CHRISTIAN COMMENT: Understanding God’s voice

To some of you, this may seem a rather mad question, because it presupposes firstly, that God actually speaks and secondly, that he has something to say to you, as one of the Gazette readers in my question.

So does God actually speak?

Does God want to communicate with us?

No matter how you read the story of creation as recorded in the first book of the Bible, one of the concepts of God’s character conveyed there is that he does indeed speak.

The way God created could have been described in so many ways but what is recorded is ‘God said...’.

And then what he said happened.

So right at the beginning, before anything else existed, God spoke.

Throughout history God has spoken to people.

The challenge for me, as I write this, is hearing his voice among all the others.

We all hear so many voices and not just audibly.

So many ideas, demands, suggestions vying to be heard and acted upon.

My own desires, ideas trying to drive me.

Even if we accept that God wants to communicate with us, it can be hard to discern his ‘voice’ among all the others.

What voices are you already listening to?

Do you want to hear God speak to you anyway?

Among all the confusion and chaos that our lives can be, do we want to hear the creator of the universe, the most high God, speak to us?

If we think he wants to speak and we want to hear him, then the next question is how?

How, among all the other voices we encounter, do we recognise God’s?

In my experience, God’s tone is always loving and brings a welcome peace in the chaos, even when I don’t like what he says.

The more time we spend with somebody, the more we recognise their voice.

Just think about the times when you ’phone somebody and only need to say ‘It’s me’.

Those will be people that you know well, that you spend time with.

The more time I spend with God, the easier it becomes to recognise his voice.

Jesus said something about this when he promised that his sheep would know his voice.

Sheep belong to a shepherd; they know their shepherd and recognise him, just as dogs recognise and know their owner’s voice.

So, back to the original question.

What does God want to say to you?

Well, when we speak, we say words and Jesus is called ‘Logos’, which means ‘word’.

So what God wants to say to you is to be found in Jesus.