Pastor Jeff and Cheryl Orluck
Cheryl: Good morning.
Jeff: Good morning.
Cheryl: You are over here. Turn the chair.
Jeff: I think I'm on. How is everybody? Wasn't that a great worship? I'm up there trying to— Nice, nice. I'm up there trying to run a livestream and I'm crying. I can't see.
Cheryl: I was wondering where you were.
Jeff: My nose was running.
Cheryl: I thought I might have to be up here by myself maybe.
Jeff: Well, you could do it too. You could probably do it better.
Cheryl: It would be really interesting. Wouldn't it?
Jeff: It would be great. Oh, hallelujah. Let's make a couple of announcements quick. This Thursday night is our monthly prayer gathering at seven o'clock on Zoom. You can find the link on Hope Happenings. Jim Stein is leading that hour of prayer, and Joanne and Jackie have done a really good job of just keeping a really good record of all the prayer needs in the church, people who need healing. It's a great opportunity for us to be together for that hour, to just pray for each other and really hold each other up and trust God for wonderful things. Friday, Cheryl, you could announce this, but I didn't ask you to— ladies lunch around town at Walburg.
Cheryl: That's fun. It's a good time together. And who doesn't like food
Jeff: It's even better when you like each other. That'll be good. Every year, in the winter the joy, that's Just Older Youth, 55 and older, we like to play games, so we always have a game day. Everyone who wasn't 55 and older was jealous, so we decided to have a Joy sponsored game day for everybody.
Cheryl: Please come.
Jeff: It's February, I think the 19th; it's a Saturday. we are going to meet at noon. The Joy group is going to put together a lunch for everybody. There'll be a free will offering for that. And then we'll just play games for the afternoon. We'll have games for adults and games for kids. It turns out Robert is a big chess fan. So we'll have chess boards there. We'll have some card games, maybe a little Dutch Blitz. It's Jackie's favorite game. Rachel loves board games.
Cheryl: How about Quiddler? Who knows the more people that come, the more different games we'll have. Plan on having fun with your friends; invite friends. It'll be a great opportunity for people to meet people from Hope. So that'll be a fun thing too. Communion today, it will be the service and Robert and Tequaris, Pastor Robert and Tequaris will be serving communion right after the service. We've got that going on too.
Cheryl: Ready?
Jeff: I think so. If the Lord is ready, we are ready. we are ready. If you saw the schedule during the weeks that Brian and Jackie, Pastor Brian and Jackie are gone, Robert is preaching twice, I'm preaching twice and we kind of staggered our week. This will be my first of two messages. I really felt like I wanted to teach on the ministry of healing for a couple of weeks. So that's going to be the heart of it. You might say why healing, and really in the last month, it really started with when we prayed for Nadine here, for her surgery for thyroid cancer. She's not out of the woods yet. We want to keep, keep on praying that God continues to do his wonderful work in her life and in her body.
Something began to really stir, flourish inside of me, a real expectation and anticipation for God to answer the prayers of the people of Hope, and I found myself whenever a new prayer request for healing comes across on my email or something, I get excited to pray because I have this anticipation, I have this expectation that we are in a season with the father right now, this church specifically is, the rest of the body of Christ may be as well, but specifically us, God is bringing us into a special season of answered prayer. So we can be excited about when people have needs for prayer, because when we pray, God is going to answer. we are seeing some really awesome answers to prayer right now. It's really exciting. Rachel's brother was on a ventilator in the hospital and he is out of ICU on the road to recovery, doing therapy to get strong again on his way home. Her dad just had a serious heart surgery and that went very well.
We just see the Lord responding to our and I just felt like it's a great opportunity to teach on the ministry of healing. I will tell you, some of you, this is old news. For some of you, it might be a brand new topic. Those of you that have been around the world of Pentecost, Pentecostal, or charismatic, healing, isn't anything new to you. Probably, you will never have heard teaching on healing that you've never heard what I'm going to say. You've heard it, but not in the context of healing. Let's put it that way. I have a little bit different view of things than what most of us have grown up on. Actually, a lot of what I'm going to say, I used to teach my Sunday school kids for years, because I taught Sunday school here for years. And that was one of my main topics with my kids: teaching them how, how to hear the voice of God and pray for the sick. Actually, every quarter, I take four or five weeks and have the kids, teach the kids what I wanted them to understand and we would do little practicing on hearing the voice of God and then we would invite adults to come in and we'd pray for them. I have some really cool stories. Maybe more in two weeks and this week, maybe I'll tell a couple stories of how cool it is when we pray for the sick and we learn how to pray for the sick.
