The Lifestyle of Listening - Part I
We are going to be talking about the lifestyle of listening. The reason we call it this is because as we learn to hear the voice of the Lord there is a lot of applications for this in the church. We always think of the pastor hearing God's voice before he preaches, asking the Lord what kind of truths he is supposed to minister. That is an obvious application. It might also be obvious to us that as we come to the service to ask the Lord if we have a part in that service. What may not be quite as obvious is that the practice of listening to God can be carried into your week. It is a practice that can be done all of the time. It is actually a lifestyle of learning. One of the greatest things that helped me learn to hear the voice of the Lord was not just to learn to hear God's voice when it came time to move in the gifts of the Spirit, but when I learned to listen to the voice of the Lord in every day life. God speak to me, not just about spiritual matters or official church matters, but speak to me about anything You care to speak to me about. Let's make this a lifestyle. Let's hear Your voice over and over throughout the day about everyday routine matters, or even special matters of the day. That gives us a tremendous amount of experience.
I want to show you the benefits of learning to hear God's voice. Now we can serve and love the Lord all of our lives and raise a godly family and still never really get to the place where we are hearing God's voice with clarity, consistency, and confidence. We go through life, hoping that we are making the right decisions and doing our best. We consult with the Lord, trying to discern what He is saying to us to the best of our ability, but never really making it to that place where we really feel like we are hearing the voice of the Lord. Many Christians are in that position, aren't they? There are many advantages to hearing the voice of the Lord clearly and precisely. The best way I can illustrate hearing God's voice with clarity, consistence, and confidence is to talk for a moment about submarine communication.
Therefore, what has been done is to develop another method of communication that we call the ELF, extremely low frequency communication waves. The way this works is that there is an antennae buried in the upper peninsula of Michigan that is miles and miles long. It is a very long antennae, and it broadcasts a signal. The submarine receives a signal now that is penetrating through the water That is an ELF signal. Again in the upper peninsula of Michigan, there is an antennae that is miles long buried into the ground, and when they want to communicate with a submarine that is submerged, they reach it by using this ELF signal. The advantage to ELF is that it can penetrate the water, rock, everything. It can reach this submarine no matter how deep this submarine might go. This ELF signal penetrates all over the oceans of the world. The disadvantage to ELF is that it has a very slow transmission rate. It communicates very slowly. We said that in a digital burst that you can communicate pages and pages in the fraction of a second. So a submarine can theoretically surface, send and receive a message, and submerge again in a very short period of time, minimizing its vulnerability. The advantage to the ELF is that it never has to come to the surface. It never has to put itself in the place of vulnerability because it never has to come up to the surface. The disadvantage is that it cannot transmit pages and pages of information in the fraction of a second. The transmission rate on ELF is about 30 seconds per letter. You can see that if they wanted to send out operational orders from the land base and they had even a paragraph or two of information to communicate, you are talking potentially hours and hours of data transmission. IT is very inefficient, but it can reach the submarine no matter where it goes.
What has been done is that they have devised a system where each submarine has a code group of letters. The radio operator on the submarine is always monitoring this signal, always listening. While he is listening, if the land base sends a message to them that maybe is only three, four, or five characters, that code group means that they are supposed to come to the surface. The land base wants to talk to them, so they are supposed to come to the surface and get a digital burst message. So the submarine surfaces, gets its digital burst message, and then quickly submerges again. It minimizes it's time of exposure and at the same time it is always in communication with the land base. It really is a very interesting system of communication.
I do not consider this a disadvantage, but I do consider it a challenge. This is actually a wonderful thing to come up higher and be sensitive to the Lord, but it is a challenge, isn't it? The Lord wants to communicate with us using digital burst. To get His point across to us, He wants to communicate quickly and it is through this process that God can cause you to accelerate in your Christian maturity to a tremendous degree. You can find yourself doing mighty exploits for the Lord that previously would have been unimaginable for you. You can find yourself gaining years and years, maybe decades, in your Christian experience because God is communicating with you directly.
