Out of the Blue // How Can I Hear God Speak to Me?, Part 7

Have you ever heard a little voice out of the blue? Unexpectedly – this strong impression or this strong guidance just leaps out at you. Sometimes it’s just about something small. Other times, it’s huge. Many, many people have experienced that. Question is – is it from God? Is that God speaking to us … or not?

Have you kind of heard a voice out of the blue and wondered, "Where did that come from?" We’re chatting this week on the program about hearing from God. How does God speak these days and how do we hear Him? That’s what we’re exploring because God is still speaking and He means for us to hear Him.

Now one of the ways I notice that He talks to people throughout the Bible is a voice out of the blue. I had coffee with a dear friend of mine, James, just the other day. He was telling me how the day before he was racing out for a meeting and he had this distinct impression he should go back to his study and grab his diary. He ignored it. On the way something happened and he needed to contact the person he was supposed to be having the meeting with to adjust the arrangements. Problem was he didn’t have the man’s phone number on him. It was, you guessed it, in the diary sitting back on his desk in the study.

Now sometimes God has big things to say and sometimes He has little things to say and in my experience, if we love Him, if we’re in the business of drawing close to Him, sometimes in the thick of things while we’re on the run, He speaks to us out of the blue.

Some people are uncomfortable with that. There’s a school of thought that God only ever communicates to us through His Word the Bible. Well, I agree. The Bible is the primary way that God communicates with us and if anyone claims any other communication, a prophecy, a word of knowledge, something from God out of the blue, if anyone claims to have heard from God like that but they say they heard is not consistent with what the Bible says, well my friend it ain’t coming from God. God never contradicts Himself. Let me say that again, God never contradicts Himself. So I agree on that front.

But the number of times He speaks to people in the Bible and they answer Him, “Here I am Lord”, well there’s lots of those. Let’s have a look at just one of those today. Moses is a burnt out old wreck of a man. He’s 80 years old. He murdered an Egyptian as a young man. So even though he grew up in Pharaoh’s house, he fled out to the back of the desert to tend sheep for 40 or 50 years. But suddenly, when God’s ready to speak to Him, God speaks out of the blue or at least, out of a bush. Have a listen, Exodus Chapter 3:

Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.

When the LORD saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

Then the LORD said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.

The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.

Was it an audible voice, or was it a voice Moses heard in His heart. We’re not told. We don’t know. But God didn’t have a Bible to speak through back then. It wasn’t written yet. So He spoke to Moses out of the blue as it were, out of the bush. If you have access to an electronic version of the Bible I suggest you do a search on the words, “Hear I Am." They come up over and over again. God speaks to His people out of the blue and they answer, “Here I am Lord."

Has it ever happened to me? Well I’ve never been quite called to lead Israel out of Egypt to be quite honest with you. But at the same time God has spoken to me out of the blue about things that are big and about things that are small. I remember not long after I became a Christian I was alone in my house and it was a Saturday afternoon and I was ironing downstairs. And as I finished each shirt, I’d take it upstairs and hang it up in the wardrobe. As I was heading back downstairs I was just overwhelmed by the presence of God. So I sat down at the top of the stairs and what I experienced in the next fifteen or twenty minutes was God calling me to preach the Good News of Jesus.

I thought, hang on, I’d been a Christian like five minutes and your calling me to do this? Then He showed me how over the previous twenty years as I’d been invited all over the world to speak at conferences and events in the IT industry, which is what I did back then, I was an IT consultant. He showed me how he’d been getting me ready for this even before I’d given my life over to Him.

Now these weren’t my thoughts or ideas. This wasn’t a vivid imagine at works. It was ‘Someone outside of me speaking into me and showing me this stuff’ kind of experience. Did I hear an audible voice? No! Never have. But I knew it was God.

Jesus said in John 10:16:

I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.

John 10:27:

My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.

See this is exactly how it was for me that day. I just knew it was God who spoke to me and God who called to do what I’m doing on that day in the stairwell in the middle of ironing shirts. I didn’t know it was going to happen. I had absolutely no idea at that point how it would unfold that I would be involved in the medium of radio. It didn’t come until years later, in fact another eight years after that time.

Sometimes I’ve thought I heard His voice and I don’t think I’ve got it quite right. So I always test things. I think, I pray, I see if they make sense and little by little, what I’ve discovered is that I’m getting better and better at discerning God’s voice; recognising that it’s Him that I’m hearing. In my day to day to life God sometimes nudges me this way and sometimes that way. In the middle of pressure and conflict sometimes the Holy Spirit speaks strongly and directly, often with a Scripture to me that leads me to behave in a Godly way rather than follow my natural human inclinations. And you know, that’s exactly what Jesus promised would happen.

John Chapter 14, Jesus promises to send us His Spirit to dwell in us and He goes on to say in John Chapter 15 verse 26:

When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf.

Then John 16:14:

He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

Friend, God is in the business of communication with us. When He does, when we hear Him out of the blue, let’s test everything against His Word the Bible. If it’s not consistent with His Word then it’s absolutely certain that this thing we thought was from God definitely isn’t from Him. But He does communicate with us in all sorts of different ways and sometimes it comes completely out of the blue so let’s be ready for it.