FireSide Chat II

God uses different things to speak to us in our day-to-day lives. Sometimes it is direct and clear, other times it is more subtle. God doesn't not abandon us and He does not stop speaking to us, even on those days when we feel really unspiritual. I will tell you more about how He does that in a little bit. But we need to look at some basics first.

Our ability to hear His voice is partially related to our willingness to hear Him. Please don't misunderstand me--God is capable of communicating to us clearly when He wants to, no matter how much we try to plug our spiritual ears. If He decides that He has something He insists on telling us, He will find a way to get the message through. God is God, and He can do whatever He wants. He is smart, He is creative and He is all-powerful. He is capable of being heard.

But most of the time, God doesn't force His way on us. He is not a bully in how He chooses to approach us. His usual method of operation is that He will speak to us, but He won't force us to listen to Him. He hopes that we will desire to hear what He has to say. He hopes that we will become hungry to hear Him, so He keeps talking to us, even when we are not listening well.

Many of us are hungry to hear Him, but we have certain times in when we choose not to listen.

For some of us, we might be afraid that God will tell us to do something that we don't want to do (or tell us to stop doing something that we do want to do." We want "our way" in this one thing, so we don't want to hear from God.

For some of us, it is because we are too busy. There are times in our lives when we get so busy doing things that we are not "good listeners." We focus our time and energy so much on the task at hand that we don't give God our attention. When He speaks to us, we just block it out and go on with our task. It is not that we intentionally reject Him, it is that we unintentionally ignore Him because we are focusing on our tasks.

For others of us, we think we want to hear Him, but we engage our faith in the opposite direction: fear, doubt, condemnation, etc. Let me give you an example that you can probably relate to--the "down" days, e.g., the days when God feels very far away from us: We still love God with all of our hear and we are still passionate to hear Him speak to us, but we tell ourselves things like, "I don't deserve to hear from God today," or "God doesn't want to talk to me right now because He is disappointed/angry/upset/etc with me." We may not realize it, but that type of thinking is actually a "lack of faith," and it interferes with our ability to hear Him speak to us.

Why does it interfere? The answer is because faith is the commodity of Heaven--faith is what moves God's hand and causes things to be done. Likewise, "lack of faith" interferes with kingdom things. Let me give you an example from Jesus' life. Do you remember when Jesus went to preach in His home town in Mark 6:2-6? The people there were offended at Jesus because they knew Him as a local boy who grew up with them, and they had trouble receiving Him as a prophet/teacher. Verse 6 says that because of their unbelief, "He could do no mighty work there, except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them." There are lots of places in the bible where Jesus healed everyone who came to Him--but in this case, their unbelief effected His ability to minister, and He could only heal a few of them. The people's faith played a huge part in how much God was able to touch them.

Likewise, our faith in God's willingness to speak to us can effect our ability to hear His voice. He wants to speak to each of us clearly and distinctly; but many times, our unwillingness to hear Him interferes with that. In short, our lack of faith prevents us from hearing Him speak to us as clearly as He would like to, just like the lack of faith in Mark 6 kept Jesus from healing everyone who He wanted to heal.

But there is a piece of good news in this. If you take another look at Mark 6:2-6, you will notice something wonderful about Jesus. Even though the people's lack of faith kept Him from doing everything He wanted to do, He was still willing to do whatever they would receive. Jesus could have gotten angry at them and left in a huff, refusing to heal anyone. He could have called fire and brimstone down from Heaven to destroy them. But He did not do any of those things. Instead, He did as much as they were capable of receiving--He healed the few who were will to let Him do that for them. The "wonderful thing" about God is that He is so nice to us and so patient with us when we struggle to receive what He has to give us.

As I said earlier, God desires to speak clearly and distinctly to each of us every day of our lives. He is not limited in His ability to communicate to us; it is our "willingness to hear" that effects our ability to hear Him speak to us. But even when we have faith barriers (or other barriers) to keep us from hearing Him, He loves us so much that He finds other ways (subtle ones) to communicate to us.

He uses things like "divine coincidences" in our lives, (e.g.; causing things to "happen" in such ways that they are obviously God's leading. He uses things like repetition (sending us the same message over and over again from many different sources.) He uses things like "object lessons" (or giving us a spiritual revelation from an everyday life experience). Sometimes He gets creative and fun in how He communicates to us. For example, He might use phrases from the lyrics of music we are listening to in the background. Perhaps we are praying and asking Him about something. Suddenly we become aware of the music playing in the background and the phrase that the song is singing seems to relate directly to our question. God has an uncanny way of making things happen at just the right time to cause something to speak to us.

God used to use the "phrases" from songs frequently to speak to me. But my husband doesn't like the same type of music I like and he complains when ever I play it. So I have gotten in the habit of not playing music in the house. I don't hear music nearly as often as I used to, and that means I don't give God the opportunity to speak to me through it nearly as often as I used to.

