Author: David Petts

How God speaks to us       Talk 20 How to hear his voice

Throughout this series we’ve been looking at the many different ways in which God may speak to us. But now it’s important that we consider two final things:

• How to hear his voice
• How to respond (which we’ll talk about next time)

Before we do so, however, it will be helpful to remind ourselves of what we’ve said about the various ways he speaks to us.

How God speaks – a reminder

In Talk 1 we saw that God speaks to all humankind by his creation. We said that the world we live in, and the heavens above, are clear evidence that a wonderful designer has been at work. We referred to passages like Psalm 19:1-4 and Romans 1:20 to show that, as far as the Bible is concerned, we have no excuse for not believing in God. And the creation speaks eloquently, not only of God’s existence, but of his great and glorious power, his wisdom, his faithfulness, his beauty and his love.

In Talks 2-3 we saw that these divine qualities are seen much more clearly in the Lord Jesus Christ, through whom God has finally spoken to us in the person of his Son (Hebrews 1:1-2). God speaks to us:

through the person of Jesus revealing what God is like

in the words of Jesus teaching us what to believe

and in the actions of Jesus showing us how to behave.

In Talk 4-9 we examined how God speaks to us through the Bible.

In Talk 4 we gave reasons why we should believe that God speaks in this way.

In Talks 5-6 we gave important guidelines on how to understand the Bible correctly.

In Talks 7-9 we discussed different ways in which God speaks through the Bible, including how to identify, understand, and receive God’s promises. But there’s more to the Bible than promises. God gives us instructions, showing us what to believe and how to behave. He does this through the person, the words and the actions of Jesus, the direct teaching found in the New Testament, and by examples from the lives of God’s people. Finally, we discussed how God sometimes directs us by bringing key verses to our attention.

In Talks 10-14 we considered how God often uses other people to speak to us, including parents, other Christians, preachers and pastors, prophets and prophecy.

In Talks 15-18 we looked at ways in which God speaks to us directly without using other people. We gave examples from the Bible and, where possible, from personal experience, of God speaking with an audible voice, through angels, by dreams and visions, supernatural signs, and by promptings, the voice of his Spirit within us.

Finally, in Talk 19, we thought about some of the ways God guides us silently. We saw that he may do so through the trend of circumstances, by opening and closing doors, and through the gifts and talents God has given us. But ultimately, if we really want to discover God’s perfect will for our lives, we must make sure that our minds are constantly being renewed so that we think like God thinks and are willing to present our bodies as a living sacrifice to him (Romans 12:1-2),

How to hear God’s voice

Although the main purpose of these talks has been to answer the question, How does God speak to us today? an equally important question is, How can we hear his voice? The answer lies in much of what we have said so far, so my purpose now is to draw together some of those things and add a few further thoughts that I hope will be helpful. We’ll begin by outlining some basic facts that we should recognise, using the Bible as our basis.

Recognising the facts

First of all, it’s clear from the examples we’ve looked at in the Bible that God has a variety of ways of speaking to different people. Some heard his audible voice, others were visited by angels, while still others had dreams and visions, and so on. God deals with each of us differently.

Why is it, for example, that African Christians seem to hear God speak through a dream or vision more often than British people do? Perhaps it has something to do with our level of expectation. We’re all different and I believe that God usually speaks to us in ways that he knows we will recognise as his voice. This may very well mean that he won’t speak to you in exactly the same ways that he has spoken to me.

Secondly, the biblical examples we have considered show that the revelations people received were often totally unexpected and in some cases were, initially at least, unwanted! Many like Moses and Gideon and Zechariah were just going about their daily business when the Lord appeared to them. God may speak to you when you’re least expecting it!

And thirdly, it’s clear that most of the cases of God speaking to people in the Bible came at a time when God was calling them to some important task for him, or at key turning points in their life or even in history. Obvious examples are:

Zechariah in Luke 1 before the birth of John the Baptist, the forerunner to the Messiah

Mary in Luke 2 before the birth of Jesus, the Saviour of the world

Paul in Acts 9 at his conversion and commissioning for service and in Acts 16 preceding the expansion of the gospel into Europe

Peter in Acts 10 opening the door of salvation to the Gentiles.

Even for great servants of God like these, such events were not the sort of things that happened every day. So perhaps we should not be too surprised or disappointed if God never speaks to us in such dramatic ways, or if the times he does so are relatively infrequent.

But, of course, there are ways in which we can expect him to speak to us on a regular basis. For example:

as we read the Bible at home

through the preaching or prophetic gifts at church

by the promptings from that voice of the Spirit inside us.

So, recognising these facts, how can we hear God’s voice?

Asking, expecting, and listening

Although, as we have seen, God sometimes takes the initiative in speaking to us, there are times when he expects us to begin the conversation with him. James tells us that if we lack wisdom – if we don’t know what to do – we should ask God and he will gladly give it (James 1:5).

I have already given specific examples from my own experience of how God spoke to me when I asked him to because I urgently needed to know what to do, and I’ve told you how he wonderfully answered those prayers. On occasions like those we may well need to make time for God to speak to us, but at others a quick prayer may be all that’s needed. Although prayer is important, hearing from God does not depend on how much time we spend in prayer. What matters most is how we are developing our relationship with the Lord.

I once heard of a young man whose pastor asked him if he thought God might want him to become a missionary. Oh no, he replied, God hasn’t called me. But then the pastor asked another question:

Are you sure you’re within calling distance?

If we’ve really given our lives wholeheartedly to God, and if we’re living in close relationship to him, it will not be difficult for us to hear his voice. We’ll always be within earshot. In fact we’ll be expecting to hear him speak.

Of course, as we’ve already said, God may very well speak to us when we’re least expecting it, as he did very often in the Bible, particularly when he spoke through an angel. But does that mean that we should not expect God to speak to us, but just wait until it happens? Not at all. I believe that every time we read the Bible, or meet together with God’s people, we should both ask and expect God to speak to us in one way or another. Sometimes we can miss God’s voice because we’re not expecting to hear it. And if we’re expecting God to speak to us, we’ll certainly be listening.

Have you ever been in the middle of an important phone call when it’s been difficult to hear what the other person is saying because something or someone is distracting you? Maybe you hear a ‘ping’ alerting you to some notification you’ve received. Or someone is ringing the doorbell, or someone else has turned on the television. It happens all the time. We’re all aware of distractions that prevent us from paying attention to the person who’s speaking to us. What do we do in situations like this? Well, if you’re like me, you go into another room where it’s quiet and free from distractions and where you can listen carefully to what’s being said.

I wonder if that’s why God so often speaks to us in the night. It’s the only time he can get our attention! He wants us to listen, and to do so without distraction. And, if we want him to speak to us, we must make time and find a place when we can pay God the attention he deserves.

Checking we’re hearing his voice correctly

Throughout this series we have seen many different ways in which the Lord may speak to us, but whichever way it may be, we need to check that we’re really hearing him correctly. This is because we’re fallible human beings and, although everything God says is right, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re hearing it right. Let me remind you of some of the things we’ve said in earlier talks.

When we’re reading the Bible, which is God’s word, we need to make sure that we’re understanding it correctly. We need to examine the context to be absolutely sure that the words we are reading directly apply to us. We’ve also talked about the importance of getting confirmation. In fact, no matter how God speaks to us, we should always look for confirmation that it’s really God. In 2 Corinthians 11:14 were told that Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light and in Galatians 1:8 Paul says:

But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned!

These scriptures remind us that Satan is a deceiver and the only way to avoid being led astray is to test everything against the truth of the gospel as it’s revealed in the New Testament. God never contradicts himself, and nothing he says today will contradict what he’s already said in his word.

And that’s why what we’ve said already about understanding the Bible correctly is so important. It’s not enough to take a single Bible verse as confirmation that it’s God who is speaking. We must test it against the whole of Scripture. For example, let’s suppose that someone attacks you in the street and as a result you lose the sight of an eye. You’re understandably angry about this and a Bible verse comes to mind – an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth[1]. Does that mean that God is telling you that you should do the same thing to them? Of course not.

There are two good reasons why you should not. First, because even under the law of Moses it is unlikely that these regulations were intended to tell people that they must take revenge. It’s far more likely that the intention was to teach proportionate vengeance. If you’ve lost an eye, don’t take more than an eye.

And secondly, and much more importantly, the Lord Jesus said:

You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you (Matthew 5:38-42).

This is a good example of how the whole Bible is to be understood through the lens of the New Testament and in particular in the light of the teaching and character of Jesus. So, if what we’re hearing is in keeping with this, then it may well be from the Lord. However, if it’s a very specific word of guidance, we need to be sure that it’s definitely for us. And, as we saw in earlier talks, further confirmation can come in various ways, including a strong inner conviction, and testing by other Christians, and by time.

So, to summarise, in seeking to hear from God, we need to:

Recognise certain facts

God may speak to you in a different way than he speaks to me.

Sometimes God speaks to us when we’re least expecting it.

He will speak most clearly at key turning points in our lives.

But we can expect him to speak to us on a regular basis

as we read the Bible at home

through the preaching or prophetic gifts at church

by the promptings from that voice of the Spirit inside us.

Ask, expect and listen

Sometimes God takes the initiative in speaking to us, but sometimes he expects us to ask him to.

If we’re living in right relationship with him, we can expect him to speak to us, especially as we read the Bible etc.

And if we’re expecting him to speak, we’ll put ourselves in a position to listen.

Check that we’re hearing his voice correctly

Satan can masquerade as an angel of light. We need to check that what we’re hearing really is the voice of God. We need to make sure that what we’re hearing is in line with Scripture and especially with the teaching and character of Jesus.

Next time, which will be the last talk in this series, we’ll talk about how we should respond when God speaks to us. He not only wants to speak TO us. He wants to speak THROUGH us.

How God speaks to us   Talk 19        Other ways God guides us 

In recent talks we have identified five ways in which God may speak to us directly without involving other people: 

• By his audible voice 
• By angels 
• By dreams and visions 

• By supernatural signs 
• By promptings, the inner voice of his Spirit 

Today we’re going to consider other ways in which God may guide us. Throughout this series we’ve been discussing ways in which God may speak to us. But he sometimes guides us without speaking at all. If we have learned to live by the principles taught in Scripture, we will be guided by them into the right paths. In fact, the more we live by those principles the less we will need the promptings we were talking about in the last talk.  

But, of course, we need both. The principles of Scripture are the general guidelines by which we should live. The promptings of the Spirit are more specific, giving us direction as to what to do in any given situation, but of course they will never conflict with the principles taught in the Bible. 

One of the questions that is often asked by young Christians is, How can I know the will of God? It’s a good question, because as Christians we should certainly want to do his will. In 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 Paul reminds us that we are not our own, we were bought at a price. We belong to God, and we are followers of Jesus who always did God’s will1, even when it meant dying on the cross to save us from our sins 

So how can we find the will of God for our lives? Much of the answer to this question is to be found in some of the things we’ve already said. God’s will for our life is that we live in obedience to his word, which is a lamp for our feet and a light on our path (Psalm 119:105). And when we’re living in obedience to its teaching, we can expect God to guide us with regard to the specific details. This guidance may come through any of the ways we’ve already talked about, but the Lord may also be guiding us silently by: 

• The trend of circumstances 
• Open and closed doors 
• The gifts and talents he has given us. 

The trend of circumstances 

God has a plan for our lives and is constantly working everything out in conformity with the purpose of his will (Ephesians 1:11). He is in complete control of all the circumstances that surround us, even when things appear to be going terribly wrong.  

After Stephen was stoned in Acts 7 there was a great persecution of Christians, most of whom fled from Jerusalem and were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. Some even travelled as far as Antioch and Cyprus. But as a result there was a revival in Samaria (Acts 8) and a very large church was planted in Antioch (Acts 11:20). 

Acts 16:6-10 might well be another example:  

6 Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia. 

7 When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to. 

8 So they passed by Mysia and went down to Troas. 

9 During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” 

10 After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them. 

In obedience to the great commission and God’s call upon his life (Acts 9:15, 26:17-18) Paul is on his second missionary journey.  So he is already doing the will of God, but he’s unsure of where he should go next. Verse 6 tells us that he was kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia.  We’re not told how, but it might well have been through the trend of circumstances.  

Next, Paul tries to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit will not allow him to (v7). Then, in the night, he has a vision of a man from Macedonia saying, Come over to Macedonia and help us and Paul finally knows what he has to do. It seems that guidance possibly came in three different ways – the trend of circumstances (v6), a word from the Spirit (v7), and a vision in the night (v9).  

But although it’s not entirely clear how the Holy Spirit told Paul not to go to Bithynia, what’s particularly significant in this passage is that Paul gets the guidance he needs while he’s already doing what he knows God has called him to do.  