Part one, ministry part one, today, we are going to talk about hearing God's voice. You might say, what does hearing God's voice have to do with healing? Actually everything, because the ministry of healing is a ministry of partnership. There are three people involved in the ministry of healing or more, but three specific components. There's you as the prayer, the person who's praying for healing, there is the person you are praying for, they are a partner in that process and there is the holy spirit.
The way that you find success in the ministry of healing is when you work in a partnership of the three of you. The most important partnership you have is you with the holy spirit. You and holy spirit get to do a lot of really cool things together, but it's really hard to do that if you are not comfortable with hearing his voice. We are all at a different place in that journey and, and different parts of the body of Christ are in different places of that journey.
What we are talking about today is a lot of cool stuff that I've learned and experienced. It's not to in any way downgrade anybody else's experience. But if you struggle or if you feel like you can't hear the voice of God or it's something that you've never really experienced, or you'd like to experience in a deeper way, I'm hoping that that's what today will be good for. I believe that every one of us was made to be in communion with a father. That's why he made us. When he created Adam and Eve, he would walk in the garden with them. When they left the garden of Eden, he lost something. It wasn't just Adam and Eve who lost something. The father lost something. He lost communion with his friends. The whole reason for Jesus coming was for the father to regain the friendship, for God to regain communion with man who he made in his image. When we come into Jesus and when we get filled with the holy spirit, we begin a new journey in relationship with our God. That's the core of Christianity. We'll, we'll talk more about that as we go on. we are going to start with the scripture, and this is the one that— thank you, Justin, for the lead in. This is the one that Justin alluded to. We are going to start there because that's kind of the foundation of the message that we are going to share today. It's John 10, 1 through 5.
Cheryl: I tell you the truth; anyone who sneaks over the wall of a sheep fold rather than going through the gate must surely be a thief or a robber. But the one who enters through the gate is the bird of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him and the sheep recognizes his voice and comes to him. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. After he has gathered his own flock, he walks ahead of them and they follow him because they know his voice. They won't be strangers. They will run from him because they don't know his voice.
Jeff: They will follow him because they know his voice. It is the destiny and it is the privilege of every child of God to be able to hear and recognize their father's voice.
Cheryl: It's such an honor.
Jeff: It's such an honor and it's just part and parcel of who he is and of who we are: communion with the father, conversation with the father, with Jesus, with holy spirit, with our triune God is intended to be a normal part of our existence. As Cheryl and I were talking through this message, I wrote up a little bit and we talked and I'd adjust it and we talk more. One of the things that she mentioned was a scripture in Matthew 4:4. I don't know Corey, if you have this one. If not, that's fine. If you do, you can put it up, but this is Matthew 4:4. It is Jesus saying.
Cheryl: But Jesus said it is written. Man is not to live on bread only man is to live by every word that God speaks.
Jeff: Isn't that something? Man is to live by the words that God speaks. When the father speaks to us, it is life. Jesus said, "My words are spirit and they are life." Over the centuries, what the church has done is they've taken his words, the words that are written in the scriptures, and they've turned him into a legal document. They've turned his words into a legal document. His words were never intended to be a legal document. They were intended to be life. His words are life. When he speaks to us, it makes us alive inside. Think of it. How was everything in the universe created? And God said, and God said, and God said. When God said, things were created, the universe was created. Cells were created, atoms were created. Everything was created. The perfect order of the universe was created because God spoke. And when he speaks to us, there is this creation of life, this flow of life.
Things happen and new understanding comes; we become more like him. We become better humans because of his voice, because of his words. They come alive inside of us. But it's important. There's lots of ways that God speaks to us. But let me just address the fact that he speaks to us through the word. It's important that we let him speak to us through the word. One of the things that I found to be really helpfulness to every once in a while read the Bible in a different translation. I don't know about you, but after a lot of years reading the same passages over and over and over again, I just almost gloss over and oh yeah, I got that one. But you see every time you open up the Bible, God intends to speak to you. He doesn't want you to read the contract. He wants you to hear his voice. Reading the Bible isn't just to get your devotion done, get my 15 minutes in. Anything you do is great, but what you really want to do is you want to ponder what you are reading. You want to ask God questions. And guess what? He will ask you questions. Who was it that said when God asked you a question, he's not looking for information.
