Conversations with God?

Has God ever talked to you? Have you ever heard God’s voice? 

Today we’re talking about how God communicates with Humankind. Have you ever ever had a dream from God? Were you ever carried away in a vision? Does God still communicate with Wo/Man directly these days? 

Jesus said: 

 My sheep listen to My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me; and I give them eternal life, and they will never perish; and no one will snatch them out of My hand. (John 10:27-28)

Is hearing God’s voice necessary for eternal life?  In his Pentecost sermon, Peter quotes from the book of Joel: 

‘And it shall be in the last days,’ God says,
 ‘That I will pour out My Spirit on all mankind;
 And your sons and your daughters will prophesy,
 And your young men will see visions,
 And your old men will have dreams; And even on My male and female servants
I will pour out My Spirit in those days,
 And they will prophesy. (Acts 2:17-18)

Will everyone be a prophet in the last days? Young and old, male and female, even bondservants? The picture here is of all people—all humankind—receiving an outpouring of the Holy Spirit and being prophetic. 

Effective communication with others requires several things, whether it’s a friendship, a marriage, an employer–employee relationship, a teacher or a student: 

• First, you must understand that the other person is actually trying to communicate with you. If you don’t know that someone is trying to communicate with you, it’s pretty hard to understand what they’re saying. 
• Second, if you judge the needs of others based on your own needs and your own perceptions, then likely the communication will be faulty. 
• Third, if you do not take time to know something about who you’re communicating with, you will miss significant indicators of what they’re trying to say. People of faith are told to pray without ceasing, and to read our Bible. But very few people know why. There’s very little information as to why we should pray and why we should read our Bibles. We struggle to understand what God wants and what he’s trying to say. What do you think God is trying to say to you? 
• Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, the key to effective communication is to know the communicant well. The more you know about the other person, the more effective the communication can be. 

Have you ever heard the voice of God? It reminds me of a fairly old country popular love song written by Paul Overstreet and Don Schlitz. One of my nephews sang it at his wedding. But as I thought about it, I wondered if this should be a country song or whether this should be a hymn. The words go something like this. 

“When You Say Nothing At All“

It’s amazing how you 
Can speak right to my heart. 

Without saying a word You can light up the dark.
Try as I may, I could never explain 
What I hear when you don’t say a thing. 

The smile on your face 
Lets me know that you need me. 
There’s a truth in your eyes
Saying you’ll never leave me. 

The touch of your hand says you’ll catch me wherever I fall. 
You say it best when you say nothing at all.: 

All day long I can hear 
People talking out loud, 
But when you hold me near
You drown out the crowd.: 

Try as they may, they can never define 
What’s been said between your heart and mine. 

That smile on your face, 
The truth in your eyes, 
The touch of your hand 
Lets me know that you need me. 

Does that sound a lot like God?—“You’ll never leave me. You’ll catch me whenever I fall. Saying it best when you say nothing at all”? 

Does God actually speak? There is a record of God speaking at Mount Sinai when giving the 10 Commandments. As he’s wrapping up his presentation of the 10 Commandments, Moses says: 

 “These words the Lord spoke to your whole assembly at the mountain from the midst of the fire, from the cloud, and from the thick darkness, with a great voice, and He added nothing more. He wrote them on two tablets of stone and gave them to me. And when you heard the voice from the midst of the darkness, while the mountain was burning with fire, you approached me, all the heads of your tribes and your elders. You said, ‘Behold, the Lord our God has shown us His glory and His greatness, and we have heard His voice from the midst of the fire; we have seen today that God speaks with mankind, yet he lives. Now then, why should we die? For this great fire will consume us; if we hear the voice of the Lord our God any longer, then we will die! For who is there of humanity who has heard the voice of the living God speaking from the midst of the fire, as we have, and lived? (Deuteronomy 5:22-26)

God seems to want to communicate with us, and he does so in order that all may go well with our situation. That’s the final verse: 

 If only they had such a heart in them, to fear Me and keep all My commandments always, so that it would go well with them and with their sons forever! (Deuteronomy 5:29)

God wants to communicate with us so that all will go well with our children forever. We often mistake that to be freedom from fear and freedom from want in this life but the key word in this passage is the word “forever”—”that it will go well with us and our children forever.” It is our forever well being that God has in mind, our eternal good that he has in mind, not just the here and the now.