This reminds me of Eliezer, Abraham’s servant, who in Genesis 24 is sent to look for a wife for Isaac. He makes his way to the town of Nahor and comes to a well just outside the town. He gets his ten camels to kneel down and decides to ask the Lord for a sign. He will ask one of the young women who comes to draw water from the well to give him a drink. But if she’s the woman he’s looking for, she’s to offer to draw water for the camels as well! And, of course, that’s what happens!  

The story is well-known. But notice what Eliezer says in verse 27. The Lord has led me on the journey. Undoubtedly the Lord was leading him throughout his journey, but the specific guidance he needed came well after Eliezer had set out on his journey. In the same way, it’s as we get on with the job that God has already given us to do, that we get the guidance we need. 

Open and closed doors 

Another thing that results from the fact that God is in complete control of circumstances is that he sometimes directs our steps by opening and closing doors. In Revelation 3:7-8 we read: 

What he opens no-one can shut, and what he shuts no-one can open… See I have placed before you an open door. 

In my final year at Oxford I was praying about what my next step should be. I had been studying for a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and my plan was now to go to a Bible College to prepare for the ministry God had called me to. So I applied to London Bible College, fully anticipating that they would accept me for their course leading to the London University Bachelor of Divinity Degree. 

On the application form, which required me to include a testimony of my Christian experience, I made reference to the baptism in the Holy Spirit. This led to a number of questions at the interview, and it became clear to me that they were suspicious of Pentecostals. So I wasn’t entirely surprised when, a few days later, I received a letter saying that they thought I would be happier at a Pentecostal Bible College2 

Although I felt that their decision was unjust, I reminded myself of the injustice that Joseph had experienced at the hands of his brothers and his recognition later that God had intended it for good (Genesis 37 and 45). God, not the college faculty, had shut the door on LBC. So I considered applying to Kenley, the Assemblies of God Bible College, where Donald Gee, a world-renowned Bible teacher, was then the Principal. So I sent off for the application forms. 

However, people were telling me that I didn’t need to go to Bible College. I had been preaching since I was fourteen years old, and the Holy Spirit was already using me in teaching and leading others into the experience of the baptism in the Holy Spirit. In those days Assemblies of God did not require any formal training or qualifications for a person to be recognised as a minister. The evidence of one’s calling and gifting was fruit from one’s ministry.  So what should I do? 

I decided that I would go to Kenley unless the Lord opened a door for me to minister in a Pentecostal church. But this seemed highly unlikely because, having grown up in a Baptist church, I was relatively unknown among the Pentecostals and the few churches I had preached in were mostly well provided for with regard to ministry. I told no-one about this decision and yet, a week after making it, I received a letter from the small Assemblies of God Church in Colchester, inviting me to take on the pastorate. And, as if to confirm it, the application form for Kenley that I had asked for never arrived. 

Much more recently, my granddaughter Emily asked me to pray for her as she was considering applying to work for Youth for Christ in Birmingham. At the time she was living in London working full time for Alpha and she was uncertain what to do. I assured her that I would pray for her and reminded her of Revelation 3:7-8. I suggested that it might be a good idea to apply for the job and trust the Lord to close or open the door according to his will. 

The next day, as Emily was walking in one of the London parks and praying about this, she looked up and saw something she had never seen before – AN OPEN DOOR! It was a piece of modern art, a sculpture of a doorframe with the door within it wide open. The Lord had literally placed before her an open door. Needless to say, she is now working for Youth for Christ in Birmingham. 

The gifts and talents God has given us 

Another thing that will help us discern the will of God for our lives is having a realistic understanding of the gifts and talents God has given us. In a passage where Paul mentions some of the gifts God has given to his people, he begins by saying: 

For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgement, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you (Romans 12:3). 

Here the emphasis is on not having an exaggerated sense of our own importance, but it’s just as important to recognise the gifts and abilities God has given us. Humility does not mean pretending that we’re no good at things which in fact we are good at! It means gratefully acknowledging that whatever gifts we do have come from the grace of God.  

When Jeremiah protested that he was unsuited for the task God was calling to, God replied that before Jeremiah was born, he had formed him in his mother’s womb (Jeremiah 1:5). Generally speaking, God’s will for our lives will be very much in line with the talents he has given us. Those who have heard me sing know very well why I have concluded that it’s not God’s will for me to be a gospel singer! 

Having said that, we know that God can equip a person with supernatural gifts beyond any natural talents they may possess. So, in seeking God’s will it’s good to ask ourselves what natural talents we have along with any spiritual gifts in which he is using us. 

But finally, the great key to finding the will of God in our lives is found in Romans 12:1-2, where Paul says: 

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – this is your spiritual act of worship. 

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will. 

In these verses Paul shows us how to test what God’s perfect will for our lives is. He reminds us of God’s love in sending Jesus to die for us and, bearing that in mind, encourages us to live holy, sacrificial lives. We are not to behave as the world behaves or think as the world thinks. We are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. We’re to learn to think like God thinks! We’re to find out what pleases the Lord (Ephesians 5:10). 

If we are seeking to do this, we won’t have to worry about finding the will of God. God is perfectly capable of taking care of his own will! The only person or thing that can prevent God’s will being done in my life is me! God is all powerful and, by definition, he wants his will to be done.  

So as long as I want it to be done, God will make sure that it happens. In short, if we’re determined to live all out for Jesus, God will take care of the rest. Sometimes we don’t need to know what God’s will is, but if we do, he will make it plain. And very often it’s as we look back over our lives that we see how God has been guiding us all the time, even at times when his voice is silent. 

Talk 18 Promptings – the voice within

In recent talks we’ve been looking at ways in which God speaks to us directly rather than through other people. We’ve considered how he may speak with an audible voice, or through angels, or by dreams and visions, or by supernatural signs. We now turn our attention to what are often called promptings, by which I mean the voice of God’s Spirit inside us.

In John 14-16 Jesus told his disciples that he was going away, but that he would not leave them without help. He would send them another helper, the Holy Spirit, who would live within them (14:17) and would teach them, remind them of what he had said (14:26), guide them, and reveal to them things about the future (16:13). 

And the same is true for us as his disciples today. Romans 8:11 tells us that God’s Spirit lives within us and Galatians 4:6 says that, because we are his sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts. So we too can expect to hear the voice of God’s Spirit inside us, teaching us, reminding us, guiding us, and even revealing things to us about the future.

Let me tell you about Hilda and Edna. They were both members of our church in Basingstoke. Edna had been saved as a teenager but had backslidden and married a man who was not a believer. Although she had come back to the Lord, she often struggled because of the problems caused by being ‘unequally yoked’ to an unbeliever (2 Corinthians 6:14). 

Hilda was a widow who had come to Christ in her sixties during a mission I was conducting in our church. She lived in a council house which was only a few minutes’ walk from a chip shop. One day, as she was walking across to the shop to get some fish and chips, a random thought came into her mind. Go and see Edna. She thought this might be from the Lord, but Edna lived over a mile away and if she went to see her the chip shop would be closed by the time she got back as the only means of getting to Edna was on foot. And anyway, she wasn’t completely sure that the thought was from God, so she thought she might go and see Edna later. 

But before Hilda had reached the chip shop the thought came again. Go and see Edna NOW. So she went. If the thought had come from God, she didn’t want to disobey him. And when she arrived she knew, as soon as she saw Edna, that the thought had indeed come from God. Edna opened the door and burst into tears. She had been overwhelmed with the thought that nobody loved her, not even God. In desperation she had prayed, Lord, if you really love me, please send someone to see me NOW. Hilda went without lunch that day, but what did that matter? She had been obedient to God and as a result had been a blessing to a fellow Christian who was struggling with her faith.

There’s no doubt that Hilda’s random thought was a prompting of the Holy Spirit. That’s often how he speaks to us – by putting thoughts into our mind. But, of course, not every thought is a prompting of the Spirit and we need to learn how to distinguish the thoughts that come from him from those that don’t. I’ll be saying more about this at the end of the talk, but first let me give you a few examples from my own experience.

In the early 1970s, while I was pastoring at Basingstoke, I began to receive invitations to minister in other countries as well as in other churches up and down the UK. I was also teaching once a fortnight in our Bible College which was then at Kenley in Surrey. But there surely had to be a limit to how many invitations I could accept? I was expected to preach three times a week in the church I was pastoring.

One day, as I was praying about this, as if from nowhere the word Antioch came into my mind. Now I knew that Antioch was a place mentioned in the Book of Acts and that that was where the disciples were first called Christians (Acts 11:26). I also knew that Paul had set out from there on his first missionary journey, but I wasn’t quite sure how this might be relevant to what I was praying about, so I decided to open my Bible and see what else I could discover about Antioch, and I very quickly came to Acts 13:1-3 where I read:

In the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers: Barnabas, Simeon called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen (who had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch) and Saul.

While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” So after they had fasted and prayed, they placed their hands on them and sent them off.

Now Barnabas had been the first leader of the church at Antioch and he had brought Saul (or Paul) alongside him to help with the ministry (Acts 11:22-25). But now the Holy Spirit was telling them both to leave Antioch for a while and start on the church planting mission to which he had called them. But how could they leave Antioch? Who would look after the church in their absence? The answer was simple. There were other prophets and teachers in the church (v1).

In giving me the word Antioch God was not only answering my question, but also showing me what was to become a key principle in the churches I have led, in the college at Mattersey Hall, and what I have since taught to church leaders around the world – the importance of team leadership. 

It may be difficult to understand today, when team leadership is normal in many churches, but, in my experience, back in the seventies churches in most denominations were led by one man, who did all the preaching and led all the meetings. In giving me the word Antioch God was clearly telling me to look for other ministries in our church which would complement my own, give others an opportunity to exercise the gifts he had given them, and free me to accept invitations to minister elsewhere as he was leading me to an increasingly international ministry.

One example of this is how I came to visit several countries in Asia in 1986. It was on a Sunday in 1985. For no apparent reason the word India came into my mind. The impression was so strong that I said to Eileen, I think the Lord is going to send me to India. But I told no one else about it. 

The following Wednesday evening Pastor Ray Belfield came to Mattersey to speak to the students about missions. After the meeting I invited him back to our house for a cup of tea before he made the journey back home to Wigan. As we prayed together before he left, I prayed that the Lord would show us more clearly how as a college we could do more about mission. As soon as I had finished speaking, Ray said to me, I’ll tell you what you can do. You can go to India. 

This resulted in a month’s trip the following January, not only to India, but also to Pakistan, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. Ray’s word was prophetic and came as a confirmation of what God had already begun to tell me the previous Sunday. It would have been a big decision to leave the college for a month if I had not had an excellent team of workers at Mattersey, plus the double assurance of what God wanted me to do – the inner voice of God’s Spirit confirmed by a prophetic word.

And finally, let me tell you about Ruby. It was while I was leading the church in Basingstoke. We had invited an evangelist to come and conduct a series of special meetings. I encouraged the people to pray that God would give us one outstanding miracle of healing before the evangelist came and that this would attract people to the meetings.

So we began to pray months ahead of the evangelist’s visit, which was to be in June. Then, on the Sunday after Easter, it happened! It was the evening service and I was preaching about Thomas. He was the disciple who had been absent when Jesus, three days after he was crucified, appeared to his disciples on Easter Sunday. When the other disciples told Thomas that Jesus was alive, he simply refused to believe it. It was impossible! But a week later Jesus appeared to him too and showed him the wounds in his hands and feet. I remember saying something to the effect that the same Jesus whom Thomas had been able to see and touch was present with us right now even though we could not see him.

After the sermon, as we sang a closing song, a middle-aged woman walked – I should say hobbled – to the front of the church. This was a complete surprise to me as she had never been to our church before and I had not invited people to come forward for prayer, as we sometimes do. Neither had I mentioned healing. So I went to her and asked:

Can I help you? 

She responded by saying:

If Jesus is present as you say He is, can He heal me now?

Immediately I knew that this was the miracle we had been praying for. It was as if God was saying, This is it!

He can, and he does! I said. Be healed in the name of Jesus! 

And she RAN back down the aisle, instantaneously and completely healed. Ruby and her husband both became Christians and as a result of that miracle, a number of other people came to believe in Christ and became members of our church. 

Now some people teach that we should always command healing in this way, but even Jesus only did what he saw his Father do (John 5:19). I will only command healing when I believe that’s what God is telling me to do on that occasion. Otherwise, I believe we should pray for healing rather than command it.

So how do we know that that ‘inner voice’ is in fact the voice of God? If I’ve made it sound easy, I must admit that I haven’t always found it so. Some people talk as though they’re hearing words from the Lord all the time and I’ve sometimes thought, I wish he’d talk to me like that! I’ve also wondered if those people really are hearing the voice of the Lord as much as they think they are. 

