Hazards to Hearing
In this session, we are going to be talking about the hazards to hearing God's voice. There are several points we need to be aware of. If we are not, we may find ourselves falling into these hazards and pitfalls. You've heard the saying, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." By being aware of these potential pitfalls, or potholes in the road if you will, it is easier to steer around them. It is only when we don't seem them coming and we happen upon them suddenly that we tend to fall into them. Therefore, what we want to do is not to highlight on the negative, but we simply want to tell you some of the potential potholes in the road with regard to hearing God's voice. We want to mark them so that you can steer clear of them with plenty of warning.
A better way to do it, instead of allowing ourselves to pollute the voice of the Lord within us is to believe in faith and to do what God tells us, the way God tells us, and to be faithful to the voice of the Lord. We may not necessarily be comfortable with it. God wants us to be faithful to what He tells us and not necessarily comfortable with what He tells us. Many times when the Lord speaks to us we find that our thought processes and motives have not really lined up with God's word. There is an adjustment that is necessarily. Until we make those adjustments, we may be very uncomfortable with what God is telling us. What He really wants to do is cause us to believe what He is telling us. To believe it in faith, not because our belief system agrees with it or our attitude agrees with it, but because God has said it and we believe. Therefore, we want to believe it in faith, do what God tells us, the way God tells us, even though we are not necessarily comfortable with it.
The fact is that you can succeed in business doing things the worlds way and you can succeed doing God's way. All you have to do is ask the Donald Trump's and others if you can succeed using worldly business principles. Of course, what does it profit you if you gain the whole world and lose your own soul. However, there is also kingdom business principles, that is doing business God's way. It is doing the right thing that would be pleasing to the Lord. The Word of God actually has quite a number of biblical business principles in it. We should be doing business that way. We can also prosper and succeed if we do business God's way. The thing we can't do is succeed when we mix the two. It's like putting gasoline in a diesel engine. It puts you in the cross-currents of destruction. So if you are a business person and you have dedicated your work life to the Lord, and then you begin to do it with worldly principles, you are mixing the two and putting yourself in the cross currents of destruction. You're asking for trouble.
Now of course what the Lord would like you to do is do business His way. "Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and al things will be added to you." Matthew 6:33. Of course, godly principles ensure natural benefits and eternal blessings.
The better way is God has the vision and the goal. He has a method for implementation. Don't do it your own way. This is a real challenge, particularly for people who have been doing things their own way for years and years. This concept of following the Lord and dialoging with Him on a consistent basis is somewhat new to them in their Christian experience. Old habits are sometimes hard to break. This might be one you really want to focus on.
The better way to do it is to lean not on your own understanding, but acknowledge Him in all your ways. God is always right. Can you say amen to that? If you ever disagree with God, the most you can hope for is second best because God already has first place. He makes the very best decisions that can be made. He has never been wrong. Pretty good track record, isn't it? So the better way is to always do it God's way.
You see you need an avenue of opportunity and that is not when all eyes are on you and you are making a major decision as a corporation. That is the time to function in great wisdom. To be wise as serpents, as harmless as doves, and speak the word of the Lord into that situation with great wisdom. Then when they come to you after the meeting, affirming your decision, then you can have a one on one conversation with them about God You can tell them there is a God in heaven Who is intimately involved in the affairs of men and as we surrender our lives to Christ that He wants to be Lord of every aspect of our life. You have an open avenue now to speak into their lives. What we want to do is be very careful when we cite the Lord, or give Him credit. Otherwise, if we use a lack of wisdom here, we can alienate those we are trying to minister to. It becomes counterproductive. The better way to do this is to hear the word of God in your spirit, deliver the word with wisdom so that it can be received and acted on.
Are you familiar with the concept of sympathetic vibration? It works this way. If I were to take a tuning fork of a certain pitch, let's say the note A. If I were to strike that and then take a pitch fork that is tuned identically to the first one, the second one would begin to resonate and vibrate right along with the first one, but the second one was never struck. Because they are tuned to the same pitch, the second one begins to vibrate sympathetically. I saw a man demonstrate this. He had an operatic voice. I guess he had perfect pitch. I don't know. He took a upright piano with the lid up and put a microphone down into that piano cabinet. He sang a note. When he stopped singing, you could hear through the microphone that the strings on that piano were still humming. It is the same effect when the bass player is playing and the snare drum begins to rattle.
When God speaks to your spirit, your soul man begins to resonate along the same line. So if God begins to speak to your spirit man a word of the Lord for someone else in the area of marriage, your soul begins to vibrate in the area of marriage. You think, "Oh, I know this or that about marriage." All of the things you know and understand come to your mind. They are stirred up. The challenge in hearing is not to tell them what you think. Don't tell them what is coming out of your soul man that is stirring. It may be good counsel. Keep in mind that the soul is not carnal. The soul is not bad. It can be used for carnal purposes or godly purposes. The soul is your mind, intellect, and your emotions. Created by God you can use them for good or evil. So even if the Lord speaks to your spirit about marriage, and the soul responds with godly counsel founded out of the word of God in regards to marriage, don't tell them. Because God didn't say give them your counsel. God said give them this word. Then if you just can't sleep well at night because you didn't tell them, then say now this is my own counsel on the matter. Be very clear about it and tell them what your counsel is.