We long, I think, for the Urim and the Thummim, to hear directly from God what we should do. Have you ever heard from God and is God ever spoken to you? Scripture tells us:

 Indeed God speaks once,
Or twice, yet no one notices it.   

In a dream, a vision of the night,
When deep sleep falls on people,
While they slumber in their beds,   

Then He opens the ears of people,
 And horrifies them with warnings,   

So that He may turn a person away from bad conduct,
 And keep a man from pride;   

He keeps his soul back from the pit,
 And his life from perishing by the spear.   

“A person is also rebuked by pain in his bed,
 And with constant complaint in his bones,   

So that his life loathes bread,
 And his soul, food that he should crave.   

His flesh wastes away from sight,
 And his bones, which were not seen, stick out.   

Then his soul comes near to the pit,
And his life to those who bring death. (Job 33:14-22) 

The Bible is full of stories about God communicating with mankind in visions and in dreams. Jacob saw a ladder into heaven with angels ascending and descending the ladder. Joseph saw sheaves of wheat bowing down to his. Daniel sees the timeline of nations. Zachariah and Joseph each had a vision about a son who would be born into their families. Peter saw a sheet filled with unclean animals let down from heaven. And in Acts 2, the young and the old, the male and the female, and the bondservants are all caught up in visions. 

On occasion, I’ve had some weird dreams myself about people who are no longer alive, and a recurring dream about being late to school or missing out on an examination. Sometime my teeth are falling out. Is this God trying to communicate with me? Or is this just bad spaghetti from the night before? Have you ever had a dream you associated with God that convinced you was God trying to talk to you? How would you validate such a dream? 

As a boy, I remember mission stories about dreams of good things that happened to people who turned to God, about messages from God that would go to those who were receptive to them. I wonder if you’ve ever had a message from God? Here’s one such mission story—a modern one: 

 Since the age of two, Maria had accompanied her mother to the witch doctor to obtain a blessing for the family business in Guinea. The visits were part of life, and the blessing seemed to work. Her mother became a very wealthy businesswoman with many shops across the West African country. She also made her daughter rich and they owned a house in a gated compound, two cars, and a big store selling stylish clothing and handbags. The witch doctor, however, caught 24 year-old Maria by surprise when she visited him for a blessing in 2013: “If you want to be rich,” he told her, “you have to offer a human sacrifice. The sacrifice must be an albino.”

Maria had brought cows to the witch doctor to sacrifice before, but never a human being. The thought of a human sacrifice deeply disturbed her and it weighed heavily on her mind when she fell asleep that night. But as she slept, she dreamed that two small children were talking to her, but she couldn’t understand what they were saying. The next night she saw the children again in a dream. This time she could understand them. “The solution,” they said, “is not to visit the witch doctor.” 

The next night Maria dreamed again. This time she heard a voice as she walked on the street. It said: “The solution is our father and our Savior Jesus Christ.” When she awoke she was puzzled because she wasn’t a Christian. She belonged to another major world religion. How could Jesus be the solution, she wondered. She told her mother about three nights of dreams. “Why do we have to make a human sacrifice” she said. 

Her mother didn’t like the dreams at all and told Maria to buy a cow for the sacrifice, which Maria did. As the witch doctor prepared to slaughter the cow he assured her that her dreams would stop. But that night Maria had another dream. By the end of the week, Maria was exhausted from nightly dreams and decided to go shopping. On Saturday morning she drove her car to the compound gate and stopped, waiting for it to be opened. As she waited, a small girl darted into the compound and approach the car window. “Do you want to go to church?” the girl asked. 

