When God Speaks: How to Recognize God’s Voice and Respond in Obedience
As I read the title to today’s study, I wondered how Blackaby was going to define experienced. Would it be in a past tense? Present? Ongoing? And then I read this in his opening paragraph:
The Word of God is alive even now. It is not given that we might know about God, but that we might experience Him. To know God with the head is dry and impersonal.
And once again, I’m hit upside the head with the “doing” part of knowing God. It isn’t enough to read or study, I must DO. I must “experience” Him in every sense of the word.
ex-pe-ri-enced; ex-pe-ri-enc-ing
(1580)
1 : to learn by experience 〈I have experienced that a landscape and the sky unfold the deepest beauty —Nathaniel Hawthorne
2 : to have experience of : undergo : experienced severe hardships as a child
The Scripture that he used today is 1 Corinthians 2:9-12, in which Paul talks about the wisdom that we have being from God. Blackaby had an exercise to go along with it in which he suggests seven things to do when reading Scripture to make an impression upon you. My titles for them and thoughts about them are:
- Write it down & if something pops into your mind, write it down.
- Meditate on the passage you are reading. Too often, Christians associate meditation with Zen Buddhism or secular spiritualism. But meditation is simply focused communication with God, not like prayer because it is one way. Just receive God’s message.
- Study the meaning of the passage. Use commentary, original languages, etc. There are a lot of study tools available online, I use an offline library based upon Libronix.
- Identify the changes you need to make. Examine what you are doing in your life, compare it to what you are hearing from God, see if there are things that need to be adjusted.
- Write out a prayer about the passage and about the adjustments you’ve identified.
- MAKE THE ADJUSTMENTS! Too often, I adjust the message to what I want to hear vs. adjusting my life to the message.
- Watch, wait and see. If the adjustments really came from God’s message, His fruit will come to pass.
Dang, I’m getting tired of being told to actually do this stuff. It’s much easier to just think about it, sit around contemplating the world and my place in it. Actually doing something about it? Yes, that is the point. And though I make fun of it, the fact is that I like applying it.
1 Corinthians 2:9-12
But just as it is written, “Things that no eye has seen, or ear heard, or mind imagined,are the things God has prepared for those who love him.” God has revealed these to us by the Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the things of a man except the man’s spirit within him? So too, no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things that are freely given to us by God.
Leave a Reply