God Speaks to You: Hearing a Call

I have been going to church for a while now.  During my church experience I have seen pastors come and go and have gotten used to that happening.  It is just a part of church life.  However many of the pastors I have been around don't share anything about how they knew God was telling them to go somewhere else.  Usually they stand up during a service and announce that they had been "called" to go to another place, and that they are resigning, and they announce their last day at the church.  At times I wondered how they knew that God was telling them to go somewhere else.  The cynic in me said they were going to a larger church and were going to make more money, but my heart tells me that that doesn't happen each time.  I believe many pastors do hear God telling them to go somewhere else.  But how did God talk to them?  What did He say to them?  How did they know it was Him telling them to go?

With those questions in mind I plan on laying out for you how God spoke to me to tell me to leave my "boat" and move back to Humble, Texas.  I will include a lot of detail for you because the details are important.  I'm doing this so that perhaps you will be able to recognize the Lord speaking to you in your own life.  After all, He speaks to us all.  Too many Christians out there believe in their heart that God speaks only to certain people like pastors or priests.  They have never recognized God's voice in their own life so they assume He never speaks to them.  Yet the Bible tells us that the Holy Spirit resides in us.  Are we really to assume that this Holy Spirit would take up residence in our bodies and NEVER say a word to us throughout our whole life?  That would be like getting married to someone and living with them for many years without any communication whatsoever.  It just doesn't add up!  There is no question that the Holy Spirit speaks to us;  the real question is this:  are we listening? 

In my experience as I've gotten to know the Lord better, He begins speaking to me through the Bible.  I wake up each day and generally read from 3 books within it just for the variety.  In March I was reading from Genesis, Ezekiel, and Romans.  I've always enjoyed doing this because I recognize the alignment in what God says in scripture.  Sometimes I'll read a prophecy from the Old Testament and then read its fulfillment in the New Testament.  In March this was no different.  I woke up on the morning of Sunday March 18 and read this passage from Ezekiel 3.

4 Then he said, “Son of man, go to the people of Israel and give them my messages. 5 I am not sending you to a foreign people whose language you cannot understand. 6 No, I am not sending you to people with strange and difficult speech. If I did, they would listen! 7 But the people of Israel won’t listen to you any more than they listen to me! For the whole lot of them are hard-hearted and stubborn. 8 But look, I have made you as obstinate and hard-hearted as they are. 9 I have made your forehead as hard as the hardest rock! So don’t be afraid of them or fear their angry looks, even though they are rebels.”

I have read this passage before and really have not thought anything of it.  However for some reason on this morning, I had this deep-seated feeling that this was God's message directly to me.  It was like reading a letter that had been written to you.  Nobody needs to tell you that the message in it is for you because...it's a letter written to you!  That's the way I felt that morning, and I even shared it with our church that morning as an encouragement to them that they needed to be reading God's word each day so that they know what He is telling them to do.  But I was uneasy.  What was the context here?  For me, did it mean some new work was going to begin in Everett?  Did it mean I would be ministering to some new people in our community, an English-speaking culture that needed a persistent hand?  Or, did it mean He wanted to send me somewhere else?  I pondered that off and on all day long.

The next day I began to get a suspicion that God was doing something wild and different and crazy.  I spoke with our pastor back in Humble, Texas and he mentioned a new position they had that he wanted me to consider.  I couldn't believe it!  In my heart my first reaction was that I shouldn't consider it.  God Himself had moved us to the Pacific Northwest, after all.  We are now well-established here, we have friends, we are deeply embedded in this community and deeply vested in it.  Things are on-track at my school and going well.  Why would God even consider moving us away from all of that?  However, I agreed to go to the Lord about it and see what He thought.  

Later that evening as I was pondering this conversation, I felt the Lord speak to me in that moment.  I sensed Him telling me that He had a message for me tomorrow morning, so I'd better pay attention.  Was the voice audible?  No, but I had certainty in my heart that no matter what I'd better pay attention to scripture the next morning as something important was about to be said.  So I woke up with great anticipation that morning and encountered this passage from Genesis 31.

 ³ Then the Lord said to Jacob, “Return to the land of your father and grandfather and to your relatives there, and I will be with you.”

I was shocked to read this.  I was also excited, but my first reaction was utter shock.  I think this was one of those moments where I probably stared at the floor in wonder.  Did this just happen?  Lord, is this really what you are telling me to do?  I read on to Genesis 31:13:

¹³ I am the God who appeared to you at Bethel,^[a] the place where you anointed the pillar of stone and made your vow to me. Now get ready and leave this country and return to the land of your birth.’”

  

And I continued reading in Romans 3:31:

  ³¹ Well then, if we emphasize faith, does this mean that we can forget about the law? Of course not! In fact, only when we have faith do we truly fulfill the law.

So here, apparently, God was telling me exactly what He wanted me to do.  He was telling me where to go, when to go, and that I needed to have faith to truly please Him.  He told me he was sending me to a people who speak the same language I do, and that he has made me persistent so I can do what He is asking me to do.  Probably the best and most encouraging part, though, was His statement that He would be with me as I went.  Wow.

My next step after hearing this message was pretty crucial.  I did not immediately rush out to let everyone know that I had heard from the Lord.  I spoke to Amanda about it privately and we both agreed that we needed to pray on this.  One of my greatest fears at that time was that I had only invented this and that the Lord wasn't actually talking to me.  I needed to know for sure, and I'd only get that by being alone with Him, seeking him through prayer and more scripture reading.  I was absolutely convinced that if I were to do those things, He would confirm it.  So I made plans to go off to be alone with him later in the week, and I'll describe that journey in my next post.

What about you?

I want you to think about how God speaks to you for a few moments.  Yes you.  Maybe you are one of those Christians who would never voice it but who believes God doesn't speak to you.  You think you might have heard His voice but were never sure so you just disregarded it because you were not confident in your ability to hear.  Or He asked you to do something crazy and outlandish and you thought "God doesn't ask people to do stuff like that!"  You kept moving in life and things were sure and safe and secure, but you've been eaten up by the thought ever since.  Was that really Him?

Still others of you don't believe in God at all.  You are interested in a life of faith and in "spiritual" matters but haven't had any spiritual being speaking to you, or so you think.  You may remember back to times where you felt peace or "centeredness" in a particular moment but never feel like you got a specific word or direction from anyone.  Yet you are interested.  This kind of thing sounds exciting and intriguing.  This doesn't seem to be the "churchy" thing you think you know about church-going folk.

Here are a few things I have come to learn about how the Lord speaks to us, and each of these applied in this situation.

• He speaks through the Bible directly to us.
• He speaks very specifically and tells us what to do next.
• He rarely tells us what will happen after the initial command.  He expects us to follow what He told us to do and to trust Him.
• When He speaks and directs us, He promises to go with us.

As I continue to tell our story, I'll try to unpack all of these things for you as each of them are things I have experienced personally.  It is my hope that in unpacking them and giving you examples of how this applied in my own call back to Humble, you will learn to hear God in your life more and more, and that you will learn to obey what He is saying.

I'm excited to share the rest of the story with you.  And I pray that God would speak to you and take you to new, exciting, and deeper relationship with Him as we share what He has done.