Maria was surprised. “I’m not a Christian,” she said; “Why are you asking me to go to church and who are you looking for?” “I want to go to church,” the girl said. Maria looked closely at the girl. She wondered whether the girl was lost and seeking her parents. She didn’t know about any churches in the neighborhood. Seeming to read her thoughts the girl said: “I know the way.” 

Maria decided to help the girl find the church and got out of her car. After a short walk Maria and the girl reached the gated compound of a Seventh Day Adventist Church. A group of people were standing near the church inside the compound. One of them, a woman, asked Maria whether she could be of assistance. “This little girl asked me to come here,” Maria said, motioning. But the girl was nowhere in sight. Maria looked at the gate and back into the compound. No girl. She returned the puzzled gaze of the kind woman and suddenly felt a strong desire to tell about her dreams. 

“Can I ask you a question?” she said. “Of course,” the woman replied. “I have had many dreams,” she said. “I have sacrificed a cow. But nothing has stopped the dreams. I don’t know what to do.” “Wait for me,” the woman said. “My husband is a pastor, I will ask him for help.” And that is how Maria, a non-Christian in a country where many people are hostile to Christianity, learned about Jesus. Today she is a Christian. 

“My conversion to Christianity is a miracle,” she said. “No one came to me with the Bible. I didn’t read any Christian books. It was a direct call from God.” Maria never saw the girl again. She is convinced that the girl was an angel. 

Do we need direct visions and direct dreams and direct communication from God? Is this something that God does frequently? Commonly? We don’t know the answer? Do we recognize that God is trying to communicate with us? Or is this something which is done rarely and only on special occasions? 

David: I was in my mid 30s. There was nothing particular going on in my life at that time. I was just living life. There was no particular reason, no crisis, that should cause me to have a lucid dream in which I became surrounded by a great evil. It was an intense feeling of the most baleful evil imaginable being out to get me. It was really terrible and deadly serious. It was by far the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced in life or in dreams. It was an utterly malevolent evil. 

Sometimes when I’m frightened in a dream I try to say things and the words won’t come out. I was trying to say to this entity: “You can’t win. You are not the most powerful thing here” or words to that effect; “You cannot do this”.  Basically I was saying: “I believe in God.” I wasn’t saying it so much as thinking it—willing it—and as I did so, the oppression slowly receded. 

I could feel another presence vanquishing the evil entity. I found my voice and was able to say something like “See” I told you so!” and then I woke up with a feeling of absolute certainty that this had not been a dream, that It had been very, very real. There were no words spoken except for my own feeble, strangled remarks. There were no visible entities. Nothing was visible at all. The entire dream was pure and utter feeling. But the feeling was intensely real. 

I was already a believer. I said so in the dream, and that was enough to get rid of the evil presence. It certainly solidified my faith and left it unshaken ever since. That’s it.

Donald: The Old Testament certainly speaks to people having dreams and finding meaning in them and of people with authority to interpret dreams and so on. Another way you could look at it is: When two things come together, does that mean God is speaking to you? When a circumstance presents itself and it’s not coincidence, it seems like God maybe is playing a role. It’s not a dream, certainly. You can see it as a form of communication because without something transpiring that you didn’t anticipate, it seems like God did play a role in that moment. But if somebody says “God told me that” you suspect them. 

I was extremely ill a number of years ago, in intensive care, and things were out of control. I went into cardiac arrest. I couldn’t communicate, but I wrote down that I was on my way to Jordan and asked for a tape cassette to calm me down, talk me down. I’ve still got the cassettes—there were two of them and they were topic based. I had never listened to them—I just brought them thinking they might be interesting to hear when I am in Jordan. One was on death and dying and the other was on [garbled.] 

Was God talking to me through those tapes, or was that a coincidence? I don’t know. But it certainly played a major role in a moment in my life.

Kiran: When I was converting to Christianity from Hinduism, it was really rough. My family was rough. My friends and the gang I used to belong to were rough. 