To help us get a better understanding about this we need to consider what the Bible has to say about where our thoughts come from, and as we do so we realise that some of our thoughts are not from God at all. They are temptations. The Bible shows us that in our Christian lives we are constantly fighting a battle against the world, the flesh, and the devil. Our thoughts are prompted by what we see, what we hear, and by the company we keep. So it’s possible that a thought that we imagine has come from God could in fact be prompted by any of these things. So how can we be sure?

Bearing in mind what we’ve said in previous talks about how God speaks to us by Jesus, the word of God made flesh, and through the Bible, the written word, it goes without saying that any word he speaks by his Spirit in our hearts will always be in line with the character of Jesus and the principles of Scripture. If we are spending time with Jesus and meditating on his word, the thoughts that we have are more likely to come from God than if we spend most of our time watching television for example.

Another thing to consider is the kind of ‘word’ we feel the Lord might have given us. Is it a word of encouragement or is it giving us direction, or even telling us about the future? We’ll consider each of these possibilities in turn, also taking into consideration whether we feel the word is for ourselves or someone else.

First, then, let’s suppose an encouraging thought or verse of Scripture comes to your mind. We know from verses like 1 Corinthians 14:3 that part of the Spirit’s role is to encourage us, so it would seem likely that the thought you’ve had has come from God. It might just be a line from a song that comes into your mind – something like, The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, for example. Well, that’s an easy one! It’s totally in line with the teaching of the Bible, so, whether it’s a prophetic word from the Spirit or not, it’s true! So you can believe it and receive it, and pass it on to anyone who might need it.

But what about a thought or word where it seems that God is giving you direction, where he’s telling you to do something? That’s not quite so simple. Again, the first question to ask is, Is it in line with Scripture? The better you know your Bible, the better you’ll be able to answer this question. Obviously, if it’s contrary to Scripture, it isn’t from the Lord. But what if it is in line with Scripture, but you’re not sure if it’s for you? 

For example, let’s suppose you get a feeling or thought that the Lord wants you to go to China and preach the gospel. That’s certainly in line with Scripture, as Jesus has told us to make disciples of all nations. But we’re not all called to China, and you’d need to be very sure that your thought or feeling really was from the Lord. In this case a single thought or feeling would not be enough. It needs to be confirmed. But how?

It seems that God has an infinite variety of ways of confirming his word to us. Much of what we’ve said in this series has been about the many ways God spoke and confirmed his word to his people in the past and how he continues to do so today. These have included angelic visitations, dreams and visions, supernatural signs, and prophetic words. We have also mentioned persistent repetition and apparent coincidence, when a thought or word comes repeatedly from a variety of different sources and we become convinced that it can only be God. To this we should add that, if the word you’ve received is as serious as being called to China, it would be wise to discuss it with your church leaders and see if they have any witness about it. 

And the same guidelines hold good for a situation where you feel that God has revealed to you something about the future. It’s important not to act upon it unless it’s been confirmed in the sort of ways we’ve just mentioned. And if it involves someone else, it’s vital that we have confirmation before we share it with them – and even then, it’s always best to begin by saying something like this:

I feel that God has given me a word for you. If it’s really from hm, I believe you will know in your heart that it’s for you.

But even before we do that, it would be wise to search our own hearts by asking if the word is really for others, or if it’s something that God is saying personally to us. This holds good not only when we feel the word we have is for a particular individual, but also when it comes during a meeting at church or in a home group. 

The exercise of spiritual gifts like prophecy or interpretation of tongues is a separate subject, but learning how God speaks to us and discerning whether what he’s saying is something for others or just for ourselves is clearly important if we believe that the Lord wants to use us in these gifts. In fact, I think that most of what I have learnt about recognising the inner voice of God’s Spirit has been by using these gifts.

A good example is how I started to exercise the gift of interpretation of tongues. I first spoke in tongues when I was baptised in the Holy Spirit on September 8th, 1959, just four weeks before starting my studies at Brasenose College, Oxford. I enjoyed the meetings at the church I attended and soon began to invite some of my friends from the college Christian Union to come and experience Pentecostal worship.

But there was just one problem. Although there was usually an interpretation after someone spoke in tongues, there were just one or two occasions when there was not. I was concerned that the friends I invited might get an unfavourable impression and conclude that Pentecostal worship was unscriptural. So I asked a friend, who was a Pentecostal evangelist, what I should do.

That’s easy, he said. You interpret.

But I don’t have the gift of interpretation, I replied.

Then ask for it, he said.

But how do I know God wants me to have it? I asked.

He then reminded me that we know from Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 12-14 that it’s God’s will for tongues in church to be interpreted, and he suggested that the very fact that I was concerned about it could be an indication that it was a gift God wanted me to have and that I should pray for it.

So that’s what I did. I began to pray for it, and a few weeks later after someone had spoken in tongues in the Sunday morning meeting and no one else had interpreted it, I spoke out in faith, trusting that the words that had come into my mind were from God.

For months I wondered if the gift I had received was genuine, or whether it was ‘just me’. Then, one day, at the close of a meeting in which I had interpreted, another Christian came up to me and told me that he had received word for word the interpretation which I had given.  I had exercised the gift in faith for months, but finally I had some confirmation that it was real.  

About seventeen years later, in November 1977 I was serving as Acting Principal of Mattersey Hall prior to becoming Principal in 1978. One Saturday evening we took a bus-load of about 45 students to Bethshan Tabernacle in Manchester. There were several hundred people in the meeting during which the students sang and testified, and I preached. As soon as I had finished preaching, a woman near to the back of the meeting began to speak in tongues. As I was still at the microphone, it seemed appropriate for me to interpret so that everyone present would hear and be edified. As usual I spoke out in faith what I felt the Lord had put on my heart. When I had finished, we sang a hymn and the pastor closed the meeting in prayer.

As soon as the meeting was over, one of our students, Guetawende Roamba from Burkina Faso, rushed up to me. He was clearly very excited, and when I asked him what was the matter, he told me that the woman who had spoken in tongues had been speaking his native language. Now in Burkina Faso they speak French, and because I also speak French fairly fluently, I knew that she had not been speaking French. So I wondered what language it might be. 

What language? I asked. Moré, he replied. Frankly, at that time I had never heard of it – and we found out later that the Irish lady who had spoken in tongues had never heard of it either! But I was excited that I had been present when speaking in tongues had been recognised as a real language. At the same time I was not a little concerned because I was the one who had given the interpretation! 

I had been interpreting tongues since I was a student at Oxford in 1960, but it had always been (as it always must be) ‘by faith’, and yet I still had some intellectual doubts that the gift was genuine. I had simply trusted the promise of Jesus that God gives good gifts to those who ask him (Matthew 7:11). Of course, I had no need to fear, but it’s easy to imagine how embarrassed I would have been if I had ‘got it wrong’ in the presence of one of my Bible College students!

I hardly dared ask the question, but I knew I had to. 

And what about the interpretation, Gueta? Was it accurate?

Of course, you know the answer because I wouldn’t be telling this story if the interpretation had been wrong! What an amazing thing! The Holy Spirit inspired an Irish woman to speak an African language which she had never heard, or even heard of, and then gave the interpretation to an English man who had never heard of it either! God is faithful. His word is true. And his Spirit is still at work distributing his gifts as he himself determines. The atheists – and for that matter those Christians who say that the gifts are not for today – have no answer to experiences like these!

So it’s not surprising that the devil tries to cast doubt on the genuineness of words that we receive from God. He is constantly challenging with words like, Has God said? God is more than willing to speak to us, but, if he can, Satan will distract us from listening, or cast doubt on what God has said. But as we step out in faith in what we believe he has said, we will receive confirmation that it is real and learn from experience to recognise that inner voice of God.

How God speaks to us            Talk 17 Supernatural signs

Another way God speaks to us is by supernatural signs.  In Acts 2:22 Peter refers to Jesus as a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders, and signs. And in Hebrews 2:4 we read that God testifies to our salvation by signs, wonders and various miracles, and gifts of the Holy Spirit. 

These three words, miracles, signs, and wonders, reveal three different aspects of the miraculous power of God. The word that is often translated as miracle literally means power. Miracles demonstrate how powerful God is, and they make us wonder. They cause amazement. They are also signs. They point the way. 

As we look at both the Old and New Testaments, we see that through signs and wonders God is speaking to us, demonstrating his power, revealing his love, confirming his promises, and giving us direction. Perhaps the best OT example of God giving direction through supernatural signs is found in the story of Gideon (Judges 6-7). In these chapters God speaks to Gideon in several different ways:

• through a prophet (v8)
• by an angel (v12)
• by supernatural signs (vv17-21, 36-40)
• by speaking to him (possibly in a dream or vision) in the night (v25, 7:2, 4, 5, 7, 9)
• through another person’s dream and its interpretation (7:7-14)

So supernatural signs are just one of several ways in which God speaks to Gideon, and, as we shall see, the signs God gives him are not so much a case of God speaking to him as a confirmation of what God has already said to him. But let’s remind ourselves of the story.

The Israelites had done evil in the sight of the Lord and as a result were being oppressed by the Midianites. But when the Israelites cried out to the Lord for help, he sent a prophet who reminded them of how the Lord had delivered them in the past and told them the reason for their problem – they had not listened to the Lord. Then the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon and said: The Lord is with you, mighty warrior (6:12). 

When Gideon protests (v.13), the Lord says to him:

Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian’s hand. Am I not sending you?” (14) …I will be with you (16).

Then Gideon says: 

If now I have found favour in your eyes, give me a sign that it is really you talking to me (17).

Gideon then brings an offering to the Lord and the Lord responds by touching it with the tip of his staff. Immediately fire flares up and consumes the offering and the angel disappears (21). Gideon, realising who he’s been speaking to, fears for his life and says:

Ah, Sovereign LORD! I have seen the angel of the LORD face to face!” (22).

But the Lord says to him:

Peace! Do not be afraid. You are not going to die (23).

 What’s particularly noteworthy in this passage is the fact that Gideon seems to understand clearly the message he is receiving. God is with him and will use him to deliver Israel from the Midianites. But he needs reassurance because he finds it hard to believe that God would use someone like him and so he wonders if it really is God who is speaking to him (v17). So he asks for a sign. 

Later in the chapter we read that the Spirit of the Lord came upon Gideon and that he blew a trumpet, summoning an army to follow him (34-35). But, despite the promise and all the signs the Lord has already given him, Gideon still seeks reassurance and asks for further confirmation. In verses 36-40 we read:

36. Gideon said to God, “If you will save Israel by my hand as you have promised, 37. look, I will place a wool fleece on the threshing floor. If there is dew only on the fleece and all the ground is dry, then I will know that you will save Israel by my hand, as you said.” 38. And that is what happened. Gideon rose early the next day; he squeezed the fleece and wrung out the dew – a bowlful of water. 39. Then Gideon said to God, “Do not be angry with me. Let me make just one more request. Allow me one more test with the fleece. This time make the fleece dry and the ground covered with dew.” 40. That night God did so. Only the fleece was dry; all the ground was covered with dew.

Now it’s important to understand this correctly, especially as some Christians today expect God to guide them by ‘putting out a fleece’. They’re not sure what God wants them to do, and so they say something like this:

Lord, if you want me to do A, let B happen. 

Which is fine, if we understand that Gideon was asking God to do something that was supernatural, something which couldn’t possibly happen unless God did it – like how God moved the shadow backwards for Hezekiah as a sign that he was extending his life for fifteen more years (2 Kings 20:1-11).

What’s more, by asking God to make the fleece wet, and then dry, Gideon was not asking God to do something that might possibly be contrary to God’s will. As an example of what I mean, consider the following. Let’s suppose I want to know if God wants me to go to London tomorrow; so I say:

Lord, if you want me to go to London tomorrow, let my cousin John come and see me today.

I hope it’s obvious that, although this fits the formula, Lord, if you want me to do A, let B happen, it’s by no means an exact parallel with what Gideon did. Why do I say this? Because, although it might be unlikely that my cousin would come and see me today, and even if I might think that it would be a miracle if he did, it might just be God’s will that my cousin does something completely different! So if God does want me to go to London tomorrow, but he doesn’t want my cousin to come and see me today, how can he possibly answer the foolish prayer I’ve just prayed?!

So please be very careful about asking God to make something happen as a sign that he wants you to do something, especially as after the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost, there’s no NT example of anyone ‘putting out a fleece’. 

Furthermore, it’s worth remembering that Gideon shouldn’t have needed this sign. God had already spoken very clearly to him in several ways and God’s word should have been enough. Despite this, God graciously did what Gideon asked, as he does for us when, like Gideon, we need reassurance.

When we turn to the New Testament, we find that the main purpose of signs is to point people to Jesus. The star the wise men followed led them to Jesus (Matthew 2). Jesus himself performed signs and wonders because he knew that without them some people would not believe in him (John 4:48). The miracles he performed were signs that with the coming of Jesus the kingdom of God had come (Matthew 12:28, Luke 11:20). And Peter tells us that the miracles Jesus performed were signs that were given by God to testify who Jesus was (Acts 2:22). 

