Last week I watched a romantic comedy with my wife that contained a rare admission of truth on the world’s stage (a.k.a. movie screens). Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson are oddly paired as a math teacher and superstar diva. They find themselves impossibly matched up in very strange circumstances. It was predictable in all the ways you want a rom-com to be, but I couldn’t help but notice part of the message that was coming through, which is:
Which of the Ten Commandments do you suppose is most often broken?
You might guess that the 5th commandment to honor your father and mother might be violated most.
The 10th commandment forbidding coveting your neighbor’s wife and possessions might be broken often as well.
I believe the most overlooked and dismissed commandment is the 4th one.
The 4th commandment as found in Deuteronomy 5:12-15 (NIV) reads this way:
Hearing God's voice is one of the most important parts of being a Jesus follower. Jesus often withdrew to a quiet place to listen to His Father.
To hear God’s voice speaking to your heart, you must turn down the volume of the world.
Once you’ve found the volume dial and silenced all of the noise of this life, how do you know it’s God speaking and not your imagination, or worse yet, the voice of the accuser of your soul?
The following list is not comprehensive, but it's a good starting place to use as a guide as you learn to hear and recognize God's voice when He speaks to you.
God reveals Himself to us in many ways. I hear the voice of God primarily through His creation, through His written word, and by the whispers of the Holy Spirit to my heart.
Years ago as I was spending time in prayer with some of the staff at the church, this thought rushed into my mind. It was seven words:
“You will lead a ministry of honor.”
The first time it flew into my mind seemed like a distraction from our prayers. I was trying to pray, and so I squinted harder and tried to focus more on listening to my teammates and agreeing with them in what they were asking God for in prayer.
Our God reveals Himself to us in many ways. The primary ways that I hear the voice of God is through His creation, through his written word, and by the whispers of the Holy Spirit to my heart.
In the first of this three-part blog series I spoke about God speaking to me through His marvelous creation. Hearing God’s voice through His written word is the second part of the series.
I stood in a small room in The British Library and quietly cried big crocodile tears unexpectedly. As I walked among the most revered treasured documents in the Treasures Room, near the back of the room two rows of glass cases stood inauspiciously without anyone around them.
Our God reveals Himself to us in many ways. The primary ways that I hear the voice of God is through His creation, through his written word, and by the whispers of the Holy Spirit to my heart.
Today's message is about the first of these three ways God speaks to me. It will be followed by two more messages this week where I'll talk about the second and third ways.
In the early 1850’s the New York state legislature and city designers came up with a plan to create the first landscaped public park in the United States. It began with more than 700 acres in the center of Manhattan. They knew the potential for New York City to explode in population, and if they didn’t have a park, a place to where the public could retreat, it would greatly hinder the public health. So, Central Park was designed to be a place of retreat where the public could take a deep breath and rest.
One of the designers, Frederick Law Olmsted said,
E.E. Cummings said, “most people are perfectly afraid of silence.”
“We are so afraid of silence that we chase ourselves from one event to the next in order not to have to spend a moment alone with ourselves, in order not to have to look at ourselves in the mirror.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Yet another writer said, “Men fear silence as they fear solitude, because both give them a glimpse of the terror of life’s nothingness.”
While I don’t agree with that writer about a lack of meaning in life, there are times that we can feel like there is a lack of meaning and “nothingness” to our lives.
Our family has plunged into the FFA adventure. That’s Future Farmers of America, for those who aren’t familiar with the term. Mimi is our youngest and at 14 she is taking on the responsibility of raising a lamb. It will only be about a five-month adventure ending with showing the lamb and selling it at the Silver Dollar Fair. It should be a fantastic learning experience for all of us.
My father’s family was farming and ranching just two generations ago, so this feels familiar. We were blessed to live among the orchards near the Sacramento river with our young family for a few years and found the rhythms of agriculture delightful.
Do you count how many shopping baskets are in each line at the store to make sure to stand in the shortest line?
Do you find yourself frustrated when someone is driving slower than the speed limit in front of you?
Do you see multi-tasking as a “normal” part of life that you should embrace?