When God speaks it will not always be an audible sound that comes to you through the air. You can read through the scriptures and have a verse stand out requiring one to stop and reflect on the words to a deeper degree. People in life will speak wisdom you didn’t know was needed. And sometimes it is a friend calling to see if you are doing well at a time you didn’t feel your best.
All of these instances have something in common. But it is not just a something, it is someone who reaches into the souls of all men to deliver the message they must hear at those points of their life. This person is the Holy Spirit of God who moves in ways we cannot see to bring about things we could never have imagined.
He will speak to us in the method best suited for our personalities and specific character traits. The examples I have just listed are from my own life and the lives of others I have known. degenerate the effectiveness of other methods. I have heard testimonies from Christian authors of fiction about how their books changed the hearts of their readers. Hearts changed because they wrote characters who felt truly real and human to the one who read the story.
The follow-up to hearing God is obedience. In the culture of the Bible, the word hearing was synonymous with obedience. Because of this disobedient people are described as having ears that don’t hear. Same too with idols which are said to have ears that don’t listen and mouths that don’t talk. The idols are different from the true God of heaven because they are unable to take action or hear the cries of their worshippers calling for answers.
Isaiah proclaimed that the word of the Lord will not return void and that it shall carry out its purpose(Isaiah 55:11). The purpose of the Lord’s words may not look the same from instance to instance but the spirit behind the actions is unchanged. From reading scriptures I’ve picked up on a trend that God’s times of speaking can easily be broadly assigned for the purpose of revealing an element of His nature or to work within a person’s heart drawing them closer to Him.
With an unbeliever, this looks like reconciling them to understand their sin and need for salvation. But for the believer, it is the call to grow in their relationship and in a metaphorical sense, “go deeper.”
There is an element of our spiritual being that has only recently been re-noticed by church leaders in our day and age. It is however something the early church fathers and leaders understood.
We can be in the presence of many others with a united cause or reason but still feel lonely. We are lonely because of no deeper connection to those around us. It is just a simple feeling of not being alone that will fade away when the others leave and we are once more on our own. But the inverse of this is fully possible when we have connections to others that go deep. Seeing those people whom we’ve developed that connection with reminds us that we have someone who knows us and cares for us. This applies to Christians and non-Christians.
But all humans, regardless of whether they’ve fully verbalized it this way or not, have the desire to be with something more than just a place or a person. Within each one of us is a deep need for connection and belonging. It is a calling to come to a place of intimacy that many of us believe is the need for marriage love. We only feel that way because it is the closest thing a human can get from another human to having this desire fulfilled.
To each of us, God calls that we might hear His invite to know Him and begin having this feeling fulfilled a little bit at a time. We will have days or nights that feel dry but others that feel as if they’ve been overflowed by Holy Spirit’s presence and being.
Here is something I learned from my own experience. When you acknowledge the call and begin to pursue it you may start to find that your needs are so much deeper than what you first believed.
It wasn’t until my freshman year of High School that I took this desire seriously and made Christianity my own faith. I read through the whole New Testament that year and then moved over to the Old Testament. By the end of that year I’d read nearly the whole thing. Bible study and prayer became more important in my life and yet I still felt the call to come deeper. A yearning for me to do more and come into it fully. That I may leave behind the protection in the bay of my routine and enter into the vastness of the deeper seas that God wanted me to learn how to navigate with Him.
The call is always there calling us to go deeper and deeper into God and His being. When you choose to answer the call from God to come closer to Him. To see Him more and more as the person of Jesus Christ in addition to being the almighty creator of Heaven and Earth you connect more to who He is. Through this, the Holy Spirit will begin to stir within you wanting to be permitted to have full reign in your life to be alive and active.
When you surrender and tell the Holy Spirit to have free reign in your life this is when you answer the call to come home and truly begin your journey. This home is not one for your body but for your spirit as it learns to live on Earth while desiring to be united with God in Heaven. It will not be a journey full of ease but it will be rewarding in our spiritual depths and empower us to continue onward.
Until Next Time, Courage and Godspeed