As John is nearing the end of his Gospel, having recorded amazing miracles like Jesus turning water into wine, healing a man who was born blind, feeding five thousand people, and raising Lazarus from the dead, he writes:

Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. 

(John 20:30-31).

And God still works miracles to confirm the word of those who are preaching the good news about Jesus (Mark 16:15-20). This was the main purpose of the miracles recorded in the Book of Acts. Thousands came to faith in Jesus through the miracle of tongues at Pentecost (Acts 2:4) and the healing of the lame beggar in Acts 3 led to thousands more (Acts 4:4). In Acts 5 more and more men and women believed in the Lord as a result of the signs and wonders performed by the apostles (vv12-14). And when Philip the evangelist went to Samaria, crowds of people saw the signs he performed, believed in Jesus and were baptised (Acts 8:6-7, 12). 

So the main purpose of signs in the New Testament was to point people to Jesus. But how does this help us if we’re already Christians. How does God speak to us through signs? Part of the answer is simply that miraculous signs encourage our faith. The passage in John that we just referred to can also be translated that you may continue to believe. 

And who can deny that testimonies of miracles today encourage the faith of believers? Since the publication of my book, Signs from Heaven – why I believe, in which I record some of the miracles I have seen in my own life and ministry, people have told me how much it has encouraged their faith. But that leads me to an experience which I shared in that book and how it radically altered the direction of my life.

You may remember that in an earlier talk I told you of the impact Laurie Dixon had made on my life. Remember the story of the falling rock that just missed me on the mountainside in Switzerland and how that led to Laurie telling me about the baptism in the Holy Spirit?   That was in 1958. Now fast forward to July 1959.

Eileen, who was then my girlfriend, and I were sitting in the youth meeting at church singing from a well-known chorus book, when I happened to notice a list of books advertised on the back cover, one of which was entitled, The full blessing of Pentecost, by Dr Andrew Murray. Immediately I concluded that this book must be dealing with the subject Laurie had been talking about last year in Switzerland, and I suggested that it might be good to get it. In a few days, Eileen received a reply from the advertisers saying that the book was no longer available.

A bit disappointed, I returned home from Eileen’s to my parents’ house for lunch. As the meal was not quite ready, I went into the sitting room to wait. On entering, I happened to notice a book lying on the piano and casually picked it up – The full blessing of Pentecost by Dr Andrew Murray! But how did it get there? No one, except Eileen, knew anything of my interest in the subject. My parents did not know where the book had come from. It is true that my father had always had a large collection of books, but if it was his, he certainly had never read it, and didn’t even know that he possessed it. Anyway, why wasn’t it in the bookcase and how did it get on the piano? 

No one to this day has any idea how that book came to be there on the very day that I had thought it to be unobtainable. The answer must surely lie in the realm of the supernatural – maybe an angel? But even if you think up a natural explanation – and that’s always possible for those who don’t want to believe – how likely is it that this was just a coincidence? No, God was confirming to us that we needed to be baptised in the Spirit, and when we had read the book, and were persuaded that the experience was biblical, we were both baptised in the Spirit and began to speak in tongues.

Of course, as I just mentioned, those who are sceptical try to explain away such things as the appearance of the book as coincidences. Indeed, all answers to prayer tend to be dismissed in that way. But, as a former archbishop of Canterbury once said, I find that when I pray, coincidences happen. When I don’t pray, they don’t!

In fact, what at first sight might appear to be a coincidence may very well turn out to be a sign. When one ‘coincidence’ happens after another, we may very well conclude that what is happening is actually the activity of God. This is how God spoke to me when I desperately needed to be sure that the pathway we had embarked upon was really in the will of God.

It was at the beginning of the 1980s while I was Principal of Mattersey Hall Bible College. As the facilities at the time were, to say the least, outdated, and as the number of students was increasing rapidly, we urgently needed to provide new accommodation for them. It was estimated that we would need £600,000 to do this (which in today’s terms would be more like £6 million). But we had nothing in the bank. 

The matter was so serious that the Board of Governors referred it to the Executive Council, and the Executive Council referred it to the General Council of Assemblies of God meeting in its Annual General Conference in Minehead. 

The matter was discussed at length and, during the course of the debate, one of the pastors went to the microphone and asked me a direct question: David, have you heard from the Lord? In all honesty I had to answer, No, I just know that we need this new building. The debate drew to a close and the matter was put to the vote. To my delight, the proposition to go ahead received the two-thirds majority required by the Constitution. Now all we needed was the money!

After the vote had been carried by so large a majority, I fully expected the money to come pouring in. But very little came! Everyone seemed to be leaving it to everyone else! As the time for the signing of the contract drew near, we still had very little money, and I began to be anxious. Who has to sign the contract? What happens if the money doesn’t come in? Who goes to prison if the money doesn’t come in?! These were serious questions that were troubling my mind, and I kept remembering the question that pastor had asked me in Minehead: David, have you heard from the Lord?

Eventually, in desperation I said to Eileen: 

I need to hear from God about this. I’m going to pray all night, and if he doesn’t speak to me, I’m going to phone the Board of Governors and cancel the whole thing. 

So I began my night of prayer. After several hours, at around 2am, I began to feel like giving up. God wasn’t speaking and I really didn’t know what to do. I decided to take a break, so I sat down on the settee and picked up a copy of Redemption Tidings magazine.

As I opened it the title on the editorial page struck me forcibly: FAITH. So I began to read. Now if you have ever been in desperate need to hear from God and have been in a meeting where someone has brought a prophetic word which you have known was just for you, you will understand just how I felt as I read that editorial. Every single word of it came as Thus says the Lord to David Petts. I knew that God had spoken. I knew that we were to go ahead. I knelt down by the settee and sobbed into the cushion and asked God to forgive me for my lack of faith. Then I went to bed. From that moment I never doubted that God was behind our building project after all.

But that is not the end of the story. The next morning I went down to the College and walked into the office. Ernest Anderson, who was then a resident member of faculty, was standing there and I excitedly told him what had happened. 

That’s wonderful, David, he said, I was praying all night too. 

I thought it was strange that we had both decided independently to pray all night and I could not imagine why he had decided to do so. 

Oh, I said, What were you praying for? 

To which he replied:

I was praying for the same thing. I knew that unless you, as the Principal of the College, heard from God, the thing would never happen. 

Oh, thank you Ernest, I said, but you could have gone to bed at 2 o’clock!

I immediately telephoned Colin Whittaker, the editor of the magazine. Colin, I said, you have written the greatest editorial you will ever write, and I told him what had happened. Then he told me that he had known when he was writing the editorial that he was writing it for the College, but he had not felt able to be that explicit in print. 

Some coincidence! I knew beyond doubt that this was far more. That series of events could not possibly be coincidence and through it I received confirmation that what I had read really was a word from God, a word that gave me faith for something bigger than myself. And, of course, because it was from God, it came to pass.

But faith does not always see immediate results. It is sometimes tested, and in fact it was a few years before the building was finally complete. There was an initial response as I told the story of how the Lord has spoken to me, and we were soon able to provide new accommodation for 32 of our students, but then the flow of funds dried up and building had to be delayed. Sure that we had received a word from the Lord, the Board of Governors, of which I was a member, decided to spend a day together in prayer and fasting.

Towards the end of the day, Paul Newberry shared with us two verses that he felt the Holy Spirit had impressed upon him from Micah 7:

Do not gloat over me, my enemy! Though I have fallen, I will rise. Though I sit in darkness, the LORD will be my light (v8).

The day for building your walls will come, the day for extending your boundaries (v11).

It seemed to us that the Lord was saying that the enemy would have no reason to gloat over the present delay in our building project. Now was not God’s time for more building development, but that the time for building would surely come.

Encouraged by this I went home. Our daughter Sarah was home from college and I called to her as I entered the house. I’m up here, she said, calling from her bedroom. I went up to see her and, to my surprise, she was sitting in the dark. When I asked her why, she replied in the words of Micah 7:8. Though I sit in darkness, the Lord will be my light! What a confirmation! The same verse from two different people in two different places in the space of less than one hour. 

And, of course, the time for building did come, and at the time of preparing this talk, I’ll be back there teaching this week and I think I’ll be staying in that very building.

But now it’s time to summarise what we have learned in this talk.

• Signs are not so much God speaking to us, but God confirming what he has said. 
• Be careful if you’re thinking of putting out a fleece. 
• In the New Testament the main purpose of signs is to point people to Jesus. They also encourage the faith of those who are already Christians. 
• With God there’s no such thing as coincidence. He is working all things together for the good of those he has called according to his purpose. Remarkable coincidences are very often God’s way of confirming what he’s already said.

Next time: Promptings

Talk 16 God speaks to us directly     Part 2       Dreams and visions

I guess most Christians know that the Bible contains many references to God speaking to people through a dream or vision. The book of Genesis alone contains some 40 references to the word dream, and at least seven people are mentioned as having been spoken to in a dream or vision. These include:

• Abimelech (20: 3, 6)
• Abraham (15:1)
• Jacob (31: 10, 11)
• Laban (31: 24)
• Joseph (37: 5, 6, 9, 10)
• Pharaoh’s Butler and Baker (40: 5, 8, 9, 16)
• Pharaoh (41: 7,  8, 15, 17, 22, 25, 26, 32).

And in the rest of the Old Testament there are many other references too, far too many to mention here. The most significant of these is Joel’s prophecy:

And afterwards, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions… (Joel 2:28),

We’ll return to this when we come to look at dreams and visions in the New Testament, but first let’s consider three other OT passages. The first is in the book of Job which is considered to be the oldest of all the books of the Bible and in it we find Elihu saying to Job:

Why do you complain to God that he responds to no one’s words? For God does speak – now one way, now another – though no one perceives it. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on people as they slumber in their beds, he may speak in their ears…(Job 33:13-16).

Now it’s important when reading Job to be aware that not everything Job’s friends said to him was correct, but in this case Elihu’s words are in line with what God himself says in Numbers 12:6-8: 

When there is a prophet among you, I, the Lord, reveal myself to them in visions, I speak to them in dreams. But this is not true of my servant Moses; he is faithful in all my house. With him I speak face to face, clearly and not in riddles; he sees the form of the Lord.

Here God confirms that he does speak through dreams and visions, but also makes it clear that they are ‘riddles’ and can be open to misinterpretation. They are not as reliable as the level of revelation that God granted to Moses. They need to be interpreted, as we know from the well-known stories of Joseph and Daniel who were gifted by God in interpreting dreams. 

Finally, in Jeremiah 23 we are warned against the danger of false visions:

This is what the Lord Almighty says: Do not listen to what the prophets are prophesying to you; they will fill you with false hopes. They speak visions from their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord (v.16. Compare 14:14).

Let the prophet who has a dream recount the dream but let the one who has my word speak it faithfully for what has straw to do with grain? declares the Lord (v.28).

The context here is that God had told Jeremiah that judgment was coming on the nation, but this, of course, was an unpopular message that nobody wanted to believe. The false prophets, who were politically motivated, were only saying what they knew the king wanted to hear. Through Jeremiah God is warning these prophets to make sure that they are speaking God’s word faithfully and not prophesying visions from their own minds. And he is warning those who are listening to them not to believe them.

So the OT passages we have been looking at teach us that:

1. We sometimes think that God does not respond to us, but he does in one way or another, sometimes by a dream or vision (Job 33:13-16). 
2. Even when God does speak through a dream or vision, it often needs to be interpreted (Numbers 12:6-8). 
3. Visions and dreams need to be evaluated. What is the motivation of the person relating their dream? Are they faithful to God’s word? (Jeremiah 23:16, 28).
4. As we see from the example of faithful Moses, there is a higher level of revelation than dreams and visions. For us, that is the teaching of Scripture. This is in harmony with what we have already seen with regard to different levels of prophecy.  

As we come now to look at the New Testament, we see that here too there are frequent references to God speaking through dreams and visions. In the Gospels we read about Joseph and the wise men in the Christmas story, and Pilate’s wife having dreams, and of Zechariah, Peter, James, and John having visions. In Acts, God (or an angel sent by God) speaks in visions to Cornelius, Peter, and Paul.

The references in Acts are particularly important for us, because, as we have explained before, we are living after Pentecost which was a turning point in human history. The gift of God’s Holy Spirit was then made available to all his people. When the crowd, composed of many different nationalities, are amazed to hear the disciples speaking their languages, they ask, What does this mean? To which Peter replies:

…this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel:

‘In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy… 

(Acts 2:16-18).

This seems to suggest that, far from any idea that dreams and visions might become redundant after Pentecost, there should in fact be an increase in these manifestations. They are a direct result of the Spirit being made available to all. What’s more, if God spoke to Cornelius, Peter, and Paul through visions, there is no reason to suppose that he will not speak in the same way to people today, And indeed, there are increasing numbers of testimonies of Muslims around the world who have come to Christ as a result of God speaking to them through a dream or vision.