I was pondering; I was driving here. I was thinking about the garden of Eden. I was thinking and I was talking to the Lord. I said, Lord, did you teach Adam how to like plant gardens? Did you teach him how to cultivate? Or was it just fruit hanging on trees? And if it was just fruit hanging on trees, how did he know what root vegetables he could eat? Was it different parts of seasons that different fruits were in season, so there was always food available or did he have to plant and plan? And did you teach him how to do that? What would it be like if we were all living in the garden of Eden still today and the whole earth? I assume as the population grew, the garden of Eden would've expanded, what would that have been like? What would it have looked like?
Cheryl: Did he tell you?
Jeff: No, but that's a part of the conversation. We ask questions. There are lots of things in the word that we don't understand. We ask the questions. If we don't get the answer, we put it on the shelf. We wait for the answer. Sometimes it takes a few other pieces to pull it together so it makes sense to us. But other times it's just like the Lord just opens it up to you. He awakens things inside of you. And it's just like, oh wow. I never saw it that way. A lot of times he begins to show you things in the scripture that are contrary to what you've been taught. Oh my goodness. We were having a conversation— Every other Thursday, Joel has a class called engage. We talked about controversial topics, and we were Thursday night about Jesus in the face of other religions. It was a great conversation. Pastor Robert was there and we each got to share stuff in our hearts and it was really a fun night. But in this one girl said, well, I don't know if I dare share this, because you are going to think I'm a [inaudible 54:07].
Sometimes God shows you things and you are not sure who you can tell because it doesn't fit with evangelical theology. But the Lord showed me this, well, what am I going to do? But you can share it with each other. You can grow together in the things that God awakens in you because it's not a static thing. God's word isn't static, and the understanding of his ways is not static. Honestly what men and women understood 50 years ago is different than what we understand today.
I use this example all the time, you know, back in the days of Pentecost in the years of the Azusa street revival in 1906 and moving up into the twenties and thirties. The primary doctrine that even launched the Pentecostal movement was the doctrine that the baptism of the holy spirit was evidenced by speaking in tongues. If you are Pentecostal, you understand that if you are not, that's just fine because it's not important anymore, because in the advent of the charismatic movement, that teaching was completely lost. It was no longer important that the first thing you had to do to be considered to be baptized with the holy spirit, you had to speak in tongues. Nobody even thinks about that anymore.
It's not important. See that piece of theology was something that God breathed for that moment. I'm not saying speaking in tongues isn't important. I'm saying that that's the evidence. It has got to be the evidence. When we were in high school, we were Lutherans. I grew up a Lutheran. We visited an assembly of God church, and these little old ladies got a hold of us and they said, well, "You need to get baptized in holy spirit." I said, "Well, we've been filled with the holy spirit." And they said, "Pastor, have you ever heard that before that someone can be filled to the holy spirit, and not speak in tongues?" But God keeps moving us forward because we don't have it all. None of us understand it all. So he gives us parcels and he keeps moving us forward as the church and in our communication with the father, as we read the word, he continues to awake us to new understandings that move us farther into an understanding of who he is and what his nature is. And that's really what the scriptures are for.
It's not a legal contract on how everything is supposed to work and who you can qualify and disqualify from faith. Isn't that how we tend to use the scriptures? Oh yeah, you do it this way. you are okay. Oh, you don't do it this way. you are not okay. The scriptures are intended to help us understand who God is, what his nature is, what he's like. We want to understand who the father is because we want to commune with him. That's all for free. I don't know if it lends to the topic, but okay.
Let's see here. If you are struggling with this concept of hearing God's voice, I think there is a couple things that really helped me years ago. That's part of what I want to share today and we are going to go on from there. I think it's really important for us to understand that God is always talking to us. I was in a pastor's meeting years ago and marveling at one of the pastors, shared something the Lord had shown him. I was just marveling at how this guy could hear God like that and how he could share these amazing things that God showed him. I thought, wow, that's really cool. Right in the middle of my thought process, the holy spirit just interrupts me and he says Jeff, I have so much to show you. I need your attention. 24 hours a day. He's always talking. There's nobody that is disqualified from hearing this and there is nobody who's not able.
It's actually simply a couple of things; that is, really learning a couple simple things. One is how he talks because he talks in different ways to different ones of us. The other thing we want to learn is how we hear because each of us hears differently because we have different senses that we tend to use more or not. So let's move from there into the topic of spiritual senses. I kind of waxed eloquent there. I didn't intend to, but away we go. We are going to read Matthew 13. We are going to start with verse 10 to 13.
