Day 1: God Speaks to His People

The first week of When God Speaks: How to Recognize God’s Voice and Respond in Obedience is titled simply enough, God Speaks. Today’s material focused upon the fact that God does speak, a couple of reasons why we don’t hear it, the pattern He uses to speak to His people and that what He says does come to pass.

Blackaby used Romans 3:11 (compare Psalms 36:1-4) and discussed how sin disorients us and keeps us from seeking God. His second point was to point out how our everyday living dulls our senses and makes us non-responsive to the wonder and awe of God.

He used a good example of that, watching television with a remote. You can watch a fictional, gory death scene on one channel, flip it to another and watch the real life news. And not be moved because you are no longer sensitive to the material.

Same with us and hearing God. We think that we should hear Him the same way that we hear our co-worker, neighbor or family. It doesn’t work that way. He outlined a basic pattern that God uses in the Bible to speak.

• He spoke in many ways. The key is not how He spoke but that He spoke.
• When He spoke, the person knew it was God.
• When He spoke, the person knew what He said.
• When He spoke, the person knew what to do.
• The person God spoke to couldn’t prove it. He had to obey and rely on the results to verify it.

That still works today. Most of the problem is that we don’t want to listen because in fact we don’t want to change what it is we are doing. We don’t want to obey. So we pretend that we don’t hear, that God doesn’t speak.

And we have a memory verse! Yikes, I’m so bad at that. But great at paraphrasing, we’ll just have to see how that works. Made for interesting reading at lunch; people look at you so weird when you walk into Jack In The Box carrying a notebook and a Bible. Alien!

^{Deuteronomy 8:3} So he humbled you by making you hungry and then feeding you with unfamiliar manna.⁷ He did this to teach you⁸ that humankind⁹ cannot live by bread¹⁰ alone, but also by everything that comes from the Lord’s mouth.¹¹