Finally, before I share a personal testimony of how God spoke to me in a dream, it’s worth noting that in Acts 2 Peter identifies the manifestation of speaking in tongues as the fulfilment of Joel’s prophecy that when the Spirit was poured out in the last days all kinds of people would see dreams and visions and that they would prophesy. This may well suggest that, just as dreams and visions are a means of prophetic revelation, speaking in tongues fulfils a similar role.  It certainly did so on the Day of Pentecost and, as we have seen, when accompanied by the gift of interpretation of tongues, it can be a means of building up believers in the local church. God has spoken to me many times through these gifts, but only once has he spoken to me through a dream.   

Some years ago, my daughter, Sarah, recommended a book by Jack Deere entitled, Surprised by the Voice of God. On reading it, I was challenged by the reminder that in the Bible God often spoke through dreams, and I wondered why God had never spoken to me in a dream. So I said, almost casually, Lord, you have never spoken to me in a dream, and I would really like you to. 

I must admit that I didn’t expect an immediate answer, but a few days later I had a dream. But before I tell you what it was, I need to tell you about our family. Debbie, our oldest daughter was living in Rugby. Sarah, our second daughter, was living in Portsmouth. And Jonathan, our son, was living near Liverpool. 

About a year before I had the dream, Sarah had asked me if I knew anyone who needed a car. She had tried to sell her old one, but was offered only £300 for it and felt that she’d rather give it away than sell it for such a low price. I told her that I thought Jonathan would be grateful for it, and so she gave the car to him.

Shortly before I had the dream, we had arranged to visit Debbie on a particular weekend because we knew that Jonathan would be there too. Now I had the dream about a week before the visit to Debbie. In my dream Eileen and I went to Debbie in separate cars because we would need to give Eileen’s car to Jonathan. That was it. And even though I had asked the Lord to speak to me through a dream, I didn’t seriously think that the dream was a message from God. And so we both went to Debbie’s in my car.

Imagine my surprise when we arrived at Debbie’s and saw what looked like a brand-new car standing outside Debbie’s house. Whose is the car? I said. Oh, it belongs to the insurance company, said Jonathan. Mine is a write-off. Someone smashed into the back of it while it was parked on the road.

And it was then that I was reminded of my dream. Could God be saying that we should give Eileen’s car to Jonathan? I told her about the dream, and she readily agreed that that is what we should do. So we told Jonathan and simply asked that he would give us the insurance money when it came through, to put towards replacing the car we were giving him. We didn’t expect very much as the most Sarah had been offered for it a year before was £300.

Eileen and I agreed together that we’d leave it a few weeks and then start to look for a replacement car for her. The car she had given Jonathan was a Toyota Corolla 1600, five door executive automatic, and Eileen loved it! So I promised her that we’d look for a newer version of exactly the same model. Shortly afterwards we heard from Jonathan. The insurance company had given him £1200 for the car, for which, if you remember, a year before Sarah had been offered a mere £300.

Grateful to God that we were getting far more than we had expected, Eileen and I set off one Saturday visiting car sales companies in several nearby towns, looking for a Toyota Corolla with the same specification. It was pouring with rain all day long, and after several hours of unsuccessful searching we returned home, tired, wet, and rather discouraged. 

Then, quite suddenly, on the following Tuesday, a thought came into my mind. A few years earlier the College had bought a Toyota minibus from a Christian brother in Nottingham who had a garage with a Toyota franchise. Maybe I should try him? So I phoned him and told him what I was looking for. If he had one come in, would he please let us know? To which he replied, Will silver do? 

Now the colour of the car was about the only detail I hadn’t specified when I told him what we were looking for, but silver was just the sort of colour we wanted! Yes, that’s fine, I said. Does that mean you’ve got one? And to cut a long story short, one had come in that very day, There was just one previous owner and they had only covered 3000 miles a year from new. The price was right, and when he said, When do you want to come over and look at it? my reply was, I don’t need to. This is so obviously God, I’ll come and get it on Saturday. That’s the only time I’ve ever bought a car without looking at it, and it was just what Eileen wanted. 

Now you may think that I’ve wandered a long way from the dream I was telling you about, but if it had not been for that dream, that whole series of amazing events would never have happened. And the story is not just about a dream about a car. It’s a testimony of how God is at work in the little details of our lives, constantly working all things together for our good because he loves us and because we are called according to his purpose (Romans 8:28).

Talk 15      God speaks to us directly (Part 1)

The Bible is full of examples of God speaking very directly, often without any human involvement. Some of the ways he speaks like this include: 

• an audible voice
• angels
• dreams and visions
• supernatural signs
• promptings.

We’ll look at each of these in turn, starting with some biblical examples and then illustrating wherever possible from my own experience. I say ‘wherever possible’ because I can’t honestly say that God has spoken to me in all of these ways.

An audible voice

There are many examples in the Bible where we read that the Lord spoke to someone, but it’s not always clear how he spoke. Consider the example we looked at earlier in the series. We looked at Acts 13:1-3 where we read that the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” The Holy Spirit may well have spoken with an audible voice on this occasion, but it’s just as likely that the spoke through one of the prophets who were present (v.1). 

On other occasions, however, it’s perfectly clear that God’s voice was audible. To mention just a few examples:

Isaiah heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send and who will go for us?’ (Isaiah 6:8). 

When Ezekiel had a vision of the glory of the Lord, he fell face down and heard the voice of one speaking (Ezekiel 1:28).

At Jesus’ baptism a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased’ (Matthew 3:17).

On the road to Damascus, Paul had a vision of Jesus, fell to the ground, and heard a voice say to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ (Acts 9:4).

Peter heard his voice while praying on the rooftop in Joppa (Acts 10:13-16).

And on the isle of Patmos John heard a loud voice, the voice of the Lord, telling him to write (Revelation 1:10-12).

All these examples seem to make it perfectly clear that God sometimes speaks with an audible voice. But to be absolutely sure about this, let’s turn to the well-known story of Samuel (1 Samuel 3).

Hannah, Samuel’s mother, had been unable to have children, which, in the culture in which she lived, caused other women to despise her. But she prayed fervently to the Lord and promised that if he would give her a son, she would dedicate him to the Lord’s service. So, when Samuel was born in answer to Hannah’s prayer, she took him to the temple where the boy ministered before the Lord under Eli the priest (2:11). 

In chapter 3 we read how one night, while Samuel was lying down, the Lord called him by name. Samuel, not knowing that it was the Lord, ran to Eli and said, Here I am. You called me. But Eli replied, I did not call; go back and lie down. This happened three times, and by then Eli realised that it was God who was calling Samuel. He told him that, when the Lord called again, he should reply, Speak Lord, for your servant is listening.

This was the beginning of Samuel’s ministry as a prophet and it’s very clear that God’s voice was audible. The fact that Samuel thought that it was Eli who was speaking shows that Samuel heard what was being said. From this it seems reasonable to assume that this may well have been the way that God spoke to Samuel on a regular basis.

And I have no doubt that if God could do it then, he can do it today. Having said that, although God has spoken to me in many wonderful ways, I have never heard his audible voice and I know very few people who would claim to have done so. However, rather more frequently we hear of God speaking through the ministry of angels.

Angels

As far as I know, I have never seen an angel and have never heard an angel speak to me – although we need to remember that some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it (Hebrews 13:2). But both Old and New Testaments show that God sometimes speaks to his people through the ministry of angels.

The word angel comes directly from the Greek word aggelos (pronounced angelos) and simply means messenger. Angels are God’s messengers. They are ministering spirits sent to serve those who will inherit salvation (Hebrews 1:14). A good example of this is when the angel Gabriel appeared to Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist and told him that his prayer had been heard and that his wife, Elizabeth, who was barren, would bear him a son. Humanly speaking, this was totally impossible because both Zechariah and Elizabeth were now far too old. I think Zechariah’s question was quite understandable:

How can I be sure of this? I am an old man and my wife is well on in years (Luke 1:18).

Gabriel’s reply in the next verse illustrates perfectly the ministry of angels: 

I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and have been sent to speak to you and tell you this good news (Luke 1:19).

Angels are God’s messengers. They stand in God’s presence and are sent to speak to us. The Gospels and Acts give us plenty of examples. About six months after his visit to Zechariah, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, to a virgin whose name was Mary (Luke 1:26-27). It was angels who brought the good news of Jesus’ birth to the shepherds and told them where they would find him (Luke 2:8-14). 

It was an angel that came from heaven and appeared to Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, strengthening him (Luke 22:43). And it was the angel of the Lord who descended from heaven and rolled away the stone from the mouth of Jesus’ tomb and told the women who had come to anoint the body of Jesus that he was risen (Matthew 28:1:7).

In the Book of Acts, as the disciples were looking intently up into the sky, two men dressed in white stood beside them (Acts 1:10). They told them:

This same Jesus who has been taken from you into Heaven, will come back in the same way as you have seen him go into Heaven (v,11)

These men dressed in white were undoubtedly angels sent by God to remind them of Jesus’ promise that he would come again (John 14:28).

In Acts 5:19 the angel of the Lord opened the prison doors and released Peter and John. In Acts 8:26 an angel told Philip the evangelist to go south to the road that leads from Jerusalem to Gaza. This led to the conversion of a key national leader from the land of Ethiopia.

In Acts 10 it was an angel who spoke to both the apostle Peter and the Roman centurion Cornelius (verses 3, 7, 22) resulting in the conversion of Cornelius and his entire household. In Acts 12 it was the angel of the Lord who once again released Peter from prison (verses 7-11). And in Acts 27:23-24 it was an angel who stood beside Paul before the ship on which he was travelling was wrecked on the island of Malta and said:

Do not be afraid, Paul. You must stand before Caesar, and God has graciously given you the lives of all who sail with you,

Now the Book of Acts was not written simply as a historical account of the beginnings of the early church. Most scholars are agreed that Luke’s intentions in writing it were not merely historical. They are theological and missional. Luke is not just teaching us how it was, but how it can and should be. And in recording the frequent activity of angels, he is surely telling us that we can at times expect angelic intervention too.

There have certainly been many anecdotal reports recently of people claiming to have experienced the presence of angels in one way or another and I see no good reason to doubt this, particularly when the testimony comes from a reliable source. As far as Eileen and I are concerned, although God has never spoken to us through an angelic messenger, I am confident that we have experienced angelic help on at least one occasion.

In 1977 I served as Acting Principal of Mattersey Hall for six months before being appointed Principal in 1978. During that time we were still living in Basingstoke although I was at Mattersey much of the time about 200 miles away from home. 

One weekend I went with about 50 of our students from Mattersey to Newport in South Wales. There was a big inter-church meeting on the Saturday night and on the Sunday the students went to different churches to sing, testify, and preach. I stayed in Newport to preach in the church there.

After Sunday lunch the pastor, Eric Dando, asked me if I would like to phone Eileen, which of course I was grateful to do. After telling her that the weekend was going well, I asked her how she was and was shocked to hear her reply.

    I’m O.K., she said, but I very nearly wasn’t!

    Oh! What’s happened? I replied.

And she told me what had happened to her on the Saturday night while I had been away preaching in Newport.

There had been a women’s missionary meeting in London and Eileen and several of the ladies from the church in Basingstoke had gone to it. They had travelled in two cars and on the way home, on the road between Reading and Basingstoke, several horses ran into the road in front of the cars. It seems that they had escaped from a nearby field.

One of the horses collided with the car in which Eileen was travelling in the front passenger seat. The impact was so great that the front of the car roof caved in to within an inch of Eileen’s head. The car was a complete write-off and, as the people from the car in front walked back to see exactly what had happened, they feared the worst. 

At this point it is important to explain that at that time the wearing of seat-belts was not compulsory in the U.K. and the car in which Eileen was travelling didn’t have any. Bearing in mind the speed at which the car had been travelling when it collided with the horse, both Eileen and the driver should have been thrown forward through the windscreen. Indeed, the woman seated behind Eileen was thrown forward so violently into the back of Eileen’s seat that it was twisted out of position.

Yet Eileen was not thrown forward, and none of those travelling in that car was seriously injured. They all walked away relatively unharmed. As she related the story afterwards Eileen told me that throughout the whole incident she was strangely conscious of something – or someone? – holding her to the back of her seat, preventing her from being thrown forward. Was it a coincidence that on that very evening I had been preaching in Newport on a subject I have rarely preached on before or since? My subject was ANGELS.

Of course, I cannot categorically state that Eileen was saved by an angel. But I am certain that Eileen’s life was spared by divine intervention of some kind – and, as we have seen, the Bible does say that angels are messengers God sometimes sends to be of help to his people.

