We have recently finished our sermon series on Listening to God. Having introduced our theme this year of ‘Prayer’, Paul wanted to encourage us to find new and fresh ways to pray.
He opened the series with the question: does God speak today? He then challenged us to ask ourselves whether we feel that God speaks to us personally.
“We know that God is a God of revelation but we tend not to personalise it…Listening to God is a bit of an art form and it doesn’t come easily. It should be the most natural thing in the world but because of the cacophony of noise around us…and for all sorts of reasons that I’ll address over the next few weeks, it isn’t.” – Paul Meiklejohn
The series addresses these three questions:
- Does God speak?
- How does He speak?
- Does he speak to you?
A listening church
In the first part of the series, Paul shared some biblical validation of God speaking and how the Church has been a listening church.
- “God begins creation by speaking ‘Let there be light.’”
- “Then as we rush through the Old Testament, God spoke to Adam to set his life aside as a prophet. God speaks to Moses at the burning bush and throughout the rest of his ministry. Samuel, when he was just a lad, God spoke to him.”
- “It may surprise you that in the Old Testament alone, God speaks about 3000 times.”
Also referring to the New Testament, Paul reminded us that words are important to God. But he also goes through Church history and how the belief in God speaking has changed over the centuries. So a good summary for those who love your Church history.
Learning to Listen to God
In this series, Paul also touches on the following three questions:
- If God speaks, how much attention do we give that?
- How can we be sure it is God doing the talking?
- If it is God speaking, what should we do about it?
“The idea is not to shut down the idea of God speaking to us but learning to discern what He is saying.”
God longs to reveal Himself to us and He is asking us to be sensitive to His direction. This series is intended to help us to become people who are in conversation with God on a regular basis.
We encourage you to listen to or revisit this series to develop your relationship with God and seek Him with an open and listening ear.
Series links
Here are all six parts of the series, available on YouTube:
- Listening to God (Part 1): Does God Speak?
- Listening to God (Part 2): God on Mute?
- Listening to God (Part 3): How Does God Speak?
- Listening to God (Part 4): Does God Speak to You?
- Listening to God (Part 5): Becoming Prophetic People
- Listening to God (Part 6): God Spoke
We have been greatly blessed by this series. We’ve had several testimonies of how God is speaking to people in our church; He’s been using dreams and ushering people to act through His spirit.
We’re enjoying going deeper with our new series in Philippians this month.