The God Who Speaks

Yesterday I had a conversation with a friend of mine about the ways that God has been speaking to her lately. She said that she used to hear people talk about “God told me this” or “God told me that” and she always wondered, “How do you know that God said that?” or “How do you know that God said that?” She said she always believed in God — it was never that she doubting in His existence or even His benevolence toward her — but she never understood how God communicated with us, how He would connect with her in a personal way.

That’s been changing as of late. She’s gone through some tough times over the last few years, really tough. Her world has been turned upside down, and while she has some familial support around her, it’s not enough to sustain her heart through it all. She has had to turn to God in desperation to hold her up. (Literally.) In so doing, she has slowly grown to encounter a God that is not only benevolent, like a friendly old grandfather, but passionate, like a wild lover; a God that not only exists, in the same way that the religion exists or that democracy exists, but a God that is real and present, hot as fire, cold as ice, firm as rock and as close as the air in her lungs. She has met the Living God. And it is changing her in some pretty dramatic ways.

One of those ways is in her perception of Him. I don’t mean just what she thinks of Him, but how she perceives Him, with the sense organ (for that it is, among other things) of her heart. She is now able to hear Him speak to her intimately and personally, just to her — a word of encouragement, a nudge of direction, a whisper of instruction — about her and about her life. Once was through a fortune cookie, another through the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and another through the counsel of a friend.

It is not always that God is so direct; oftentimes He speaks indirectly, expecting that we engage not only with our eyes and ears but with our will, that we trust what we’ve heard before and remember it and walk in it, that we obey what we read in Scripture.  We must remember that the Spirit of Christ in us was given to us, among other reasons, to teach us, to comfort us, to speak to us.

I had that experience last night. I had a dream that I was driving in a car and needing to hear from God about something. I can’t think of what it was, but it seemed only important that I heard from Him. I looked up, and I saw written on a license plate in front of me “John 14:13-15.” I had no idea what that Scripture said, but I took it as from God, and that was all I needed.

Upon waking, I remembered the dream very clearly, which is not typical I might add. Another clue that this might be more than just about the bowl of Grape Nuts I had before I hit the hay last night. I picked up my Bible and headed for the Scripture. Yup. God coming through for me. It was exactly what I needed to remember: “Whatever you ask in My name, that will I do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it. If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.”

It can be hard to hear God in our culture. We distract and divert ourselves to keep from sitting still, afraid that if we were to be quiet for a moment we’d hear nothing at all, and that scares us to death. That’s also a faithless act. We don’t expect God to be there at all. For my friend (and for me, sometime earlier in my journey), it took a dark turn in life to bring her to need God at all. But once she recognized that need and stopped to listen — in hope beyond hope — to see if God would be there, everything changed… forever. Life began, “the most intimate” part of life (Ephesians 4:30) came in to dwell.

 

I Remember Your Name

Sometimes I wake, and lo, I have forgot
And drifted out upon an ebbing sea!
My soul was at rest now resteth not,
For I am with myself and not with thee;
Truth seems a blind moon in a glaring morn,
Where nothing is but sick-heart vanity:
Oh, thou who knowest, save thy child forlorn
-George Macdonald, Diary of an Old Soul

Lord my God, don’t let me forget my part in the covenant you’ve made with me. On my bed I remember you. I think of you through the watches of the night. If you wake me each morning with the sound of your loving voice, I’ll go to sleep each night trusting in you. In the night I remember your name, O Lord. I relish everything you’ve told me of life. I won’t forget a word of it! Point out the road I must travel; I’m all ears, all eyes before you. (2 Kings 17:38; Psalm 63:6; Psalm 143:8; Psalm 119:55, 16)

 

Coming to a Standstill

The past 36 hours have brought another major ice storm in the midwest, and half the metropolis area where my wife and I live has been without electricity. Trees are down, roads are iced and blocked. We are staying with family members that still have intermittent power.

With everything coming to a standstill, it seems the Lord God has asked for me to put into practice some of the intention in my heart for silence, for stillness, for resting and “waiting passionately” on Him. It is so good to stop and simply remember the Presence and the Passion in the heart of our God for us.