More recently I had an experience of answered prayer which several of my friends have suggested might have been brought about by angels. It was Sunday May 9th 2021 at around 10.45am. I was travelling from Brixham, where we live, to Newton Abbot for a COVID test. This was required because I was due to go into hospital on the Tuesday for an exploratory procedure on my larynx. 

Shortly after I started my journey I noticed a gentle banging sound coming from the rear of the car. At first I wasn’t too concerned and anyway I didn’t want to stop as I didn’t want to miss the appointment for the COVID test which was at 11am. If I had missed the appointment the procedure would have had to be postponed. So I continued my journey hoping that the banging was nothing serious,

Within a few miles, however, the banging had become much louder and I was getting scared. Finally, in desperation I called out, Lord Jesus, please take care of this! No sooner had I said this than I saw in the mirror a car behind me flashing its headlights. It drew along side me and indicated that I needed to pull over into the layby that was a few yards ahead.

When I did so the problem was obvious. My nearside back wheel was coming off! Two of the five nuts that hold the wheel on were missing and the other three were loose. If I had continued like that, the consequences could have been fatal. Relieved that the other driver had pulled me over in time, I asked if he could help me, explaining the urgency of getting to the COVID appointment. This he gladly did and, when he searched in the boot for the wheel brace, he discovered that there were two spare wheel nuts there!  It took less than a minute for him to fix the wheel and he was on his way. And I reached Newton Abbot just in time for my appointment. I think I have never known such a quick and dramatic answer to prayer.

Now, of course, I cannot be sure that the man who fixed my wheel was in fact an angel, but I’m open to that possibility. But in a way it really doesn’t matter. What matters is that the Lord answered my prayer, saved my life and brought me safely through the operation. Whether or not he used an angel to do so is unimportant. As we have seen, the Bible does tell us that angels are God’s messengers and that they are sent to minister to God’s people.  I believe it because the Bible says so, not because I’ve had an experience that may or may not have involved an angel.

How God speaks to us    Talk 14 Prophets and Prophecy (Part 2)

The ministry of a prophet

From what we’ve said so far, it should be clear that although all Christians are to ‘prophesy’ in the general sense of speaking on God’s behalf, not all will exercise the gift of prophecy. And not all who exercise this gift will be prophets in the Ephesians 4:11 sense. In short:

• All God’s people should prophesy (speak on his behalf)
• Some, but not all will receive the spiritual gift of prophecy (to edify the church)
• Some, but not all of these will exercise the ministry of a prophet.

So what can we learn about prophets as distinct from those who have the gift of prophecy? 

We saw earlier that prophets are people who hear from God and then pass on to others what he has said. They speak on behalf of God. Of course, because God knows the future, prophets may foretell the future (if that is what the Lord reveals to them), but most of the time they speak on God’s behalf to the people of their own generation. This was true of the prophets in the Old Testament and it’s true of prophets today. However, there’s a very important difference between prophets today and those of the Old Testament.

Differences between OT prophets and prophets today

Prophets today do not fulfil the same role as OT prophets and we should not expect them to do so. People like Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel etc. were people of great power and influence, proclaiming God’s word and manifesting his power to Israel and to the nations beyond. 

But we must be careful not to assume that prophets today will be the same. For a model of what we should expect of a prophet today we need to look at the New Testament and those who are described as prophets after the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2). Until then the Holy Spirit was given to relatively few people, but at Pentecost Moses’ prayer that all God’s people would be prophets (Numbers 11:29) was answered, and Joel’s prophecy that God would pour out his Spirit on all people began to be fulfilled (Joel 2:28, Acts 2:16-17). 

This meant that Acts 2 was in a very real sense a turning point in human history. The real dividing-line in God’s dealings with mankind is not the break between Old and New Testaments, but the seven weeks that started with Christ’s death and resurrection and that culminated with the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost. From then on the Holy Spirit was available to all and, as we have seen, all God’s people are in a sense ‘prophets’ (Acts 2:16-18).

This means that people referred to as prophets in the New Testament before Pentecost should be considered in the same category as the Old Testament prophets. John the Baptist, for example, was the last in the line of Old Testament prophets. Jesus himself made this clear when he said:

For all the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John (Matthew 11:13).

In saying this Jesus revealed the continuity of the prophetic line from Moses right through to John for, until Jesus came, all prophetic ministry pointed forward to him. 

But what was the purpose of prophetic ministry after Jesus had come?  There clearly was to be a change of emphasis and we must not be surprised if certain differences appear in the role of the prophet after Pentecost. So, what is the ministry of a prophet today and how is it different from that of the Old Testament prophets?

To answer this question, we need to look at some of the people who are named as prophets in the Book of Acts. These are Agabus (Acts 11:27-28, 21:10), Judas and Silas (Acts 15:32), and some or all of those mentioned in Acts 13:1-2 (Barnabas, Simeon, Lucius, Manaen, Paul). The difficulty here is that it is not clear whether they were all ‘prophets and teachers’ or whether some were prophets and some were teachers.

Of all those mentioned in the previous paragraph, we know nothing more of Simeon, Lucius, Manaen, and Judas.  Barnabas and Paul were also apostles and so it is difficult to distinguish their apostolic ministry from their prophetic ministry.  Silas said much to encourage and strengthen the brothers (Acts 15:32) and preached that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God (2 Cor.1:19-20).  We know little else of his ministry except that he accompanied Paul on his second missionary journey. 

This leaves Agabus of whom we know rather more. He clearly spoke with great revelation from the Spirit (Acts 11:27-28, 21:10) including the accurate prediction of certain future events. His prophecy about a widespread famine is a well-known example of this (Acts 11:27-30) as is his prediction of Paul’s captivity in Jerusalem (Acts 21:11). 

From this it is clear that his ministry involved more than the simple gift of prophecy which need not contain any element of prediction. However, there is no suggestion that he fulfilled a role similar to that of OT prophets like Moses, Elijah etc. who spoke prophetically to national leaders. 

This leads me to the conclusion that though the prophets referred to in Ephesians 4:11 exercised a greater ministry than the simple gift of prophecy, they are by no means the same as the prophets of the Old Testament or as John the Baptist in the New. And that understanding must surely influence any conclusion we may wish to draw about the role of prophets today.

Prophets today

So far we have looked briefly at the role of prophets in both the Old and New Testaments. Our purpose in doing so was to establish precisely what kind of gift is referred to in Ephesians 4:11. Our findings may be summarised as follows:

The prophets referred to in Ephesians 4:11 are not the same as

• the prophets of the Old Testament
• NT prophets before Pentecost
• the simple gift of prophecy (1 Cor. 12:10).

So to discover the role of prophets today, we must examine any NT examples of the ministry of prophets after Pentecost – and we have noted that Agabus is the only clear example.

Agabus

We find references to the ministry of Agabus first in Acts 11 and then later in Acts 21. In Acts 11:27-28 we read that some prophets came to Antioch. One of them, named Agabus

stood up and predicted that a severe famine would spread over the entire Roman world.

We are then told not only that this came to pass (v.28), but also what the disciples decided to do about it and how they did it. They decided that they would provide help for the brothers living in Judea (v.29) and they did so by sending a gift by Barnabas and Saul (v.30).

Two things are important here. First, Agabus’ prediction came to pass. If it had not done so it would have been a false prophecy according to the principles laid down in Deuteronomy 18:21-22. Clearly if a prophetic revelation comes from God it will come to pass. 

Secondly, it is noteworthy that the prophet did not tell the disciples what to do. Agabus simply gave them information as to what would happen. There is no suggestion here, therefore, that the prophet gives direction to the church or to individuals. But this is something which becomes even clearer when we consider the later passage in Acts 21 where we read:

… a prophet named Agabus came down from Judea. Coming over to us he took Paul’s belt, tied his own hands and feet with it and said, “The Holy Spirit says, ‘In this way the Jews of Jerusalem will bind the owner of this belt and will hand him over to the Gentiles’ (vv.10-11).

The disciples then pleaded with Paul not to go to Jerusalem (v.12), but Paul answered that if needs be he was ready to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus (v.13). Seeing that they could not persuade him, the disciples replied, The Lord’s will be done (v.14).

Again we see clearly that the prophet does not give direction to Paul. Agabus tells Paul that he will go to Jerusalem and that he will be captured by the Jews and handed over to the Gentiles. He does not tell him not to go. It is the disciples in the following verses who plead with Paul not to go. They put their own interpretation on the prophecy. But Paul knew that they were misunderstanding what God was saying, for he himself knew what God wanted him to do.

To help us understand this we need to go back to Acts 20. Paul is on his way to Jerusalem, hoping to get there in time for the feast of Pentecost (v.16). He reaches Miletus and sends to Ephesus for the elders of the church (v.17). In his farewell address to them he says

And now, compelled by the Spirit, I am going to Jerusalem, not knowing what will happen to me there. I only know that in every city the Holy Spirit warns me that prison and hardships are facing me. However, I consider my life worth nothing to me, if only I may finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me… (Acts 20: 22-24) 

Three things are significant here. First, it is clear that prophetic ministry was common at that time. In every city Paul was receiving prophetic words. Secondly, these prophetic words were testifying to the same thing. Paul would be imprisoned in Jerusalem. Thirdly, despite all this Paul was convinced that God wanted him to go for he was compelled by the Spirit to do so. 

It is very important to understand this when we come to Acts 21:4 which says that through the Spirit the disciples at Tyre urged Paul not to go on to Jerusalem. This apparently completely contradicts Paul’s own statement that he was compelled by the Spirit to go (20:22). However, the passage about Agabus (vv. 10-14) sheds light on this. The disciples at Tyre made the same mistake as those at Caesarea. They received a revelation from the Spirit as to Paul’s future imprisonment, but they wrongly understood that this meant that Paul was not to go.

So the ministry of Agabus teaches us that prophets today may receive revelation from the Holy Spirit with regard to the future. However, it is not their role to tell the church or individual Christians what to do. They do not give direction. They impart to us information from the Spirit which helps us decide in advance what to do (Acts 11) or may encourage us that we are still in the will of God even when we are called to pass though hardship and difficulty (Acts 20-21).

One example of a present-day prophet is César Castellanos. When I met him he was the leader of a church in Columbia which was at the time almost certainly one of the fastest growing churches in the world, with over 200,000 members. In 1998 he visited Britain and was the guest preacher at a conference I attended. At the end of a special late-night meeting where César had been speaking to about a dozen national Christian leaders, he prayed for each one of us in turn. When he came to me, instead of praying, he prophesied. His prophecy included the following statement:

This is what the Holy Spirit says: I will greatly anoint your pen and your writing will be a blessing to thousands and thousands of people.

How was I to respond to such a wonderful prophecy? Let’s see what the New Testament has to say about this and then ask how it applies to César’s prophecy about me. It’s very important, when we hear prophetic words of this kind, that we consider very carefully what has been said and judge it in the light of what the New Testament teaches.

How to respond to the ministry of prophets today

In 1 Corinthians 14:29 we’re told to judge or weigh carefully what a prophet says. We must not automatically assume that everything a prophet says comes from the Lord. A prophet may well have received something from the Lord, but the way they express it may be influenced by their own interpretation of what the Lord has given them. 

Remember the people in Acts 21 who were telling Paul not to go to Jerusalem? They had heard rightly from the Lord that Paul would suffer when he went to Jerusalem, but they put their own construction on it and told him not to go! There’s a human element in every prophecy, even when it’s given by divine inspiration.

So how do we weigh or judge a prophecy? It will greatly help if we ask ourselves questions like these:

• Is the prophecy in line with the principles of Scripture?
• Is the person who brought the prophecy reliable?
• Do we have an inner witness that this is from the Lord? 
• Are there any other signs confirming the prophecy?

If the answers to these questions are positive, then it would be wise to ask the Lord what our next course of action might be, and perhaps to seek the advice of one or more of our church leaders. Do they have any conviction that this is what God is saying? Other important questions you might ask are:

• Is there any indication of the timing of the fulfilment of the prophecy? We shouldn’t automatically assume that it will happen immediately. 
• As time passes, can we see definite signs that the prophecy is coming to pass?

Now, just by way of example, if I apply these principles to César’s prophecy about myself, I can certainly see that:

• His prophecy was in line with the principles of Scripture
• The person who brought the prophecy was reliable
• I did have an inner witness that it was from the Lord. It was a confirmation of what I had already felt that God was saying to me. In the weeks leading up to that conference I had been feeling that God wanted me to give more time to writing. César’s prophecy came as a wonderful confirmation
• The fact that he did not know me was in itself a good sign of its genuineness. César had never met me. He knew that I was a Christian leader but he had no way of knowing that I was a writer. 
• There was an almost immediate fulfilment and it continues to be fulfilled over 20 years later. Since that time, I have written several books which have been translated into a variety of different languages. They have certainly reached thousands already and I continue to receive messages of thanks from grateful readers. 