One night, I had a dream I was on a small vessel traveling from Sri Lanka to India. I had never been on a ship before. I was on deck in the prow of the boat. Looking out, I saw bits of vegetation in the ocean. I assumed we were nearing shore. I could see palm trees in the distance. I was desperately looking to make it to the shore. 

Suddenly, I heard shouts and screams and saw small boats filled with men throwing spears at the ship. Pirates. Some threw spears at me. I was terrified I was going to die and wouldn’t make it to the shore. And then immediately to my right appeared a tall, strong man with gray hair and a gray mustache, wearing a white shirt and white pants and white shoes. 

He put his hand on my back and pushed me down to the deck and said: “Don’t worry, I’m here.” Then he was shouting commands telling the crew what to do. Immediately, nets were thrown from the ship over the boats and our vessel was able to sail on. I felt so much comfort. I took it that God was telling me “You are worried about navigating through life and about how you’re going to end up, but I am there with you.” 

I had several other instances where I didn’t get dreams but I would read some words in the Bible and then it would speak to me. But all those instances were where I was stressed and anxious, and the communication was “Don’t worry, I’m with you. Whatever happens, I’m with you.” But it was never specific, such as “I want you to go to Wayne State University.” It was always “I’m with you, you don’t have to worry.” 

Don: As I ponder more than 70 years of existence, I don’t know that I’ve ever received a communication from God. Should I be jealous? Is God not interested in me? Is he only interested in Kiran and David, but not me? Or maybe I’ve missed the communication—is that possible?

Kiran: It is interesting that I don’t get those views anymore. They were only in the first year of my conversion. I don’t get them now. I went through one of the roughest periods in my life a couple of years ago but there were no dreams.

Bryan: Once or twice I thought I heard God speaking directly to me, but it was nothing really out of the ordinary. 

A few years ago I was a deacon at the 3000-member Southern Adventist University church. I was on duty one Sabbath when the head pastor’s sermon topic was “The Wrath of God.” I’m convinced that in that service, we witnessed the direct hand of God. 

He got up to preach his sermon on the Wrath of God but was unable to start. He became catatonic, frozen at the pulpit. The church went quiet. A couple of the other deacons and I went up on the platform and laid him down, in front of the whole church. We put his feet up on a chair. He remained catatonic, unable to speak, unresponsive, for a few minutes, but then came around. We sat him up and called an ambulance, but he refused to go and said he was going to try again. 

We brought a chair up on the platform. He sat in the chair next to the podium, and tried to preach his sermon again, and was again unable to do it. He just could not speak. After four or five minutes of this, the whole church just watching him not knowing what to do, he was led off the stage and an assistant pastors came up and preached a sermon on a different topic. 

We had been talking in Sabbath school and in discussions on campus about whether God was wrathful or loving. I was and remain convinced that we saw the hand of God close his mouth. This was not something God wanted people to hear. God is love, not wrath. I was there. I was part of it. I saw it. Still today, to recall it is a profoundly emotional experience, to feel like you have seen the hand of God. But I am convinced that we did, that day.

Carolyn: As a teenager (I think I was in junior high) I had a dream that has remained with me all my life, the only dream that I remember. It was right at the end of World War 2. I was still a child, basically. Our school had two storeys. The stairs between them led to a landing then made a U turn up to the second floor. The landing had very large windows. In my dream, as I looked through that window the sky was black with bombers coming to bomb the school, with me in it. I was terrified. 

I had the dream three times. When I was finally able to tell someone about it, I was released from the fear. I didn’t pray about it, but I had prayed often before and I had been at many church gatherings where I felt I was walking with the Lord. The only way I could quiet myself from the dream was knowing that God was in charge. That was the undercurrent following every one of those dreams. I don’t say it was an encounter with God. But for me, that dream was really real. And I just knew, as a child, God was going to take care of me

Don: Have you ever asked God to communicate with you and you didn’t get anything back except silence?

Reinhard: Yes. I think Nature itself speaks about God. Just gaze at the moon and the stars. The Bible said that God speaks to us through Nature. 