I want to talk to you about hearing God's voice in your personal life using the equivalent of digital burst. That is hearing God's voice as a lifestyle, listening to Him day by day. It expedites things to a tremendous degree. But before I tell you how to listen to God in your personal life on a regular basis, I want to tell you some of the things that God will not talk to you about. I want to speak to you about what God does and does not talk about.
Proverbs ll:l3 says, "A gossip betrays a confidence, but a trust worthy man keeps a secret."
Proverbs 20:19 says, " A gossip betrays a confidence, so avoid a man who talks too much."
What does that mean? God is going to talk to you in your own personal life about the things for which you have responsibility and authority. If you are a parent, God is going to talk to you about your life and the life of your children. They are under your authority and you are responsible for them. Therefore, God wants to talk to you about them. If you are a pastor, God is going to talk to you about your own life, children, spouse, and also about the lives of the people entrusted to your care. He is going to talk to you about your sheep. Why is that? Because you have responsibility for them and God wants to help you and feel you in as to how you are to pastor them, mentor them, and train them. If you are an employer and have employees, God will speak to you regarding your employees. But if you are a saint sitting in church, God is not going to talk to you about another saint sitting in church if you are not part of the problem or solution. Do you understand that? What this does is that when we realize what God does and does not talk to us about it helps focus our faith.
Now some people just have a bad attitude, critical spirit, and they just like to dig up junk about people. They like to talk about it. They say, "God showed me that so and so has got this sin in their life." The first question is not is this accurate. The question is, "Why are you talking about it?" They say "God told me." "Well wait a minute. I want to question that whole premise that God would tell you about the life of someone else. Don't you know that God is not a gossip?" We are asking God to speak to us about things about ourselves and things for which we have authority and responsibility. Things that we have no business meddling in we can rest assured that God does not walk to talk to us about those things.
God does have privileged communication. There are times when God wants to speak to you because He might talk to you about the life of another, but you are not supposed to say anything. This is privileged communication. The reason He might do this is that He may want to teach us by example. This is an exception to the rule, but it can happen. He might tell us something that is going on in someone else's life in order for us to learn from that.
For example, you might really admire and respect somebody in the church and wonder why they seem to always have it together, and the Lord might speak to you and say, "This is because they are really spending a lot of quality time with me." This is privileged communication. This is information you are not supposed to approach that person with or anybody else. It is just between you and Him so that He can instruct you and teach you. This can be either positive or negative.
Another example is that we see somebody in the news and they have an unethical dealing in their finances or a moral failing, and the Lord might speak to us and show us some of the reasons why that developed so that we can learn and avoid the same pitfall. Please keep in mind that this is the exception, not the rule. So that when you start asking God to talk to you, you don't automatically start looking for this kind of information. Furthermore, it is not for the purpose of judging people. We really have to get over this in the Body of Christ. Some people just have a judgmental, critical, blaming spirit and they just want to rake through the dump, seeing what kind of garbage they can find on people. That is their nature. That is not the purpose of the voice of the Lord. You can be real thankful that God is not going to talk to them about your life!
Mark 14:36 says, "And He said, Abba Father, all things are possible unto You. Take away this cup from me, nevertheless, not what I will, but what you will."
So Jesus is speaking to the Father, and He calls Him, Abba. Abba is Aramaic for the Father. In our vernacular, it might be "daddy" or "papa." It is an intimate term.
Again, we find this in Romans 8:15. "You have not received a spirit of bondage to begin to fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry Abba Father." Isn't it interesting that Jesus called the Father, Abba? Now He is saying that you have received the spirit of adoption, and you should cry Abba Father. In Galatians 4:6, again we find the word Abba appearing there. In Vines Expository Dictionary it says that Abba is the word framed by the lips of infants and betokens unreasoning trust. Isn't that precious? The Lord wants to bring us into a place of intimacy. It may seem foreign, but we have to trust Him and follow where He leads.