In using this illustration, I have simply tried to highlight the fact that God does still speak through prophets today and to show how important it is to know how to evaluate what they say. In the final analysis, as the children of God it is our privilege to be led by God’s Spirit and, although he may choose to speak to us through prophetic ministry, we, and we alone, can determine God’s will for our lives. And it’s because we have the Spirit that God sometimes speaks to us directly, without any human intermediary, and that will be the subject of our next talk.

How God speaks to us    Talk 13   Prophets and Prophecy (Part 1)

We saw last time that God speaks to us through pastors and preachers, but, as we shall see today, he also speaks to us through prophets and the gift of prophecy. We’ll begin by explaining what prophecy is. In the English language the word prophet is often used to refer to someone who foretells the future. But its basic meaning is someone who speaks on behalf of someone else. A good illustration of this can be found in Exodus 7:1-2. Here the Lord says to Moses:

See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron will be your prophet. You are to say everything I command you, and your brother Aaron is to tell Pharaoh to let the Israelites go…

Aaron is called Moses’ prophet because he is going to speak on his behalf. So prophets are people who hear from God and then pass on to others what he has said. They speak on behalf of God. Moving now to the New Testament, we find that there are three different levels at which prophecy may operate:

1. There is a sense in which all God’s people are prophets(Acts 2:16-18)
2. Prophecy as a spiritual giftis given to some Christians, but not all (1 Corinthians 12:8-11).
3. Prophets are given to the churchto equip God’s people for works of service (Ephesians 4:11-12).

All God’s people are prophets

As we’ve already seen, a prophet is a person who speaks on behalf of God. Understood this way it is easy to see how, in a sense, all God’s people are prophets. We are all called to speak on his behalf. As the children of God, it is our privilege to be led by the Spirit of God (Romans 8:14) and the purpose of the Spirit’s coming at Pentecost was that we might receive power to be witnesses (Acts 1:8). The Spirit was poured out so that all God’s people could prophesy – sons and daughters, young and old, servants, men and women (Acts 2:16-18).

This does not mean that all Christians will exercise the gift of prophecy as it is described in 1 Corinthians 12-14 or that they will be prophets in the Ephesians 4:11 sense, but it does mean that God has made his Spirit available to all so that we can all speak on his behalf. As we’ve already seen, Acts 8:1 tells us how, because of the persecution that had broken out against the church in Jerusalem, all the Christians (except the apostles) were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. Verse 4 tells us that these people preached the word wherever they went. As a result, many people turned to Christ and the great church at Antioch was founded (Acts 11:19-21).

These people were not called to be ‘preachers’ in the way we tend to use the word today, nor were they prophets like John the Baptist, but they had received God’s Spirit and they did speak out on his behalf, and in that sense they were both preachers and prophets! In short, all God’s people are called to speak up for him. All God’s people are prophets.

The gift of prophecy 

In 1 Corinthians 12:8-11 Paul lists nine spiritual gifts. One of these is prophecy. 1 Corinthians 12:10-11 says:

 …to another prophecy… he (the Spirit) gives them to each person just as he determines.

This strongly suggests that this gift is not given to everybody and Romans 12:6 backs this up by saying:

We have different gifts according to the grace given us. If a man’s gift is prophesying, let him use it in proportion to his faith.

This gift is given by the Spirit to individual Christians to speak words of encouragement and edification to the church. In 1 Corinthians 14:1-5 we read:

1. Follow the way of love and eagerly desire spiritual gifts, especially the gift of prophecy. 2. For anyone who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men but to God. Indeed, no one understands him; he utters mysteries with his spirit. 3. But everyone who prophesies speaks to men for their strengthening, encouragement and comfort. 4. He who speaks in a tongue edifies himself, but he who prophesies edifies the church. 5. I would like every one of you to speak in tongues, but I would rather have you prophesy. He who prophesies is greater than one who speaks in tongues, unless he interprets, so that the church may be edified.

These verses make it very clear that the gift of prophecy is very valuable. The reason for this is that it edifies or builds up the church. It strengthens, encourages, and comforts God’s people. In church it is more valuable than speaking in tongues because, although speaking in tongues edifies the person who is speaking, it doesn’t help anyone else unless it’s interpreted.

However, when an interpretation is given, speaking in tongues becomes just as valuable as prophecy. In fact, when speaking in tongues is understood, it is in itself a form of prophetic language. On the Day of Pentecost, when Peter was asked for an explanation of how the disciples were able to speak languages they had never learned, he replied that this was the fulfilment of Joel’s prophecy that your sons and your daughters shall prophesy (Acts 2:17ff.).

All this shows us that God may speak to us through the gift of prophecy or through the interpretation of tongues[1] or even through speaking in tongues when the hearers understand the language that is being spoken, as on the Day of Pentecost. And I can testify from my own experience that God does speak to us in all these ways.

In 1959, when Eileen and I were seeking the baptism in the Holy Spirit, we decided that perhaps we should visit a Pentecostal Church to find out more and possibly ask for prayer. So one Tuesday evening we went to Bethel Church, Dagenham, when they were having their weekly prayer meeting. The church was several miles from where we lived and no one in the church had any idea of who we were. We were slightly nervous as neither of us had ever been to a Pentecostal prayer meeting before and we didn’t know what to expect. Would there be speaking in tongues, for example?

As it turned out, the meeting was not unlike the Baptist prayer meetings we were used to, apart from the fact that there were no real gaps between one person praying and the next. Then, just as we were getting used to it, somebody spoke in tongues. This was followed by an interpretation, which, to our total amazement, began with the words, You have come into this church seeking to be filled with the Spirit…

This was followed by two more ‘messages’ in tongues each followed by an interpretation and we knew without a doubt that God was speaking directly to us. We continued to attend that Pentecostal prayer meeting and a few weeks later we were both baptised in the Holy Spirit and began to speak in tongues ourselves. This experience brought us into an entirely new dimension of Christian living and ever since we have been grateful for words from the Lord that have come either through prophecy or the interpretation of tongues.

Some years later, when I was pastoring a church in Basingstoke, we were both rather concerned when Eileen discovered that she had a lump in her breast. Fearing the worst but hoping for the best, we committed the matter to the Lord.

We have always believed in divine healing, but we also believe that God expects us to take what medical help might be available[2], but we weren’t sure which was the right course of action in this case. So on Saturday night I asked the Lord to speak to us through the gifts of the Spirit in church the next morning.

And, sure enough, the answer came through an interpretation and a prophecy. After one person had spoken in tongues, someone else gave the interpretation: You have considered the help of man, and that is great, but in this situation it is the Lord himself who will meet your need…

At this point I began to cry and the floor was wet with my tears, when the interpretation was followed immediately by a prophecy: For has he not promised to heal you…?! Needless to say, the lump disappeared within days.

So God undoubtedly speaks to us through gifts like prophecy and the interpretation of tongues, but on rare occasions he speaks through the gift of tongues itself. This happened on the Day of Pentecost when people from several different nations heard the disciples speaking in their languages, and it still happens today.

One evening, some years ago, when I was Principal at Mattersey Hall Bible College, I was preaching in Newark when, in the middle of my message I spoke a few words in tongues. My purpose in doing so was to demonstrate that, when God has given us this gift, we can use it as a means of praying with our spirit whenever we wish (1 Corinthians 14:14-15).

Straight after the meeting, a woman with her husband approached me and said: I’m rather embarrassed to speak with you, but, you see, I understood what you said when you spoke in tongues. Then she went on to explain that, although she had been a Christian for several years, she had never been able to give up smoking. Only that day her husband had said to her, You really must give it up. If you don’t, it will kill you. She had replied, I know, but it’s so hard. She then went on to tell me that she and her husband were gypsies and that they had a language of their own known as Romany. I had never heard of such a language, yet when I spoke in tongues on that occasion, Romany was the language I was speaking. And what did it mean?

I have told you already. Cigarettes are not good for you!

So God has wonderful ways of speaking to us, through tongues or interpretation or through prophecy. And he also speaks through the ministry of prophets. But that will be the subject of our next talk.

How God speaks to us       Talk 12       Preachers and Pastors

In recent talks we’ve been considering how God speaks to us through our parents and through other Christians. We now turn our attention to how God speaks to us through the preaching of his word by those he has called and gifted to do so. We have already seen that God expects all Christians to spread the good news of the gospel to those with whom they come in contact. The gift of the Holy Spirit is available to all Christians and his empowering enables us all to be witnesses for Christ. 

In Ephesians 4:11-12, however, we read how Christ has given to the church apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers, to equip God’s people for works of service so that the body of Christ may be built up. I have written at length on each of these roles in my book, Body Builders, so won’t be going into great detail here. It will be enough for us to remind ourselves that one of the chief ways that God has chosen to speak to us is through his servants.

Of course, God speaks to us individually as we read our Bibles, but that by no means does away with the need for the teaching of God’s word through those to whom he has entrusted our spiritual welfare. In Acts 20 the apostle Paul is on his way to Jerusalem and at Miletus he calls for the elders of the church to come and see him (v17). He knows that none of them will ever see him again (v25) and he wants to encourage them and pray with them one last time. He tells them to 

Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood (v28).

Notice that in verse 17 these people are referred to as elders. In this verse they’re called overseers and shepherds. It’s clear from this and from passages like 1 Peter 5:1-5 and Titus 1:5-7 that:

1. In the New Testament elders, overseers, and shepherds (pastors) are interchangeable terms referring to the same role.
2. Their responsibility is to protect and care for the flock (God’s people) from ‘wolves’ (false teachers) who distort the truth (Acts 20:29, 1 Peter 5:2).
3. They must encourage others by sound teaching and refute those who oppose it (Titus 1:9).
4. They are ultimately accountable to Christ, who is the Chief Shepherd of the flock (1 Peter 5:5).

Since God has given such a serious responsibility to those who are the shepherds of his sheep, it follows that his people are to pay attention to the teaching and advice given by church leaders. I can’t say in all honestly that I have always done so – in fact I remember that as a teenager I sometimes argued publicly with our Baptist pastor (for which I wrote and apologized a few years later after I was baptized with the Holy Spirit). But I’m so glad that down through the years again and again God has spoken to me and guided me through the teaching and advice of pastors and other preachers.

Perhaps the best example of this is how the Lord called me to full-time ministry. Mamhead Park is a country mansion built regardless of cost in the nineteenth century. Set in hundreds of acres of beautiful countryside, with views going down to the sea at Lyme Bay on the south coast of England, in the 1950s it was used by the Baptists as a centre for retreats and conferences. It was also used in the school holidays for Summer Schools for young people. It was at one of these that God spoke to me and showed me that I was to be a minister.

It was at the end of one of the evening sessions. The preacher had just finished his message and the Reverend Cyril Rushbridge, who had been leading the meeting, was expected to close in prayer. But before he did so, he said, Before we close in prayer I just feel the Lord wants me to tell you how he called me to the ministry. He then took just a few minutes sharing with us how this had happened. It was nothing like Paul’s experience on the Damascus Road. I don’t remember the details, but by the time he had finished I felt sure that God was calling me to the ministry too. This was confirmed by Kate, one of the young people from our youth group, who said to me as soon as the meeting ended, David, do you know now what the Lord wants you to do with your life? The answer was yes, I was absolutely sure.

I wrote home to my parents telling them what had happened. When I got home, they told me how pleased they were and how, when the doctor had told them that they were unlikely to have any children, they had prayed that the Lord would give them a son who would have an international ministry.

I was 16 at the time and in the middle of preparing for A levels at school. I spoke to our pastor, the Reverend Leslie Moxham, and asked his advice as to my next steps now that the Lord had called me to the ministry. He suggested that I should start to attend the midweek Prayer and Bible Study meeting and this I was happy to do. But there was just one problem – time! 

Students at Brentwood School, where I attended, had lessons for six days every week and were expected to do two to three hours ‘prep’ every evening. Sunday was the only day we were not at school and on Sundays I was already attending Boys’ Brigade Bible Class at 10am, the morning church service at 11am, teenage Bible Class at 3pm, youth discussion group at 4.30pm, the evening service at 6.30pm and an after church ‘sing-song’ from 8-9pm! I also attended Boys’ Brigade, Young People’s Fellowship, and the church Youth Club three evenings every week. Could I still fit in an extra meeting without it affecting my studies at school?

My history teacher clearly thought not! About two months before I was due to take my A level exams, he said to me in front of the whole class, 

Quite honestly, Petts, unless you work harder, you’re going to fail you’re A levels. 

To which I replied, Well, you see Sir, I believe that God has called me to the ministry and that it’s important that I attend the meetings at our church, 

and I explained to him how busy I was. 

Then I added, Actually, Sir, I believe that if I put God first, and if he wants me to pass my A levels, he will not let me down. 

To which he replied, Petts, I respect your convictions, but I can’t say that I agree with you. 