To me, dreams foretell the future. I dreamed about moving from Indonesia to the United States. The source may or may not be God. In Indonesia, the majority (85%) is Muslim, Christians are about 7%, the rest are mainly Hindus. A number of prominent Muslim leaders or celebrities became Christians, saying they  dreamed about Jesus, or that God came to them and talked about Christian beliefs and  about the Bible. A member of the aristocracy said she was visited by an angel, who talked to her about Christian beliefs, and then she converted to Christianity. Things like that do happen. 

On the other hand, some televangelists claim to hear the voice of God telling them to tell us that we should do this and that. In my own experience, I never heard God speak in my ear. But sometimes, if I have a problem or something is bothering me in a relationship with people, after I pray (or even during prayer) my mind suddenly seems to get the answer. 

Sometimes the Holy Spirit clarifies things that are bugging or bothering us. For example, I had a family problem about 30 years ago, I did something to offend them, though I certainly didn’t mean to. Thirty years laters it finally came to my mind why they thought I had wronged them. It took all that time, but I got clarification. I think it was God talking to me. If we bare our heart and mind to God, we receive enlightenment through the Holy Spirit.

Donald: For those who don’t feel like they’ve heard from God—have not had a “God moment”—what if God speaks to them through those who have? Those who have had the experience are agents of God, in my mind. 

Pastor Giddi: I too have never heard the voice of Jesus talking to me. When I accepted Christianity, my parents decided that since I’m the firstborn in the family I should become a pastor. One of my aunts, who was a Christian before me, said: “You want to give your son to God, but did God talk to you? Did God call your son?” They said “No.” She asked me, and I said, “No.” “Then,” she said, “it is not God who is talking to you. God is not calling your son to become a pastor.” My parents were discouraged. 

My aunt said that five or six years later, at a church meeting, the pastor asked us to cite some references. I was the first one to do so. The pastor told my parents: “Your son will be a great minister, if you are willing to send him to Spicer theological college.” God spoke to my parents through this pastor. And the pastor said: “Don’t worry about money. We know you’re poor, I’m going to take him, and he’s going to work and study.” 

He told me: “You are going to face a struggle, because you’re going to an English-speaking school, but you have to stay, come what may, for two years.” So I believe, like Donald, that God speaks through people also. It is not just the person of Jesus Christ. It’s not just the word of God coming to us in person, but it is God just the same. It’s God voice, through humans. That pastor didn’t know who I was, because I was growing up in a Roman Catholic Church and just for that one summer, they sent us to his church. 

The question my aunt asked was answered by this pastor saying, “I know your son is going to be a pastor.” That’s how God talks through people, in my experience. I never directly heard the call of God. Somebody asked me: “Did God call you to the gospel ministry?” I only had that experience. I felt it. I heard no voice. It was people who saw that I could become a pastor. 

Jay: God never spoke to me. The idea of God speaking through other people is interesting, until somebody walks up to me and says, “Hey, by the way, God gave me a message for you.” All of a sudden, it’s not such a great idea! We’re all ready to believe that God may communicate to us through other people, as long as they don’t say, “God directly told me to tell you to do this.” I wonder why that is?

Carolyn: Did you ask the Lord and never got a response? We maybe don’t get an audible response, but I have felt as though somebody was leaning on me, pushing me in a direction. I always took it as an affirmation from God. When we’ve asked God to guide us and show us, we need a sign. I need something right now but all I get is this uncomfortable feeling of being leant upon. 

Sometimes it can come from other people. Sometimes we have to struggle for days to get an answer, just like they struggled in the Bible to get an answer from God. I just feel that within us, we can feel God leaning on us to show us the way.

David: I believe God doesn’t speak English, or Arabic, or any human language. He speaks in feelings.  Reinhard talks about feelings induced by Nature and from people around us. It’s feelings. It is not words written in any Scripture. It has always been my problem with religion telling me to find God through words in Scripture. I found God through feeling, and that’s enough for me. I suspect it’s probably enough for most people. 

