. And he’ll keep you humble and human and he’ll laugh with you. Make sure before you make a move that you’re confident that you are well intentioned in being led by God, and that will go a long way to you being able to hear from him. Father, thank you for this time today. Thank you, Lord, that when we show up and when we sit at your feet, Lord, when we come into your presence in your throne room, you are always honorable, you are always faithful, Father, to reply to us, to respond to us, to talk to us, and to give us your eyes to see, your ears to hear, and your heart to understand. Thank you, Lord, that we can always trust you, because you’ve never given us a reason not to.
We love you, Lord. We thank you and we praise you in Jesus name. Amen. Pastor David’s going to come close now.