As a result of that conversation, I did try to work harder, but I also continued to attend all the meetings at church, including the midweek Bible Study recommended by my pastor. When the A level results were published, to the surprise of my teacher I had received a comfortable pass in all subjects, including History. And to my surprise, I was shortly afterwards awarded a prestigious Heseltine Exhibition to study at Brasenose College, Oxford. I give God all the glory for this. I had followed my Pastor’s advice and had tried to put God first. I had honoured the Lord in front of my teacher and fellow-students, and the Lord did not fail me.

A few years later, after graduating from Oxford, I was pastoring a small church in Colchester. The church funds were insufficient to pay me full time, so I was teaching Religious Education in a local secondary school to provide for the needs of our young family. This was clearly part of the Lord’s plan as during the years I was teaching there dozens of teenagers came to our church and made decisions for Christ. But I knew that the Lord had called me to full time ministry and that eventually the time would come for me to give up my teaching job. The question was, when?

The answer came during the Assemblies of God Annual Conference held in Clacton in May 1966. I was not able to attend during the day as it coincided with the school summer term, but I was able to go in the evenings as Clacton is not very far from Colchester. The preacher on the first night was Pastor Eddie Durham. He began by talking about how, in time past, if a man wanted to challenge another to a duel, he would throw down a gauntlet in front of him. The challenge was accepted by the other man picking up the gauntlet. Pastor Durham then produced a motorcycle gauntlet and threw it on the floor before the congregation, saying, I challenge young men in this meeting to give themselves full time to the ministry!

I remember thinking, That’s all very well. I’d love to be full time in the ministry, but it simply isn’t possible financially. My teaching job was our only means of income.  But then I added, But, Lord, if that’s what you want me to do, I’ll do it, but you’ll have to make it very clear by the end of the week.

The reason I said this was that I was contractually obliged to submit my resignation to the school where I was teaching by the end of May if I was not going to return for the beginning of the new term in September. God had just a week to let me know what he wanted me to do. 

And he did! Night after night I went back to those meetings, having told no one but Eileen what I had prayed. And each night, in one way or another, God spoke to me confirming that I was to give up my teaching job. A particular highlight was the preaching of Thomas F. Zimmerman, the General Superintendent of Assemblies of God in the USA, who was one of the guest preachers at the conference. What made it particularly significant was the fact that it was the night of my ordination where hands were laid on me in recognition of the ministry God had given me. Zimmerman’s message was based on 1 Kings 17-18 and the story of Elijah. I was reminded that if we follow God’s PLAN, we will know his PROVISION and his POWER.

By the end of the week Eileen and I were fully convinced that God’s plan was that I should give up my teaching job and trust him to provide for our needs. And so, first thing on Monday morning, I went to the head teacher, who, incidentally, was an atheist, and handed in my resignation. When asked for a reason, I could only reply, Well Sir, this may sound a little strange, but God has told me to.

Next time: God speaks to us through prophets

Talk 11 God speaks through other Christians

Welcome back after a short break. Let’s remind you what we’ve been saying so far. We’ve seen that:

• God speaks to all humanity through his creation
• He spoke to Israel by the prophets
• He has finally spoken by his Son
• He speaks today through the Bible
• He speaks through other people – parents

Why believe that God speaks to us through the Bible

Tells us about Jesus

Jesus believed that God speaks through scripture

The apostles and early church believed…

The Bible shows us the way of salvation

How to understand the Bible correctly

What part of the Bible are we reading – OT or NT?

What is the context of the passage we are reading?

            Literary context

            Historical/sociological context

            Immediate context

Different ways God speaks through the Bible

He teaches what we should believe and how we should behave

He shows us what to expect by giving us examples from the lives of God’s people

He encourages us by giving us many wonderful promises

He directs us by bringing key verses to our attention

God speaks through other people

Last time: Parents

Today: other Christians

I suppose that if we were to ask most Christians who it is they expect God to use in speaking to them, their answer would almost certainly include preachers or pastors or prophets. And we will be dealing with these in later talks. But it’s very important that we should realise that God often speaks through Christians who do not come into any of these categories.

Of course, there are those who are especially gifted by God to speak for him. Ephesians 4:11, for example, mentions apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers. But the New Testament also makes it clear that God expects all his people to speak for him. As I have pointed out elsewhere, there is a sense in which all God’s people are prophets[1]. The Holy Spirit can use anyone he chooses.

For example, the great church at Antioch was first started by ordinary Christians spreading the word. In Acts 8:1-4 we read that, as a result of the persecution that followed the death of Stephen, the Christians were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. But they spread the word wherever they went (v.4). Acts 11:19-21 tells us:

Now those who had been scattered by the persecution in connection with Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch, telling the message only to Jews.

Some of them, however, men from Cyprus and Cyrene, went to Antioch and began to speak to Greeks also, telling them the good news about the Lord Jesus.

The Lord’s hand was with them, and a great number of people believed and turned to the Lord.

So this church was founded, not by the apostles, who had all remained in Jerusalem (Acts 8:2), but by ordinary Christians spreading the good news of the gospel. God can speak through any one of us, and he can speak toany one of us by whomever he chooses, as the following examples from my own experience demonstrate.

I have already mentioned Laurie Dixon whose testimony changed the course of my life. The year before I met Laurie, I was on holiday in the Lake District at a Baptist Summer School where I made friends with a young man named Michael Stewart. Michael told me that the following year he was planning with a couple of Christian friends to take a car and visit several countries in Europe. He asked if I would be interested in joining them. Travelling abroad was far less common in those days than it is today, and I jumped at the opportunity.

So, in 1958 I found myself in Switzerland with Michael and three new friends climbing a mountain. The long climb in the heat of the August sunshine had been tiring. We were unaccustomed to this kind of exercise and the cool water of the mountain stream was inviting to our aching feet. Graham, Michael, and Daphne sat down to rest, putting their feet in the water. But it was my first visit to Switzerland, and somehow I felt that we were wasting an opportunity when there was so much to see. Leaving the others to paddle their feet, Laurie and I climbed higher following the path of the stream, but half an hour later we had had enough too. As we looked down at the others a few hundred feet below us, we realised that we had come up the hard way. To our right there was an easier way down.

Gratefully we turned to take it, when suddenly, as if from nowhere, a large rock came hurtling down the mountainside toward the stream and I was directly in its path! As a fairly athletic nineteen-year-old, I should have been able to jump clear with relative ease, but I was gripped with terror, unable to move. As a Christian I might have thought of praying, but my mind refused to function. In a second it would hit me. The end had surely come. But when the rock was only about a yard away, it struck a small protusion in the ground, changed direction, and crashed into the stream below, missing me by inches! The danger was over as quickly as it had come.

I heaved a sigh of inexpressible relief.

Wow that was lucky! I exclaimed.

Lucky, David?

said Laurie who’d been watching from a few yards away.

That wasn’t luck. I believe God has a purpose for your life and that rock couldn’t have hit you.

It was that simple statement of faith that started a process of enquiry which was to lead to an experience which revolutionised my life. This man was moving in a dimension of Christianity that I knew little or nothing about. So I questioned Laurie to see if I could discover the basic difference.

Although from different denominational backgrounds, I discovered that we had much in common. Doctrinally, our beliefs were almost identical. We believed the same Bible, preached the same gospel, and worshipped the same Saviour. We both knew what it meant to be a born again Christian. We had both been baptised as believers by immersion in water. Basically, we had very much in common. And yet this man had something which I didn’t have, something indefinable, but very real. I asked him what it was.

He started to talk about an experience he had received after his conversion – being baptised with the Holy Spirit he called it – when the Holy Spirit had come and filled him to overflowing. He said he had spoken in tongues and told me I could read about it in the book of Acts. It was at this point, however, that my interest began to wane. I certainly wanted to experience more of God in my life, but as for speaking in tongues, I frankly couldn’t see the point of it. If being baptised with the Holy Spirit meant that I had to speak in tongues, I decided that I had better forget about it. And for a while I did!

On returning to England, I dismissed the subject from my mind and might have ignored it forever, had it not been for the remarkable series of events which took place the following summer. Eileen, my fiancee, and I were sitting in the youth meeting at church singing from a well-known chorus book, when I happened to notice a list of books advertised on the back cover, one of which was entitled, The full blessing of Pentecost, by Dr Andrew Murray. Immediately I concluded that this book must be dealing with the subject Laurie had been talking about last year in Switzerland, and I suggested that it might be good to get it. In a few days, Eileen received a reply from the advertisers saying that the book was no longer available.

A little disappointed, I returned home from Eileen’s to my parents’ house for lunch. As the meal was not quite ready, I went into the sitting room to wait. On entering, I happened to notice a book lying on the piano and casually picked it up – The full blessing of Pentecost by Dr Andrew Murray! But how did it get there? No one, except Eileen, knew anything of my interest in the subject. My parents did not know where the book had come from. It is true that my father had always had a large collection of books, but if it was his, he certainly had never read it, and didn’t even know that he possessed it. Anyway, why wasn’t it in the bookcase and how did it get on the piano? No one to this day has any idea how that book came to be there on the very day that I had thought it to be unobtainable. The answer must surely lie in the realm of the supernatural. With great anticipation, Eileen and I both read the book, and then we both began to pray fervently that we too might be baptised with the Holy Spirit. But the rest of the story must wait till later in the series.

So God used Laurie Dixon to speak to me. This was not only by his words but also by his actions. No doubt we’re all familiar with the expression, Actions speak louder than words. Less well known is the Latin motto, Facta non verba, which means, Deeds not words. We’ve already seen how God speaks to us through Jesus both by what he said and what he did. His actions as much as his words show us what God is like and how he wants us to behave. And this is how he often speaks to us today

A good example of God speaking to me through the actions of another Christian is our friend Jill Cooper who used to help Eileen serve coffee on Sunday mornings at our local church. What she did was incredibly simple, but before I tell you what it was, I need to give you the background story.

In February 2010 Eileen and I went to India for a month at the invitation of the Finnish Pentecostal Churches who asked me to go and teach about the Holy Spirit where they had missionaries working in Mumbai and Machilipatnam. Now while I was the Principal at Mattersey Hall Bible College we had the privilege of training many overseas students several of whom were from India, and when our former students heard about our trip, they were quick to ask us if we would visit them too so that I could preach in the numerous churches they had planted since returning from Mattersey.

We, of course, were delighted to agree, but I knew that the schedule they organized for me would be quite intense and, as I have always believed in observing a Sabbath principle, I asked that one day in seven should be a rest day. However, in practice this didn’t happen, as the day they scheduled as a rest day was the day we had to travel from one place to the next! As a result, and because that year the temperature in India was higher than usual, I was suffering from dehydration and to the disappointment of all concerned, a few of the meetings scheduled had to be cancelled.

Apart from this, we had had a great time in India and after a few weeks back in England I thought I had fully recovered. But towards the end of April, on a preaching trip to Essex, I started to experience similar symptoms to those I’d had in India. I couldn’t understand this as the temperature in England was about half what it had been in India. Without going into unnecessary detail, the next two years proved to be extremely difficult. I continued to experience similar problems every time I preached. I began to wonder if the time had come for me to give up.

Then, at just the right time, Eileen and I were in Exeter at a meeting for Assemblies of God ministers and their wives. The guest preacher was John Glass, the General Superintendent of the Elim Churches. He was preaching on Jeremiah 1 when he came to verses 11-12:

The word of the LORD came to me: “What do you see, Jeremiah?” “I see the branch of an almondtree,” I replied. The LORD said to me, “You have seen correctly, for I am watching to see that my word is fulfilled.”

He explained the play on words that we find in these verses – the Hebrew word for almond is very similar to the word for watch. The almond tree is among the first to blossom in spring. It’s something you watch for as a sign that spring has come. Winter will surely be followed by spring because God watches over his word to see that it is fulfilled.

Now in England most of us don’t see an almond tree too often, so John likened it to crocuses. In his garden they’re the first flowers to bloom in spring. They’re the sign or guarantee that winter won’t be forever. Then John broke away from his notes and said something like this:

There are some of you here who are feeling that your ministry has come to an end. You have been experiencing a bleak winter, but the Lord wants you to know that it will not be forever. You will experience a new springtime.

Eileen and I looked at each other. Was this for us? Surely it must be. But there were a lot of other people in that meeting. Could it be that John’s prophetic word was for them and not for us? We drove home after the meeting hoping, rather than believing, that this really was a word from the Lord for us.

And then, that evening, Jill Cooper arrived on our doorstep and said, I’ve brought you a little present. To be honest, I had bought it for someone else, but then I felt the Lord tell me to give it to you instead.

What was the present? A bowl of crocuses! And without a doubt, I have experienced a new springtime in my ministry. So the Lord does speak to us through other Christians, both by their words and by their actions. And, as the story I have just told you clearly illustrates, he most certainly speaks to us through preachers. But that’s the subject for next time.