His disciples came and asked him, why do you use parables when you talk to the people? He replied, you are permitted to understand the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but others do not. Others are not to those who listen to my teaching, more understanding will be given and they will have an abundance of knowledge. But for those who are not listening, even what little understanding they have, will be taken away from them. That is why I use these parables.
So that's an interesting statement here. It kind of contradicted what I just said, but let me just read it to you here. He replied, you are permitted. He's talking to disciples. You are permitted to understand the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but others are not. So the question is, why were his disciples permitted? This is the question you could ask the Lord. So God, why, you know father, why were the disciples permitted to understand, but nobody else was?
Jeff: The Lord spoke back and he said, well, maybe it was because they asked. If you read the rest of it, it's as simple as wanting to hear. Isn't it? It's the only difference. You want to hear, don't you? It's not like there is elect and non elect. Do you want to hear? Because if you want to hear, it's there for you. We have that scripture, everyone who asks receives; he who seeks fines. To the one who knocks the doors will be open. I think those are all in the perfect tense, which means he who keeps on seeking fines. He who keeps on asking, he who keeps on knocking. There's something about our persistence, our hunger, our willingness.
It's amazing what doors open for us in our faith when we have a willing heart. It makes a big difference. All the times the Lord is speaking to the different churches. In revelation 2, he always says whoever has ears to hear— what do you think he's implying there? Whoever's willing to hear.
Cheryl: Whoever wants to.
Jeff: Whoever wants to hear if you are listening. Are you listening? Of course, part of the problem with hearing is that we assume we know what it means and we are not actually listening. We just let that go down the channel of what we already understand. Oh yeah. I got that. We want to learn how not to have that posture with holy spirit. We want to have a posture that says I'm always willing to be corrected. I'm willing to be wrong. Change my heart, make me different. I want to be like you. I'm not there yet. I know I'm a long ways away.
I was thinking the other day about how big God is, how big the universe is. And I realized it is going to take all eternity just to really get to know him. It's not like you are going to get to heaven and you are going to understand God. It's not going to work that way. Let's read some more. We are going to read Matthew 13. We are going to do 13 to 17.
Cheryl: But they look, but they don't really see. They hear, but they don't really listen or understand. This fulfills the prophecy of Isaiah that says, when you hear what I say, you will not understand; when you see what I do. You will not comprehend for the heart of these people are heartened and their ears cannot hear here and they have closed their eyes, so their eyes cannot see and their ears cannot hear. And their hearts cannot understand and they cannot turn to me and let me heal them. But blessed are your eyes because they see and your ears because they hear. I tell the truth, many prophets and righteous people long to see what you see, but they didn't see it. And they long to hear what you hear, but they didn't hear it.
Jeff: Isn't that amazing? Those last couple sentences. Many prophets and righteous people long to see what you see. What a privilege do we have? We are not like Elijah or Isaiah or Jeremiah. We are not like the great men of the Old Testament, like David and Abraham and all these heroes of the faith. we are just us. We are just playing people. But we get to hear the father whisper realities to us that they never got to hear. We do. We get to understand things about the kingdom of heaven that it says they longed to see and they couldn't. And every one of us can. That is so cool. That makes my heart beat. Actually, that's not why I read the scripture. If you look at this, if you go back and forth and you see about their eyes and their ears and their eyes and their ears, and they close their eyes and they closed their ears and they couldn't see. And they couldn't hear, you kind of get a sense that we are talking about two different sets of eyes and two different sets of ears. There's your physical eyes. They close their physical eyes, but there is more to it than that. There's their spiritual eyes. They close their spiritual eyes because of their lack of willingness. There's their physical ears, which you don't usually hear God speak with your physical ears, but then there is your spiritual ears. And you see, they close their spiritual ears. They couldn't hear him with their spirituals. Why couldn't they? Because they had hardened their hearts. When our hearts are hard, we can't hear the voice of God, but when we want to hear him, when we are willing to hear him, there is nothing stopping it. We all get to, and we all can. And we are going to.
There are rare times that you can hear God's voice audibly. I kind of get the sense that when Jesus was baptized and the Lord said, this is my beloved son with whom I'm well, pleased, I kind of get the sense that the whole crowd heard that one, that that was an auditory voice. Has anybody here heard the auditory voice of God? You've heard him with your physical ears. You've heard him speak. Put your hand up. Let me just see. Some of you have. It's somewhat rare, but it's not impossible. Maybe it's not even not uncommon. I know Cheryl has had that experience. I suppose if he says something that you can hear with your physical years, it's because he wants you to get the point.