But God is creative and He is smart. He is able to take everyday things in our lives, and speak to us through them. When I stopped listening to music, God found something else that permeated my day. In my case, that is email. I have five different ministry email accounts that I check daily. Each of those addresses receives a lot of spam. I haven't sat down and actually counted the number of spam that makes it past my spam-blocker, but I am getting somewhere around 600 or more spam a day. I have to sort through all of the hundreds of emails in my inbox every day and delete the spam so that I can find my real email. I usually read the subject lines and delete spam from the subjects. Some are easy to identify as spam (like "Great Software Discounts" or "To Our Valued Customer"). Others are trickier and occasionally I have to look briefly at the email to determine it is spam. But in general I read at least 600 or more spam subject lines a day so I can find and delete the spam. This is time consuming and it used to be a source of great annoyance for me. But one day I noticed that God was speaking to me through a few of the spam topics.

For instance, my husband did something that really upset/hurt me and I was so mad at him that I hadn't spoken to him in two days. Of course, when I am holding onto anger, I am in direct sin/rebellion against God, and that hurts my intimacy with Him. So, those two days were not very spiritual days for me. Right about then a lot of spam ads about "ED" suddenly started appearing in my inbox. The one that caught my attention (and seemed humorous to me at the time) was "Solve Your Problems With ED". This was actually an advertisement for some sort of sexual male enhancement product. I never read the junk mail, but God managed to use it's subject line to speak to me. Guess what the subject was for the next ad below it? "Forgive Debt." I had to laugh--God was telling me to forgive my husband. The message came in loud and clear, and I knew He was right. But He used the subject lines of spam ads to communicate to me.

The was another time where the enemy had been trying to get me to believe that God was angry and did not love me anymore because I had made a mistake in judgment and was upset with myself about it. I "knew" that wasn't true in my head, but the more the enemy threw that lie at me, the more real it "felt" in my heart. After a while, I started feeling the need to isolate myself from God because I was sure that He was displeased with me. I did not ration it out, but my thinking was something along the lines of this: The blood of Jesus will eventually kick in and I will be forgiven/restored, but right now God is really disquieted with me and I should avoid Him." (Yes, I know that is a stupid and untrue lie of the enemy--but my point is that for a day or two, it "felt" real to me.)

So guess how God addressed it in my life? That is right, He used spam again. It was in mid-January and all these "Valentine" spam were being sent out. God kept calling my attention to two spam that kept arriving as a pair, one right after the other in my inbox. The first one said, "For You....My Love," and it was followed by "You're the One." Every time I saw it, I would shake my head and laugh, because it reminded me of a valentine from God. I did not just get that pairing once, I got it maybe 35 or 40 times as I sorted through my over 600 spam spread through five different email accounts. God used spam to break through the lie of the enemy, and remind me how much I was loved and forgiven because of what Jesus did for us.

Another time God felt really far away. I wasn't aware of anything that I did wrong (no willful rebellion, no sin to repent of, etc). But He felt a million miles away. I was crying out to God, but it seemed like my prayers were falling on deaf ears. I began asking God if He was hearing my prayers. Then I began getting a bunch of spam with this subject line: "You're In My Thoughts." The more I begin seeing that spam, the more it felt like God was telling me that He is listening to my prayers, so I prayed for Him to draw me closer to Him. Then I started getting a bunch of spam that said, "Wrapped In Your Arms." I know this sounds crazy, but about the twelfth time I read that spam subject in the same batch of emails, I felt like God was speaking directly to me. I just had to stop what I was doing, raise my arms, and begin worshipping Him. He fell on me and met me in a very strong and very tangible way. The distance between myself and God instantly faded. God had reached out to me though the subject lines of unwanted spam emails in my in-box.

I could go on and on with stories of how God used the subject lines of assorted spam messages to speak to me, but I think you get the idea. There were, of course, many more span on any given day, but only certain "subjects" would seem to jump off the screen at me, as if the Holy Spirit was quickening those words to me. Here are a few of the other spam subjects that God used to speak to me over the past couple of months: "Bring Joy Into Your Life," "Choose To Be Well," "You Can Be Sure Of Success If...." "Be Confident And Stand Tall," and "Make Your Life Better."

God may not use spam to speak to you, He may choose something else. But please be aware that He loves to talk to each of us, and He speaks to us even in those moments where we don't think we can hear Him clearly. He loves to use creative and innovative things to speak to us. It might be the phrases from the lyrics of a song, it might be the subject lines on spam, or it might be something entirely different. But I promise you this--even if you are having trouble hearing Him clearly, God is still speaking to you. I encourage you to open your eyes and ears to Him. Go on a "treasure hunt" and see if you can make yourself more aware of what means He is using to speak to you today.