But it’s a real dilemma if you are religious. To me, it would be, anyway. If I belonged to a religion I would be thinking: “I’ve got a problem here, because I don’t really believe these words!” I can have a feeling about them, I can certainly assert that the words of the Beatitudes make me feel wonderful. They make me feel that there is something divine in those words, something that is right, that is true, and that is coming from God. 

But God is not something you can interrogate in a language. We cannot interrogate God. It’s impossible. It’s the other way around. As Caroline says, God leans on us.

Bryan: I’ve never really thought of it that way, that God speaks in feelings. I’m convinced that at some point, Heaven will be able to look back and say that God spoke to us in all kinds of different ways throughout our entire lives—we just didn’t know it, we didn’t understand it, we weren’t in tune with it. But it has to be that God is speaking to us every day. 

I guess we’re at a point where the veil of sin is so thick now that it’s really hard to see it. It comes down to feeling, and that’s why I identify with the idea that God speaks to us in feelings. 

Jay: I’m fine with that, too, until I think about the burning bush experience, the conversion of Paul, the numerous stories (such as Job, Jonah…) of direct communication between God and humans. Is that possible or impossible? If it is possible, why are we so suspicious of it?

David: There are lots of words in the Book of Job, including the (77?) “thundering questions” we’ve discussed often. But to me it’s metaphorical, if that’s the right word. I can imagine Job “feeling” those questions from God: “Who made the stars?” “Are you able to this?” I don’t think they had to be put into words. It could all have taken place inside Job’s head, only not in Hebrew. I think God’s questions came to Job as feelings, as a sense of wonderment as he looked around him. I can imagine the questions dawning upon him, the feeling growing in him that God is unimaginable and he shouldn’t even try. 

Much of Scripture may be like that. It may be our feeble (but perhaps necessary) attempt to try to put those feelings down into words. Talking about my experience this morning was difficult. I don’t know how to put it in words. It’s essentially inexpressible, what I went through; and that partly explains why it left absolutely no doubt in my mind. The feeling was so utterly intense, there’s no way I can transmit it to you. I can say the words I said, but you cannot possibly acquire the feeling I had from those words.

Donald: How can we have this conversation without bringing up the phrase: “My conscience told me so”? That doesn’t sound like God, when we call it a conscience. What’s the role of your conscience? This conversation borderlines the idea of the role of conscience. When your conscience says, “No, I shouldn’t be doing this” or “I should do that:, who’s talking to you? Or is it a feeling?

C-J: The whole idea of right or wrong is, I believe, written on our spirit. We are spirit beings having a human experience. But as I listened to the witness among this group, I think that God gives us what we need for our personal journey. He’s not a performance, he’s not entertainment; it’s a relationship, and each of us has a different experience because God is very personal, and it’s about the relationship. 

So whatever we need for the mission he has given us, for the people that we will encounter, for whatever professional roles that we are in, God has given us the setting, time, and place to accomplish what he has ordained before the foundation of the earth. And who are we to question? But to only be yielded, to be open, to be sensitive. To use the word of God is our measuring stick, and in the mouth of two or three it will bear witness that indeed, whatever our impression is, whatever our conscious thought is, whatever our choice of behaviors, that it should line up with the Word of God in terms of “do no harm” and those 10 Commandments and our relationships with others, whether it’s government or our own personal family.

Neldeson: I believe that God is always present around us, and if we listen carefully we will do things accordingly. Things have happened to me and I’m always getting advice to differentiate good from bad. In my 63 years of upon this earth, I have been in the Adventist church since I was 12 years old. There are still wrong things that I do, but I always get down on my knees and repent for them. I ask God to constantly fill me with his Holy Spirit, and I find that in my work I always have compassion for people. I see things out there and I try to change daily. So that is what I see and I feel from God. 

Don: Next week, we’ll talk a little bit more about communication and God communicating with humankind and how that happens and how, above all, as Jason has indicated, we can validate what we hear from God. 

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