Cheryl: That's the next thing. What did you mean by that?
Jeff: That's part of this partnership: asking questions. We'll talk more about that. And then there are times when many things we see, we see with our spiritual eyes that are of God, but sometimes we see things with our physical eyes. Has anybody seen an angel actually with your physical eyes, anybody here, or seen something spiritual, and you've seen it with your physical eyes? You have? Okay. Mary, you are back there. That vision you had when we prayed for Nadine, was that with your physical eyes or was that more in your imagination? You couldn't tell it was so real. It was so real.
I've seen angels; they've all been with my spiritual eyes. Maybe you might ask where these spiritual senses are? I've got a feeling that for every physical sense we have, there is a spiritual one. Some of you might take issue with this, but I think that's why God gave us our imaginations. That's where the spiritual senses are housed: in our imaginations. I think that's where God loves to speak to us: in these places unseen, which can be somewhat of a problem because I don't but in my head, I hear the voice of God when he talks to me, but I also hear my voice. I also hear the devil's voice. A lot of us, if we've had people that really impacted us, like our parents, actually in a negative way, even after they are dead, we hear their voices. So how do you tell the difference between all these different voices? That's problematic. Our imaginations can go in a lot of different directions and if that's the place God uses to speak to us and whoa, we need a little bit of guidance here, here. we are going to be way off the rails. I think that's where mental illness can be a real problem. I'll just share with you my personal opinion about mental illnesses. Typically, in the old Pentecostal days, if someone of mental ill, we had automatically assumed it was a demon.
Mental illness is a brain malfunction. That's my personal opinion. But the brain is the connection. God created the brain as the interface between the spirit and the physical. That's what the brain is supposed to be. It's the interface. Our person, our soul, our spirit, the spiritual part of who we are connects to the physical part of who we are in the physical world via the interface, that is the brain where all those neurons are firing all the time. I don't have any scientific evidence. I wish I knew a scientist that could start a research thing on this, but that's my personal opinion.
When the brain isn't working, right, when the interface is damaged, the messages don't work. The soul that's inside of you doesn't get it correctly. He translated to the person that's outside of you. If you are bipolar, when you are manic, all kinds of things get twisted, or when you are depressive, everything that might be right in the spiritual comes out crooked. For those of us that suffer from mental illness, then discerning the voice of God can be even harder. We really need the help of people around us. If we know we've got those issues, it is best to just acknowledge that. I kind of struggle with bipolar. I kind of struggle with this. I kind of struggle with that, and then we can trust people to guide us so that if we are not connecting right, there is someone we trust that can help us with that. That's for what it's worth.
One other thought, I'll just throw this out. I don't know about you. I really appreciated when Robert and Tequaris were talking about faith and he said quite a number of times that our greatest enemy is not the devil; it's our flesh. Right. Here's something that I've experienced. I don't know if you guys have, but when the devil is talking to me, he doesn't disguise his voice as God's. He disguises his voice as mine. He tries to interpose his thoughts on my thoughts. So all of a sudden the thought will come into my head as if I thought it. What I have to do and what we can all do, because this is a key to controlling our thought life, then we measure that thought against what we know to be true. This is why it's so helpful to be a student of the word. It's why it's so helpful to be contemplating the word communing with the holy spirit, over the word, coming to know the, the nature of what is real, what God is really like, what life is really like through the word, because then when you think something and it seems off compared to what you know is true, then at that point, you get to make a choice.
So then what I end up saying, if a thought comes in and that's off, that's wait a minute, that's off. Then I can say, wait a minute. That is not me and that is not God. I reject that thought. I'm not going to own that thought and I'm not going to be that. I can make a choice right then and there. What a wonderful life when we can be free from the tyranny of our thoughts. We actually can be, if we are cognizant of the fact that not every thought is a, our thought and not every thought is true. Just because you think it, you don't have to believe it. Just because you think it, you don't have to do it. If you think it and it's wrong, you can say, that's not who I am.
Cheryl: I sometimes have thoughts that make me really— I just get involved in the thought and it goes from one thing to the next and I realize I'm so afraid. Then I say, what's going on here? I say it out loud. I realize it's just not the Lord. I'm being carried away in the wrong place. I face it straight on and say, wait, what is this? What's going on here? I'm not going to going in this place. I'm not going there. And then I'll just worship the Lord; just do a little worship. Throw that out there. It's kind of like, how do you like that? I like to do that.
