Listen to what The Man said?

Proponents of “listening prayer,” gaining in popularity as a so-called acquired skill of talking to God in such a way that you can then listen for Him to talk back, use John 10:27 as their proof text. Jesus Christ says, “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.”

The first stanza of a hymn under the category “listening prayer” reads:

I see the stars that flood the skies,
A thousand at a glance,
And wonder that You guide them all
As simply as a dance.
My Father God, I know Your love
Won’t leave my life to chance.
Speak, I am listening.
Speak, I am listening.
Speak, I am listening to You.

In his book, “The Art of Listening Prayer,” author Seth Barnes writes, “I don’t know about you, but for a long time, this verse (in John 10) bothered me. I was supposed to be listening for his voice, but mostly all I heard was silence. The silence pointed to a deeper frustration. All my life I had struggled with this problem: I had accepted Jesus as my savior and was supposed to have this personal relationship with him, but it didn’t feel very personal . . .

“Maybe you are like me—you grew up having monologues with God and have never heard before that he wants to talk to you. You’ve not really learned how to hear his voice.

“I remember the first time I heard his voice. It was years later; I was desperate. I had been betrayed by someone very close to me and I needed to know that God cared. I asked him if he would share with me what he thought of me. The next thing that happened changed my life forever. God spoke inwardly to me in a way that might as well have been audible. He said, ‘Seth, I love you.’

“That did it. I was a junky, ruined for anything that smacked of a tame, compromising faith. I shared with my children what they called ‘praying the new way.’ One of them heard God say, ‘I love you more than the flowers and the trees.’ After that, we all began to grow in our ability to listen. We would ask the Lord questions, then listen, and he often spoke.”

*****

Preachers will tell you that if you want to know the will of God in your life, you must carefully scrutinize your circumstances and listen for Him to interpret the events and give you directives through an “inner spiritual voice.”

“If circumstances were the means of divine revelation, then what is the Bible? Chopped liver?!” reasons Jordan. “You say, ‘Well, the Bible’s the primary means, but . . .’ No, it’s the only means! Because anything God is communicating and revealing to you outside of the Bible is extra-biblical.”

“The mechanics of the way the Spirit of God operates today is something you can put bullet points by it’s so clearly delineated in Scripture. Plain and simple, the Spirit of God works through the Word. Paul says, ‘The words that I speak unto you they are spirit and they are life.’

“When we communicate and we’re talking, speaking to one another is a spiritual medium; it’s a communication of spiritual truth through a spiritual medium. Paul says in I Corinthians 2:9, ‘But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.’

“In other words, left to yourself you’re never going to find out the things God has prepared for you. But God revealed them to you. It’s revealed truth. You’re not left in the dark. He revealed them to you through His Spirit. How did the Spirit of God reveal these things? Through His Word!”

*****

“I got a real wicked email from a person this past week, and they just went on and on and on, calling me all kinds of terrible invectives, telling me what kind of a heretic I am because I tell people (on our TV program) that the Spirit of God speaks through His Word, and that He DOES NOT speak outside of His Word; He’s NOT communicating to any of us through circumstances, inner impressions, events, physical things, etc.

“Oh, this man was just as mad as could be at me about this. He said, ‘You’re limiting God! God speaks into your heart and He doesn’t just speak with the cold letter of His Word; He talks to you and He leads you.’

“I simply wrote back, ‘This just isn’t how God says He communicates, and every contact you have with Jesus Christ outside of the Word of God is on an inner subjective level inside of you, so how do you know that communication—that feeling, that impression, that thought, that word—you get in your spirit is from the God of the Bible and not from the devil?’

“ ‘Well, I just feel’. . .  Listen, every Mormon who ever lived, the way he got converted was he got the ‘burning in the bosom’ and he feels that way. Every Muslim you know, they went and got the feeling.

“I had plenty of  feelings about God talking to me before I ever got saved. Religion does that. That’s what it’s based on! Religion is designed to satisfy the lusts of your flesh and your flesh lusts for feeling.

*****

“So how do you know that the contact you have is the God who created all things and not some evil spirit? Well, you need some objective standard outside of your own intuition to know that.

“That’s why Paul writes, ‘Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.’ (I Cor. 2:13)

“Where do you find the words that the Holy Ghost teaches? That’s what the Book is! ‘Holy men of old spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.’ ‘All scripture is given by inspiration of God.’ ‘The Holy Ghost spake by the mouth of David.’ ‘The Holy Ghost spoke by the mouth of Isaiah.’ The Bible’s full of that!