Here are a couple of recent posts regarding this slowing up, resting, and remembering in God:

The Silence and the Fury

From the Silence, Speak

 

All-Consuming

It’s a busy season. Family to visit. Gifts to exchange. Shopping to do. I’m struck by the way so much of our culture has been able to recognize the deep need in the human soul and sell it, promising the life we’ve always wanted if we just purchase this pair of tennis shoes, or that leather coat, or this necklace for our wives or that extended DVD set.

It can happen with even the most important things. “The church, you see” explains Paul, “is not peripheral to the world.” Oh really? It hardly seems so when you watch television or visit the nearest mall. I wonder if Paul would have thought differently if he’d had a Macy’s or Sears in his hometown. This is, afterall, what Christmas seems to be about. Even many Christians I know seem to be caught up in the consumerism and commercialism of the season. But Paul is unapologetic in the finality of his statement. “The world is peripheral to the church” (Ephesians 1, The Message). The church, meaning the body of Jesus on earth where all the action is, where the life of Jesus happens.

There was a fascinating study done at UCLA where some mice were given injections of speed to see how long it would take them to run themselves to death. Control mice that weren’t injected were placed with them. You know what happened? The control mice ran themselves to death just as quickly as the others. It’s the nature of the world to run around purposeless, distracted, desperate to fill in the missing pieces with shopping, sex, empty conversation, complication in relationships, and the like.

And so, DeAnn and I have begun pulling back, resisting, refusing to allow ourselves to be taken out and ours hearts to be completely overwhelmed with the “needs” around us – the shopping lists, the family visits, the frantic pace, the buzzing and whirling and crowding. We are withdrawing to the center, turning our gaze to the One who came for us, and starting to remember.

John Eldredge recently wrote a fantastic reminder to the deeper and truer reason behind Advent season. It is so that we may remember and anticipate. “Not only is it an opportunity to reflect – for several weeks – on the fact that God came, it is also an opportunity to lift our eyes towards his return. He will come again.”¹

Together we are seeking out the stories that remind us of God coming through for us, and for His promise that He will come again to set all things aright. We are to love Him. We are to be consumed with Jesus and with His kingdom, with His presence and with His promises. We are to see Him, to set our eyes on Him, as a babe born in a manger, as the Son who came to take our place and ransom us, as a Warrior, as a Friend, as the image of the Father, as our one true love. As Dallas Willard has said, “The key, then, to loving God is to see Jesus, to hold him before the mind with as much fullness and clarity as possible. It is to adore him.”

We are among those He came for, and for whom He will again return. He came to make Himself known “to the humbled, to the fringes of the population, heralded by goats, by sheep, and by astrologers from the east.”²

May we remember. May we awaken to the deep and unbelievably great news that we have been invited into a Great Tale, “a Story that begins, “Once upon a time” and ends “And they lived happily ever after…”²

¹John’s letter can be found here.
² This comes from “Emmanuel, God with Us“

 

One Good Memory

And even if only one good memory remains with us in our hearts, that alone may serve some day for our salvation.
-Alyosha, The Brothers Karamazov

I love this line. As the “hero” of the story, Aloysha is the moral and relational center of the novel, and Dostoevsky considers his way of life the way of the heart in relationship to Christ and centered in His life. And Aloysha could not have been more right in stating that “good memory” may serve one day for our salvation.

It is memory that Jesus speaks to in these days through his Spirit. It is recognition. Remember that right before Jesus left he said that the Father would send the Holy Spirit in his name who would teach us all things and remind us of everything that Jesus said to us.

C.S. Lewis was right to understand that we need more to be reminded than instructed. He was not only speaking to believers by the way. Yes, those of us granted a new heart that now beats very much in rhythm with the heart of Christ will be compelled to follow Him simply by memory of where He has gone and what He has spoken to us. Have you ever noticed a bead of water on the windshield during a rain shower will usually fall in line with the one that went before it, forming a kind of wet trail on the glass? This is what Lewis meant. We have not yet tread where Jesus has gone, at least not fully, as there is always more – more depth to explore and more vistas with God to enjoy. But there is a memory of that life, an imprint, a path, a trail. And it is the work of the Spirit to bring us into it.