Jeff: When we escape the tyranny of our thought life, we become truly a free people because that's where the dominating powers are. We were talking about this and Cheryl, remember the scripture I found in Hebrews 5:14? Do you want to read that one? I don't know if you have that Corey, but you can throw it up if you do.
Cheryl: But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil.
Jeff: Isn't that good? Your senses, your spiritual senses are trained. You train them over time. You train them as you grow in the Lord, as you are in his word, as you let his word become your food. As you let his words become your life, they form your inner man; they form who you are. Let's just talk a little bit about the process of discerning. I just want to give you an idea because different ones of us are at different places. You might be in a place like, ah, I have no idea how to tell the difference. What am I going to do? Think about just human life. When an infant is born, typically at the moment they are born, they don't even know what their father's voice sounds like. Now they could if the daddy was speaking to the little baby through the mother's tongue me all nine months.
In fact, we heard an amazing tape once where every day the daddy spoke into his child's life, speaking into his mom's belly and saying, hi, this is daddy. Daddy loves you. He's so excited to see you. I can't wait to see you. This is daddy. Every day, he did that. They have it on tape when the child was born, as the child just escaped the birth canal, the first thing they heard it say was daddy, three times: daddy, daddy, daddy, three times on tape at the birth.
Cheryl: It was astounding. It brought tears to my eyes. It was just miraculous.
Jeff: That was an enlightened father. I wasn't so enlightened. When my children were born, they didn't even know my voice, but it didn't take long. It didn't take long for them to be fussing in their crib and for me to walk in and say, "What's the matter, Angela?" And for them to recognize my voice, and to be comforted by my voice. They didn't understand my words, but they recognized my voice. It was comforting to them. And then they went from zero to three months to six months to a year and now they started to recognize my words. They sure learned no fast. And then they got a little older and they learned more words and now we could have these childlike conversations, and I would have to talk to them on a child's level, but they could understand. And then we were reading books and they were learning how to read and they were growing up and we could talk more. We could communicate more. And then what happens with a child is eventually they grow into adulthood. At some point in time with everyone of my children, we began to relate to each other on a peer level.
I would like to suggest that we can have that with our father, our heavenly father. We can relate to him on a peer level. We are not little children anymore. Or maybe you are a little child, but that's okay. The more time you spend with the father— this is something that happens over time. The more time that you start to seek to hear his voice, the more you get comfortable with the sound of his voice; you begin to recognize what his voice sounds like compared to other voices and you begin to talk to him on a more and more adult level.
When I say healing is about a partnership with the holy spirit, that's what I'm talking about. We are working side by side with the holy spirit as our partner. He's still our Lord, but he's also our friend and he's our partner. It's amazing how God doesn't have a problem with that. That's the wonder of relationship with God: we actually grow in our ability to discern his voice, to understand his voice, to differentiate between his voice and our voice and someone else's voice and to know when it's him that's speaking. We always have the word to help us to guide some of those things and we have our friends in the church that can help us to guide those things. Sometimes if the voice is very direct, we need to seek out friends in the church to make sure that this isn't me wishing, that we are good protection for each other. Sometimes we hear things like God said this and he didn't say it at all. People tell us, God told me you need to— well, if God tells me I need to, he'll tell me. I don't need you to tell me.
Cheryl: Maybe, maybe.
Jeff: Well, you are different. When we talk about these things, what we are doing is we are stepping into the realm of prophetic ministry and teaching. That's not my intention. I don't really want to go there, but it's all part and parcel. It's not just people with a prophetic gifting that get to hear God speak. We all hear God speak. The nine gifts of the holy spirit in first Corinthians chapter 12, those are for all of us. We won't take time to go through them but they are a normal part of any believer's life. Whether you are baptized in the holy spirit or not, that doesn't mean anything in terms of those gifts. Baptist Christians operate in the gifts of the spirit. It just is how it works. They're gifts. You don't have to qualify. They're gifts and he gives them to you when you least expect it. It's wonderful. It's a little nervy. Sometimes God gives you things when you least expect it and it's just like, what are you doing? Why now? What is this about? What do they do?
That's how we hear. Oh my goodness. We have to wrap this up. we are getting on. Let's just talk for a few minutes about different ways that God speaks to us and then we'll wrap it up. I just want to put a plug in for our good friend, Carl Anderson, who was a member of this church for a long time and then they moved to the other side of the world, actually, to the other side of the Twin Cities. But um, but he wrote a book called Love Speaks: 21 ways to recognize God's multifaceted voice. He actually did a video series on this. You can watch him. The first seven episodes are on TBN and he just completed videotaping the second seven chapters of the book. Or you can get the book and read it. It's a great encouragement on the many different ways that God speaks and how you can hear his voice. I'll just put a plug in for him because he's a wonderful friend.