This is a very important point - discerning between soul and spirit. When God speaks to you, go with what God says. Not your own reaction to what God says. Let me give you another point on where we can make mistakes with this. Again it is an application with regard to the gifts of the Spirit. When we are moving in the gifts of the Spirit, one of the most common places that we make mistakes is by interpreting what God says. Instead of telling them what God told us, we tell them what we think God meant.
There is a bit of a paradox here because your natural man can have a certain reaction to the voice of the Lord. His natural man reacted with you are going to have a baby. That is what his natural man thought. He heard the Lord in the Spirit, but his natural man thought this is what it means. Now is there anything wrong with that? No there is not. If you say what God wants you to say, it really is very irrelevant what you think that word means. Because you are not talking about what you think. You are talking about what the word is. There are times when I prophesy over people and walk away. They will come back after the service and tell me how that word applies to them. I find out we are on two different planets. They thought it means one thing and I thought it means another. But as they explain it to me, I can see how the word of the Lord really applied to them and they were more correct in their understanding than I was. The issue here is that it doesn't matter what your understanding is because I didn't prophesy to them what I thought the word meant. I prophesied what the word was. So what you want to do is when God speaks to you be faithful to the word as He has given it to you. This is whether He is speaking something to you in your personal life, a word regarding your marriage, business, children, or if you are ministering in the gifts. Be faithful to the word. Say exactly what God is saying. Do exactly what God is doing in the manner in which He instructs you to say or do it, and only what He wants said or done. Then if you find out five years later that your soulish reaction and your natural thoughts about that word were wrong, no harm is done. What difference does it make what you thought the word was. All that makes a difference is what the word truly was.
Let me clarify this. People that operate in this realm are not necessarily more spiritual than you are. They are less mature. Because spooky, spiritual behavior is a sign of immaturity. When God speaks to a mature Christian, a mature Christian is supposed to have the fruit of the Spirit - love, joy, peace long-suffering, gentleness, meekness, and temperance. These are the fruits of the Spirit. The wisdom from above is easily entreated. When a mature Christian is spoken to by the Lord, that Christian's response should be, "This is what I feel the Lord has spoken." There can be confidence and faith, but at the same time there is humility and an easy way to give that word. It's not dogmatic. It's not insistent or authoritarian. It's not, "I've heard from God. None of you hear from God like I do. I'm more spiritual than anyone else here. If you don't do what God is telling you to do, you're headed for sure disaster here." People do this. Now I know none of you have ever done this before. We want you to understand that people do this not because of spirituality, but because of immaturity.
There are some people that have such a low opinion of themselves or low self-esteem that they feel no one is going to listen to them. They think that if God speaks to them somehow that gives them some kind of value. "Man, I've got a gift and it makes me special. It gives me some sort of value or worth." If we have people who are trying to hear the voice of the Lord in order to gain a sense of value and worth and that person also has a bent toward control and manipulation, that is where you have the formula for disaster. So they give themselves to hearing the voice of the Lord, then they use to the word to manipulate or control. It is not God. God does not want to do that. That is not the way the Lord does things. God believes in structure, authority, a chain of command and He has instituted proper channels of authority in His kingdom. He has established it in His church. Therefore, it is improper and out of order for somebody that is going to the church to try to control the government of the church, the direction of the church, or the spiritual authority or climate of the church, from the back row. Right? This goes for talking on the phone saying, "the pastor is missing if because of this , or the church is headed for church disaster because of this." That's out of order and wrong. We talked about in one of our previous lessons, "What does God talk about, and what does He not talk about?" God is not a gossip. Therefore, He is not going to speak about a situation to you unless you are part of the problem or part of the solution.
Now let me give a balance to this Does that mean that a person can never speak to somebody that is in authority over them? This is an issue, isn't it? What do I do? The first thing that any honest, sincere Christian that loves God, loves God's people, and His church should do is examine their heart. God, why are you speaking to me about someone in authority over me? It doesn't me you are wrong. It simply means the first point is to examine your heart. What are your motives? Why am I even listening? Why am I even turning my face in that direction? Was I inquiring of the Lord about somebody in authority over me? This are all checkpoints. I'm not insisting that God would never speak to you in this manner, but there are checks and balances in the process.
