Discipleship 101
a beginner's guide to
Christianity
Chapter 14
Can you hear
the Holy Spirit?
When the church in Antioch
gathered for worship, the Holy Spirit spoke to them: "Set apart for me
Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them." Does the Holy
Spirit speak to us today? Can we hear what he says to us today?
Paul tells us that those who
are led by the Holy Spirit are the children of God (Romans 8:14). We should
expect the Holy Spirit to lead us, and we need to know how he does it.
In different ways
God works in different ways
with different people. He spoke in different ways to Adam, Abraham, Moses,
Deborah, Samuel, Elijah, Mary and Paul. He can speak in different ways to us
today. The messages given to Philip (Acts 8:29) and Peter are so specific (Acts
10:19) that distinct words may have been involved. But he spoke in a different
way at the Jerusalem council (Acts 15). It is only after all the discussion had
taken place that the apostles concluded that the Holy Spirit had made the
decision for them (verse 28).
Just as the Holy Spirit
decides to give different abilities to different people (1 Corinthians 12:11),
he works with us in different ways. A person with the gift of miraculous words
is likely to hear the Spirit in a different way than a person with the gift of
compassion. The Spirit will lead a teacher in a different way than a server,
because he has different jobs for each person.
The Spirit shapes us in
different ways, and as a result, we value different goals. Someone with the gift
of administration will value order and organization; someone with the gift of
serving will ask whether people are being helped; someone with the gift of
encouragement will focus on peoples’ attitudes; people with the gift of
generosity will look for needs that they can fill. And the Spirit works with us
in the way that he has caused us to be, according to our interests and values.
For some people, he speaks
subtly, in general principles; for others, he must speak with unmistakable
details. Each of us must listen in the way that God has made us, in the way that
he chooses to deal with us. The important thing is that we listen—that we are
ready and willing to hear what he says. We should be looking for his leadership
rather than ignoring it.
Dangers
There are several dangers to
take into account. First, all sorts of people have claimed to hear the Holy
Spirit when he didn’t really speak to them. They have made false prophecies,
given foolish advice, led people into cults and made Christianity look bad. If
God spoke to them, they badly misunderstood what he was saying. So there’s a
danger of "hearing" things that God never said. We should be careful,
for we do not want to use his name in vain.
A second danger is that
some people, afraid of hearing incorrectly, refuse to hear anything at all. But
as Dallas Willard has pointed out, we should not "shun the genuine simply
because it resembled the counterfeit" (Hearing
God, p. 88). Our Father in heaven does speak to
us, and the Holy Spirit does lead us, and we will shortchange ourselves if we
close our ears.
Hebrews 3:7 says that the
Spirit speaks in the words of Scripture, and we should not refuse to follow what
he says. He does communicate to us today, convicting us of what we should do,
guiding us in how we serve God.
A third danger is that some
people seek the Holy Spirit for selfish reasons. They want the Spirit to make
their decisions for them, to tell them what job to take, which person to marry,
when to move and how to live. They want the Holy Spirit to be like a Ouija board
or a horoscope, to save them the trouble of thinking and making decisions.
But God wants us to grow in
maturity, to learn through experience what is right and wrong (Hebrews 5:12-14).
And many of the decisions we face are not matters of sin and righteousness—they
are simply choices, and God can work with us no matter which we choose, so he
leaves the choice up to us. So the Holy Spirit doesn’t speak on everything we
want him to.
Some people would like to
have the Holy Spirit as a conversational companion to keep them company. They
want to chat, but the Holy Spirit isn’t involved in idle words. He does not
call attention to himself (John 15:26), and is often silent because he has
already given us enough information and advice. He wants us to use what he has
already given; he has been training our conscience to respond rightly to what
faces us. That does not mean that we rely on ourselves, but that we rely on what
God has already done in our lives and what he has already taught us.
Scripture
The Holy Spirit speaks to us
primarily through the Scriptures that he inspired to be written and canonized.
This is our foundation of faith and life, the word that everyone has access to,
the word that can be studied and discussed most objectively. Often the word that
we need to hear has already been written, and the Spirit simply needs to bring
it to mind. When Jesus was tempted by the devil, for example, his responses were
quoted from Scripture. He had studied and memorized those words, and in each
situation the Spirit led him to the appropriate response.