We've already talked about this, but one of the key ways that the Lord speaks to us is he awakens the scriptures. We ask questions and he asks questions and we have conversations about the word when we read it. When you do that, you will find, I promise you, you will find the word means different things to you than it ever did before. It will mean different things to you than you were taught, but that's okay because the Lord wants to continue to bring you into what's true.
Another way he speaks is audibly in our minds. We hear his voice in our minds. How many people have heard God speak to them in their minds? Many of us do; most of us do. That's a very common way he speaks. That's probably where we need to continue to grow as infants to children, to teens, to adults, to become comfortable. But as you are learning to hear his voice, one of the things that I want you to encourage you in is you can become confident in that, especially when you are praying for people.
When we talk about partnership, one of the things that is always amazing to me is that many, many times when you pray for people who need healing, the holy spirit won't tell you to pray for healing. He'll tell you to pray for their wounded heart. He'll tell you to pray for them to experience his love. He'll tell you to pray for their relationship with their mother. It's amazing where the Lord goes, where the Lord takes you, but the Lord knows what they need more than you. When you are in a setting like that, where you are praying for people and the Lord begins to speak to you, you can have confidence. That's the Lord speaking to you. You can have confidence that you are hearing, right. We don't have to live in a state of self doubt.
Another way I've heard that some people— I don't know that I've experienced this, but he speaks, but they see the words. So I've heard people talk about where they've seen words run across their mind like on ticker tape. I heard John Wimber. Some of you've heard of him; others haven't. He's one of my contemporary heroes of the faith. He was on an airplane once and he sat down next to a guy and he looked at him and the first thing he did was this big sign flashed on his face and it said adultery. Oh, thanks, God. What do I do with that? But it turned into an amazing time of ministry on the airplane. This is a good one. He speaks with knowings. You just know. Share your experience. I love your experience about lounging around in the mornings.
Cheryl: Some mornings, I've been busy. Oh, I have a day off. I can just not set my alarm. I can stay in my pajamas. I can have some coffee in my pajamas. I'll just do what I want. I'll be doing that, and all of a sudden, I get this impression; I have to get dressed. So I'll go get dressed. Someone knocks at the door. Thank you, God. You know what? We have to give him more credit for things that happened to us because he—what do you call it? He gives us a clue. Pay attention to that because he's helping you. He's so helping you, he wants to do so much. We should all be so excited for what? For how he wants to speak to us and set us up for things that are just amazing. Okay. Go ahead.
Jeff: That's great. When you are walking out of the house and at the last minute you remember something critical that you forgot. Thank the holy spirit for reminding you. He's talking to us all the time and he actually cares about your daily life. One of my favorites: He speaks to us as we speak. I can't tell you how many times I have heard a new truth as I've been saying it up here, sharing something. And it's just like these words come out of my mouth. It's like, wow. I never heard that one before. Thank you, Lord. I hope it's true. Robert, that happened to you? Cheryl has that happen to her all the time when she's praying for people? When we are having ministry time and you are praying for somebody and next thing you know, you are telling them things and you had no idea and you are releasing a word of knowledge, which is a gift to the holy spirit. There was no pre-thought to it. It just came out of your mouth.
Cheryl: It's so easy. It's so flowing.
Jeff: That's really fun.
Cheryl: So beautiful.
Jeff: Of course, he speaks with pictures. How many people are picture people in your mind? It can be a picture or can actually be a vision. Lots of times, with pictures and visions of symbolism you might not quite understand what he's showing you, but it means something. And you have to ask him, what does this mean, Lord? Same with dreams. How many dreamers do we have in the room? Any dreamers here? Some of us. A lot of dreams are the same as the voice in your mind; you dream for a lot of reasons. It can be God, it can be the devil. It can be what you ate. It can be stress. I have stress dreams. you are trying to dial the phone because there is an emergency and it won't dial, no matter how many times you try. Those aren't from God. Those are from stress.
One thing that I would recommend if you are a dreamer, keep a notebook next to your bed. Because typically if you have a meaningful dream, by the time you get up and shower and brush your teeth, you will have forgotten most of it. What you want to do with dreams is when you wake up, if you had a dream and it was meaningful before you hardly move, the first thing you want to do is take your pad and write down the dream. It may not make sense then, but just date it and keep it. But the wonderful thing was symbolism and stuff like that. When the Lord shows you things or tells you things that you don't understand, you ask him, what does that mean? There's a scripture. Let's see here. I think it's my last scripture here and then we'll wrap it up.