So the first thing we do is to examine our heart. Then, if we feel that it is still the Lord speaking to us, there are a number of ways we can handle this situation with wisdom, discretion, and a way that is a blessing to those in authority over us, not a curse. We can offer it to them in a spirit of meekness and gentleness. If you feel that this has really happened to you, and you really feel you have a message from God for somebody in authority over you, then what you need to do is to write that word out. Sign your name to that word. Do not do it anonymously. Don't do it in a church that you are visiting in. Own up and take responsibility. Give it to them. Now it is between them and God. It is not your job to make sure that word is followed up on. It is not your job to make sure they do what God has told them to do. You have now done what God has required of you, and you release it to the Lord. It is now God's job to follow up with them. So it wouldn't be your place to talk to other people about that word or to enter into gossip. It's not appropriate to tell people that you wrote the pastor six months ago, for example, about the fact that our worship is too long and I really feel like we are going to start losing people. Whoa! Out of order! If God did speak to you, you can give that in such a way that it is a blessing to the pastor and then you never think about it or talk about it again.
How then does a leader respond when somebody speaks to them and says, "I feel like the Lord has spoken to me about this issue, and I would like to submit it to you for consideration." A leader should respond with humility. There are some leaders that are very authoritative and they feel that God can't speak to them through somebody unless that person is a peer or in a position more senior to themselves. Frankly, that is just not scriptural. God spoke through Balaam's donkey. God can speak through anybody. What should a leader so? He should receive the word with humility and examine his heart. Listen to the Lord and make a decision based on what God is telling him. Then, he should move from there. That is why it is so important that leaders should hear the voice of the Lord. Because if a leader, in business or the church, is lacking confidence in his ability to hear the voice of the Lord, anyone could come along, claiming to hear from God and can sway that leader. This is because that leader doesn't know if it is God or not. You have to have a ability to hear the Lord for yourself. Is this God or not and then respond accordingly.
When Absalom rebelled against David, David was driven out of Jerusalem. A man by the name of Shimei came out and began to curse and throw rocks at David and his entourage. David's general said, "I'll go over there and take his head right off of his shoulders. Can I?" David said, "No, don't do that." David used it as an occasion to examine his heart to see if Shimei, this Benjamite, was loyal to Saul had a point. Did he have a point? David did not allow his generals to kill this man. He used it as an opportunity to examine his heart. I think he easiest way to describe this is every once in a while my children will make a comment to me. As long as it is done in the right attitude, I can consider some of the things they have to say. If it is done in the wrong attitude, I am much less willing to consider what they have to say. Have you found that to be true? Every once in a while, the Lord will say something through the kids and it just really gets my attention. I don't want to admit it to anybody, but they are right. So what do you do? If you are a good parent, you will receive it with humility and wisdom. Now you don't let your children run the house. They are not in authority. They are under authority. What you do is you hear it with humility and make the necessary corrections and you go on. Don't insist that God can never speak to you through your children. He does do that on occasion. Is it the norm? Is it the rule? No, it is the exception to the rule. So we want to stay in authority, but at the same time we do not want to draw absolutes.
So the better way is to do this. Be as normal at church as you are at home. Be as spiritual at home as you are at church. God is not looking for a bunch of hyper spiritual, flaky, out on the fringe type of people. That is not spirituality. That is weird. It's like, "I don't want to be seen around you because you are just weird." God wants us to be normal. There is nothing wrong with being natural. Who's likeness are you made in? God's. So when you are acting natural, you are acting like Christ because that is His nature. Please be normal. It's okay for you to be who you are and who God made you. Be as spiritual as home as you are at church and be as normal at church as you are at home.
We have a few final hazards that we want to avoid. One of them is fulfilling your own vision. Avoid this hazard.
The second one is using God's voice to exert control or authority. We have seen some do this. We had a guy who came to our ministry and he had a good word. He could prophesy. He went out to lunch with a lawyer, and the lawyer was so impressed with the prophetic anointing on this man. This man came back from lunch with the lawyer's sports car! The lawyer had given him the car and a watch!!! Because this man had manipulated the lawyer with the prophetic word. There is a great responsibility when you begin to hear the voice of the Lord. There is a certain amount of respect that that engenders in the heart of the people. You have to handle that very responsibly. Don't manipulate or exert authority or control because of the voice of the Lord.
Then lastly, is getting out of order and going up the chain of command based on the word of the Lord or voice of the Lord. There are some people that have a mistrust of authority and they struggle in trusting authority. Because of that, they do not want to submit their hearts and their lives to that authority. So they may use the voice of the Lord as leverage to put them on a par or even over authority of those that should be in authority over them. If somebody has a difficult time dealing with authority, they may find themselves trying to hear from God in a way that gives them a "one up" on that authority. This is so they won't have to deal with that authority and put themselves in their hands. The best thing we can do if we find ourselves in that situation is to realize our lives are in the hands of God and that no man can put upon us what God doesn't want put upon us, unless we have taken ourselves out from under God's covering and authority. The best thing we can do is to submit ourselves to God and God will take care of us.
Lord, I pray for each one here and that You will help us to avoid these hazards in hearing Your voice. God, give us great wisdom and discretion. Keep our feet from straying and keep us on the right path that we can do what You have called us to do in the right way with no hazards, but blessing as we proceed. In Jesus' Name. Amen