The Spirit does not bypass
our need to think, or our need to read and meditate on his words. If we are not
seeking the words he has already given in Scripture, then we should not expect
him to suddenly give us new words for new situations. Nor can we expect the
random-access method of Scripture skimming to provide good answers for difficult
questions. We cannot force, coerce or goad the Spirit to speak when he does not
choose to speak.
With Scripture, there is the
potential for nearly constant communication with God, as we read and pray and
live consciously in God’s presence. As we pray, we should also listen, for God
may use our meditations to help us understand what we should do. We have the responsibility to
read and study, for the Spirit usually works with words that are already in our
minds. He works with our vocabulary, with our ways of reasoning, with the
desires and values he has given us.
The devil can use Scripture,
too, and the Bible is often misunderstood and misused. But it is still an
important means of being led by and hearing the Holy Spirit. Scripture is the standard of
comparison for all other words from God. If we think that the Spirit is leading
us to do something, our first question needs to be, "Is this in agreement
with Scripture?" The Spirit does not contradict himself. He does not lead
us to lie, steal, gossip or be greedy, for he has already told us that those
things are not godly.
So if we think the Spirit is
leading us in one direction, we need to check it with Scripture—and the only
way we can do that is to know what Scripture says. We need to study it, and
since we will never know it all, we need to keep studying it. Memorization can
be helpful, but what we need most of all is understanding. We need to see the
principles of salvation, of Christian living, of divine love, of the way that
God works with his people; that will help us understand how he is working with
us.
Experience
We can also hear the Holy
Spirit through experience. God sometimes changes his methods with us, but most
often he works with us in a similar way from one year to another. Through
experience, we see how he has answered our prayers and led us in past
situations. This will help us recognize his "voice" when he speaks to
us in the present. Experience comes through time, submission and meditation. The
Spirit helps the humble, not the self-exalting.
We can gain even more wisdom
by drawing on the experience of other Christians. The Spirit does not isolate
us, but puts us into a church, into a community of other believers. He
distributes his gifts so that we stay together, work together and benefit from
one another’s strengths (1 Corinthians 12:7). In the same way, we can help one
another hear the Holy Spirit because we each have different experiences of how
God works in our lives.
When a message from God comes
to one person, other people are to consider it carefully (1 Corinthians 14:29).
They are to consider, for one thing, whether it is really a word from the Lord.
The Spirit can speak through the community as well as through certain
individuals—the Jerusalem conference is a good example of that. The people
learned from their experiences with the Gentiles, saw that those experiences
agreed with the Scriptures (Acts 15:15), and through the discussion heard the
decision of the Spirit (verse 28).
The Holy Spirit often speaks
to people through other people: in worship songs, in small group discussions, in
a whispered word of encouragement, in a silent smile, a picture or a magazine
article. There are many ways we can learn from others, to receive godly guidance
from others. But this is for each person to discern. Rarely does the Spirit tell
one person to give orders to another.
Sermons are a common means of
spiritual speech. Those who speak should strive to speak the words of God (1
Peter 4:11), so those who speak in church should strive to listen to God as they
prepare the sermons, and those who hear the sermons should likewise listen for
the words of the Lord. We need to let our worship services be times of
listening, of thinking, of communing with God so that we are letting him change
us to be more like Christ. Let us draw near to him, and he will change us.
Circumstances are another
experiential means of "testing the spirits." We may have an open door,
or all the doors may be closed. Barricades may test our convictions, or they may
be signals that we need to ask whether we have correctly understood the
directions. They force us to think again, to seek God again, to check with
Scripture, and to check with others who have spiritual maturity.
Responding to the Holy Spirit
If we want to hear, we need
to listen. But if we want to hear in the biblical sense, we also need to obey.
If we hear his voice, if we believe that God is telling us to do something, then
we need to respond. We need to do what he has gifted us to do. We are to submit
to God, for what he says is for our own good. We bring him honor, and we bring
ourselves blessings, by doing his will. It begins with listening. Can you hear
the Holy Spirit? It is something worth thinking about.
Joseph Tkach
To
the next article in this series:
Can the Holy Spirit save you? |
