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The Voice of God

John 16:13 However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth; for He will not speak on His authority, but whatever He hears He will speak; and He will tell you things to come.

Does the Holy Spirit still speak today? This is a controversial question for many Christians and different churches have different doctrines on this. Some follow the cessation view which holds that God does not speak directly to people through the Holy Spirit anymore while others believe that He continues to speak directly to us today. My personal experience leads me to favor the second view.

However, this view has created considerable chaos through people claiming to have received all kinds of messages and revelations from God and so gives rise to a need to safeguard oneself from being led astray. Certain ground rules can help us navigate this quicksand.

As we have seen the last few days, we don’t generally need to hear a voice from God to be able to carry out our daily tasks. Living by the principles that the Bible teaches and giving the kingdom of God priority in our lives is sufficient for that. However, there are times when God wants us to do something out of the ordinary, and at these times specific guidance is required. It is then that we need to be able to hear God speak.

There are some cautions to keep in mind when we want to hear from God. Firstly, we aren’t to be inquisitive and try to determine the future. The desire to know the future is essentially a lack of faith in God and His control over our life. We are to trust God and walk in faith, following Him as He leads us through circumstances and by controlling events around us.

Secondly, we aren’t to let worldly desires dominate our life. If we are dominated by our desires, it becomes almost impossible to hear God speaking as our desires will make us hear only what we want to hear and nothing else. In such cases, we end up mistaking our spirit speaking to us for God’s voice! We see this when a person says that God told them to marry someone but then moves on to someone else after a few months. Or when they claim that God told them that a certain event would take place and it does not. These messages are like the babbling of the false prophets in the Old Testament.

It is only when we are neutral and not looking for anything specific that we can usually hear the voice of God.

Because of this uncertainty, we shouldn’t be too hasty to act on what we feel God is telling us to do unless it is something minor where an error may not matter. For example, if we think that God is asking us to witness to someone, there is no harm in doing so even if we are not sure that it is God speaking. In other cases, it might be better to wait for some confirmation that it was indeed God. We could discuss it with an elder or a group of elders and go by what they say, but I have found that just waiting for God to provide confirmation works excellently.

Now Amos 3:7 says that God does nothing without revealing it to His servants His prophets. The problem is not that God doesn’t speak, but that we are often deaf to God and do not hear when He does. But this saying must be balanced with the fact that God wants us to live by faith without knowing all the details of the future. So, we do not need to go hunting for the voice of God but trust that when something important has to be told, He will speak.

We tend to think that God spoke daily to the people in the Bible. A careful reading of the Bible will show that is not necessarily true. In the Old Testament narrative which for Abraham begins in his 75th year or a little earlier and ends with his death at the age of 175, there are less than ten interactions with God! In the case of Paul, after Acts 9 and the Damascus road, we have Ananias prophesying to him, his time in Arabia of which no details are given, then his experience at Troas when God redirected him to Philippi, God speaking to him in the prison at Caesarea and God’s speaking to him at the time of the shipwreck.

So, when we say that God speaks to us, we are not speaking of a daily conversation, but of unusual experiences where God intervenes. There are no rules for this. Every person’s experience will be different.

Are you so busy talking to God that you do not hear what He says?