“So when the Holy Spirit wants to speak, He speaks through words and those words are recorded on the pages of God’s Word. I Corinthians 2:10 says, ‘But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.’

“He did it in the Book, in His words. When it says ‘for the Spirit searcheth the deep things,’ God the Holy Spirt knows the mind of the Godhead. Verse 11 says, ‘For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.’

“That’s a verse you don’t want to read over too quickly. ‘What man knoweth the things of a man.’ You have a spirit that gives you a capacity to know things beyond simply the physical world around you. You have a spirit of man within you. I’ve got the spirit of man within me.

“And when I speak words, those words come out of my mouth. They tell you what’s inside of me in my spirit. Those words are a spiritual medium of communication that go into your ear and are translated . . . somewhere in the mystery of your makeup it’s translated into words that your spirit hears. And words—the communication we engage in—is really a spiritual thing.

*****

“The reason you and I can talk is we have the spirit of a human, the spirit of man. Your dog has a spirit and a soul, they’re just not human. They’re not able to communicate on the basis that we do.

“When we talk back and forth (as Believers), there’s a spiritual ministry going. Now, when what we’re speaking is the Word of God, there’s more than a spiritual medium being transpired than when we’re just communicating human viewpoint—

we’re really communicating the things of God!

“And as a teacher teaches, if you read verse 12: ‘Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God.’

“As the teaching ministry communicates godly edifying to you, there’s a spiritual ministry that’s developed inside of you, and literally you store up the capacity in your inner man and you’re built up. In Galatians 4:19, Paul talks about Christ being ‘formed in you.’ There’s a form of sound doctrine built up in your inner man.

“That’s what the ministry is designed to accomplish. Our purpose as the preachers is not simply to be here at the church and entertain you, or have a place where you can come and feel good about being there.

“Our purpose is to take some godly edification—some sound doctrine based on our identity as members of the Body of Christ in the dispensation of grace—and impart that information into your inner man so that it builds up that edifice of sound doctrine inside of you, and your frame of reference (your thinking, your conscience, your inner man, all of the processes that go on inside of you) is renewed. The shorthand terminology in Romans 12 is ‘the renewing of your mind’ that you might be ‘transformed by the spirit of God from glory to glory.’

“II Corinthians 3:18 says, ‘But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.’

“There’s this inner-man transformation and it’s the spirit. Paul’s not talking to you about getting saved, he’s talking about the edification process.”

*****

“Paul tells us in Galatians 3:5 that when he ‘ministereth to you the Spirit, and worketh miracles among you,’ it’s by the hearing of faith and not the works of the law.

“Now the reason Paul adds that about him working miracles is because, at the time in which the Book of Galatians was written, this was the first of Paul’s epistles, and miracles were in operation at the time to confirm the message that was being preached.

“In Acts 13 and 14, you’ll see that Paul did work miracles among them. What was the reason? Romans 15:18 tells you. He writes, ‘For I will not dare to speak of any of those things which Christ hath not wrought by me, to make the Gentiles obedient, by word and deed, Through mighty signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God; so that from Jerusalem, and round about unto Illyricum, I have fully preached the gospel of Christ.’

“That covers the territory the Galatians were in, and when he says there that he’s made the Gentiles obedient by word and deed through mighty signs, that’s what he’s talking about in Galatians 3.

“He’ asking, ‘When miracles are done in your midst, is it because of your performance or because of the activity of the Word of God?’ Now, that’s a real strong verse, by the way, for all the folks out there trying to do miracles today, because if you go to a miracle meeting today, what do they tell you? How do you get your miracle? Don’t they always tell you something to do? It’s, ‘Plant this seed faith. Give this offering.’

*****

“There’s that yo-yo down in Texas who gets up on the desk and talks so loud-- Robert Tilton. What a con artist. He had a thing a couple of years ago where he said, ‘God told me that for every $57 you send to my ministry, He’ll save one of your kinfolk. You want to get a relative saved, send us $57.’ It wasn’t long before he dropped it down to $37. You know, get them in on the wholesale plan.

“Well, that’s the idea of, ‘You perform and God will do; God will work a miracle if you do enough,’ but that isn’t how it happens. How’s it happen? The hearing of faith. You hear God’s Word, believe it, and the Word of God works. Now, the reason the miracles were being done (in the early part of Paul’s ministry) was to confirm the Word.”

(new article tomorrow)