“I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world. Yours they were, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything that you have given me is from you. For I have given them the words that you gave me, and they have received them and have come to know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me.”
John 17:6-8
A lot of water has passed under the bridge of hearing from God. We know the familiar feeling of straining our soul to hear some voice that sounds like God speaking words in our head. I love Isaiah 30:21 on the subject which affirms such a thing.
We have something more than what Isaiah predicted, however. Something better than an exterior person speaking an interior voice. We have a union with Christ. How much of communication needs to be “oral/audible” and how much needs to just be life? Consider how Paul wrote the Bible, or others. Did they get it dictated to them? No, by all evidence, they did not. So on what basis can we say “God wrote the Bible”? Easy, they were united with Christ. Take Paul for instance. He knew the Bible (the 39 books). He knew the nature of God. He also had face to face encounters with God that affirmed things and taught him things. But when he sat down to write, he simply let life come out of his pen. Life emerged from him and came out on paper. The life that he shared with Jesus became a well that over flowed and poured out on paper. So much of our effort at hearing from God to get an echoing voice that we cannot deny really does set us up for disappointment, or demonic or soulish deception. We might find ourselves in imagination more than Spirit. But by loving God, living in union with Him, and simply asking him where the life is, we will absolutely get a sense of what the Vine wants to do and which part of the branch must bear which fruit. It will be more than simply communication, it will be communion. We can make a better case for God’s desire to commune with us than anything else. From the communion of the human with the Godman comes something called a body for Him. We don’t need words in this relationship primarily. We need life. Words are an outflow of life, and they give birth to life. That is how you know that the Life has spoken.