Let me give you an example of how this might work. I was praying on an occasion, and I was saying "Lord, I want to know you more. Please reveal your personality to me." And the Lord rebuked me saying, "I am not a prostitute." And I said, "What?" He said, "Don't come in here and ask me to expose myself so that you can have a big thrill." I realized the Lord was telling me that I was not spending quality time with Him. I was breezing into the prayer room, spending 5 minutes asking God to give me a revelation of Him. Then I was saying I have to go. The Lord says no, it does not work that way. If you want me to reveal Myself to you, I like to be chased. I only do that in a place of intimacy. The Lord spoke to me. That was a digital burst. He spoke very directly and quickly to me and I realized that I was not handling my relationship with the Lord properly with regard to revelation. The Lord was asking for more intimacy. When I get into a more intimate place with the Lord, He is more than glad to show me who He is.
I remember one situation where I was disciplining my son, Jonathan. He was probably four or five at the time. I was not getting results. It was one of those times when I was frustrated. I had been telling him what I wanted, and it wasn't catching on. Jonathan was just not paying attention. I was aggravated and I picked him up and looked him right in the face. I didn't shake him or anything, but I remember picking him up, looking at him face to face, eye to eye. I said, "I want you to understand what I am saying here." Of course, I was upset. I wasn't verbally abusing him, but obviously I was upset and had intense emotions going on. I said, "Now look, here is what I want." The Lord spoke to me right in the middle of that. He said, "Put him down. That is too intense for him. You are an adult and bigger than he is. Your presence is overwhelming, and when you bring him up to your face and speak to him eye to eye, you are overwhelming him emotionally. He is not capable of dealing with that kind of communication." The Lord rebuked me and I have never done that since. See I could have learned that through the school of hard knocks or I can learn it immediately. God can speak directly to me.
We teach a class on prophetic parenting. We are doing more and more of that as time goes on. We called it prophetic parenting or spirit-led parenting. What we are trying to communicate with that kind of terminology is simply to listen to the Lord as you parent your child. Let this be a lifestyle. We are talking about day in and day out when you do not feel at your best or particularly spiritual, listen to God's voice. Here is what the Lord began to speak to me. First of all, He began to show me the nature of my children. This one has this nature, and the second one has a different one all together, and the third one has a third nature that is not like either one of the other two. Now that we have a fourth, as she grows we will find that she will be different as well. The Lord began to speak to me and show me that each child receives in a different way. Each one learns in a different way. My second oldest child, Joy, receives best when she has a lot of affection and reassurance, cuddling, and holding. She needs a lot of reassurance in our relationship. If I provide her with that atmosphere, and then give her discipline and correct in that environment, she learns a lot better. Joy does real well with that. Melody, on the other hand, is so pleasant, laughing, and outgoing, but oblivious to us at time. A message will not get through. I can tell her that, and she says, "OK, Daddy." Then she runs and plays and goes on and does what she wants. She does not get what I'm trying to tell her. With Melody, it is more consequences in the discipline. You just have to parent each child differently. How do you know? God shows you. He speaks to you and says, "Do this with this child." There have been other times when I have been in the middle of spanking my child, and the Lord said, "You're wrong.. Your spanking them not because of what they have done wrong, but because you are in a bad mood.." I had to apologize to my children. Daddy is wrong. I should not have done this. You did not deserve this. Would you please forgive me? I tell you want - that will straighten you out in a hurry.
Let me just conclude this session, by bringing up Phillipians 3:15,
"Let us therefore, as many be perfect or mature, be thus minded, and if in anything you are otherwise minded, God will reveal even this to you."
Maybe you don't even know what those hurts and wounds are, but God will reveal it to you. He can speak it to you in a digital burst, show you where the hurts and wounds are, and then if you will stop and listen, He can quickly speak to you a healing word. I know in my own life that just as I spent time with the Lord that God will minister to my heart and love on me, and speak to me about how proud He is of me. This heals my hurts and loves them away. Amen.
God wants to speak to us very efficiently, and so there is a tremendous advantage to learning to listen to God's voice, getting those digital bursts, becoming vulnerable to the Lord, and making hearing God's voice a lifestyle.