Cheryl: Proverbs 25: 2: It is God's privilege to conceal things and the King's privilege to discover them.
Jeff: Our father loves to play, hide and seek. I'm telling you, he loves to play hide and seek. He'll give you something and you have to search. Ask and you will receive. Seek and you will find. You have to search a little bit to figure out what it means. But as Cheryl told me, whenever an adult, a parent plays hide and seek with their child, they always hide things in a way that the child is sure to find them. So it's God's glory or to conceal it; it's your glory to find it. That's part of your relationship with the holy spirit. When you get a vision or you get a picture and you are not sure what it means, ask him, what does this mean? He'll tell you. The same goes with dreams.
Those are some of the ways, the most common ways that I know that God tends to speak to us. Each one of us is wired differently, so we each tend to hear differently. And that's just great, because every part makes the body whole. The one thing I can assure you is that God is talking to you and there is nothing he loves more than to have a conversation with this child. Let's just close with a word of prayer. I'm just going to ask the father to just open up and enlarge your experience of communion with him. And then we'll close the service.
Father, we just thank you for who you are and how you made us, spirit, soul and body, uniquely made in your image as your children. What can be better than to be your children? You actually may be here or watching by livestream and you've actually never become a child of God or had a relationship with the father, like what we are talking about here, but it's real. The only thing that's required for you to have it is to open up your heart and say, I want you, I want that. Father, I want a relationship with you.
I'm going to lead us in a prayer right now just ask Jesus, come and wash us and to make us his. If you need to say this prayer, just repeat it after me. Just say, Lord, Jesus Christ, God of heaven and earth, please come to me, wash me clean and make me yours. I want to be a child of God. Open my heart, my ears, my eyes. I'm willing to see. I'm willing to hear. Come and save me and speak to me. Take my life and change it. Amen.
For the rest of us, Lord, I just pray for an increase. I pray that this spiritual phenomena of communication with God will be something that increases in our experience, that it will be more and more and more of a regular and normal part of our lives. Make us aware; make us attentive to your voice. Make us like Mary, who sat at your feet and was mesmerized by your teaching. I just pray for new confidence, new enthusiasm, new hope, new excitement, new experience with you for all who have listened to this message and all who will, in Jesus' name. Amen
Before we go, we want to just pray for those who need healing. Anybody here who needs healing this morning Anybody facing surgery or cancer or other sicknesses? Justin, you need healing. Okay. Anybody else? Bernie? Okay. We got a great report from Pat. Quig had surgery a week ago and he's doing great. He said he had total peace. He could really tell that people were praying for him. So thank you. Marvin Langenfeld us having surgery. He's having his appendix move this Thursday, so we want to be praying for him. And then we have a lot of our friends who are either recovering from surgery or still on treatments for various cancers. We have Dave and Dave, Butch, Brian, good friends that we just want to continue to trust the Lord to— we have Rachel's brother, Nathan, her dad and others. There's so many. We start naming names, we forget too many.
Father, we just want to thank you for your hand of healing. That rests on us at hope. And we thank you, Lord, that when we ask you to hear us and when you hear us, we know we have the requests we've asked for. So we ask for Justin, we ask for Bernie, we ask for Marvin your hand of healing to rest on them. Lord, it seems like Marvin's surgery is going to happen, so we just pray that you really protect him through that. Let him come through it with flying colors. Just guide the hands of those doctors and bring them through it with no issues, no after effects, just whole. We pray for sure recovery for him in Jesus name.
We bless you for who you are and we thank you for being our thank you for hearing us as we ask for our friends, for your continued grace, washing their bodies, cleansing their bodies, delivering them from the cancers that would like to rage them, but Lord, you got better. And you said you shall live and not die. We trust you for that, father. We thank you for your word that is true.
So go in peace. In a couple weeks, we'll talk more about the topic of healing and how what we just talked about today fits in. But in between we get to hear pastor Robert again, which we can all be really excited about. Next week we have Justin and the team again. Thank you guys. That was just awesome. Bless you. Bless you all. Bless you all on livestream. We love you all and the Lord be with you the whole week. Bye bye.
Transcript taken from the Sunday morning service 1-30-22. If you would like to watch the full service, click the link below.