But Lewis was speaking also to unbelievers there (in “Mere Christianity”), and actually he did not try to make much of a distinction between the two. This is the reality that Lewis knew, that the human heart itself, wicked or not, deceived or not, was made in the image of the Living God. There is a kind of memory there of another life, or at least some better life, than the one we have. It is often only a phantom pain of something better, like the pain in the “hand” of a man who has lost his arm. But it is still poignant. Just take a look around. Almost everyone you see is engaged in a struggle to make their lives better. We want an increase in pay, or a better-fitting career. We often think that children will make our lives better or happier, or maybe moving to a new city or trying out a new wardrobe or a new kind of drug. And this is not just the American Way. I have been to the remotest villages in Africa and have seen the same. It is something intrinsic in the human soul. We know life as it should be, and we do not have it.

That is the dilemma – that somewhere deep inside we know life as it should be, or at the very least we know that somehow this isn’t the life we were meant to have. Not all of us have arrived at that realization yet, but we will. It’s a guarantee that nothing we use to delude ourselves against that reality will last long. Almost everyone you see is in the struggle to have it. The greatest tragedy, however, is in thinking that we can secure it for ourselves. Didn’t Jesus say that this would never work? “If you seek to save [secure for yourself] your life, you will lose it.” (Matthew 16:25)

So what do you do? What do you do with the thought that this life is not the life you were meant to have, that you were meant to live? What do you do with the fact that we are haunted by eternity, and to make it worse, there is nothing we can do to get there. We cannot sneak our way back into Eden, though we would sell our souls if it meant we could.

If you let that sink in and if you left it there, then it would lead you to despair, then cynicism, then despondency, and finally to madness. Some have gone that way. Think of Nietzsche and his philosophy of nihilism, which states that there is no objective meaning or purpose to our existence. Secretly, this view is held despairingly by many.

But there is another way. It is the Way of Jesus…

 

His Handiwork

I will never forget the day my wife told me that the same God who carved out the Grand Canyon, who spills onto the canvas of the sky the beauty of the sunset, unique and gorgeous every evening, who springs up daisies and daffodils with his endlessly creative flare, knit me together in my mother’s womb and is the Perfecter of my faith.

We are his handiwork (Isaiah 19:25), crafted and spun and birthed and breathed into being with more delight even than He takes in creating the heavens (Psalm 8:3).

 

Early Will I Seek You

If you wake me each morning with the sound of your loving voice,
I’ll go to sleep each night trusting in you.

-Psalm 143:8, The Message

How we need this. How desperately we must awaken each day into the Gospel Narrative, to be reminded deeply of our place in it and God’s heart toward us in announcing the Kingdom come for us. How quickly we forget.

In his book One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marques tells the story of the Buendía family, and through them the rise and fall of the township of Macondo. At one point there was a plague of insomnia that swept through the town. No one could sleep, and so the people began to slowly lose their mental facilities. Because they began forgetting things, they wrote down the names of objects around them and stuck them all over town. “Cow,” “Door,” “House,” etc. Then, they realized they could read the names of objects but not know what to do with them, so they described them further, “Cow: Milk in the mornings,” “Door: Push to open,” “House: Enter for shelter,” etc. On the outskirts of town, they even posted a sign to help them remember, “God Exists.”

John Eldredge tells about reading this story and finding it so ridiculous… until he realized how much like his own story it is. He wrote that he wished he had a sign posted above his bed in the morning so that when he woke up the first thing he would read was simply, “God Exists.”

That’s all of our stories. We wake up… and forget. God knows this. How He must know this. The Old Testament is full of stories of God in fellowship with his children that forgot him constantly.

And so here’s one of the greatest provisions of the New Covenant: He’s provided for this by giving us the Spirit of life to remind us and teach us as the disciples and apprentices we are called to be (John 14:26). How cool is that!

“You are all [children] of the light and… of the day… So then, let us not be like others, who are asleep… “ 1 Thess 5:5-6

I love how St. Francis of Assisi reminds us to “remember at all times – it is God himself, breathing within, who woos us and calls us to live as His sons and daughters.”

And so, we pray with Brennan Manning: “Jesus, Son of the living God, anoint us with fire this day. Let your Word not shine in our hearts, but let it burn. Let there be no division, compromise, or holding back. Separate the mystics from the romantics, and goad us to that daredevil leap into the abyss of your love.”

Being awakened is, of course, just the beginning. We come into the Life that Jesus promised us.

The psalm finishes:

Point out the road I must travel;
I’m all ears, all eyes before you.

-Psalm 143:8, The Message