Trinity 12 – Hearing God’s Voice

2 Corinthians 3:4-9       St Mark 7:31-37

Looking up to heaven, Jesus sighed and said to him,
“Ephphatha”, that is, “Be opened.”
And his ears were opened, his tongue was released,
and he spoke plainly.

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Can you hear me?  You hear me battling sometimes with our sound system.  But as a preacher I can see sometimes, even if the sound system is working, I’m connecting sometimes as I speak with some of you and other times I’m not.  The words are being spoken but they are not always being heard.

And I know there are a myriad of things going on in each of your lives today that affect your concentration, and there is also the factor of my ability or inability to speak with clarity and with a kind of conviction that grips you – so that the Gospel strikes your heart and moves you.

We know there are all sorts of circumstances that intervene between the word spoken and the word received.  And it is much more the case with the Voice of God.

In our Gospel this morning Jesus heals a person who was deaf and had an impediment to speaking.

The miracles of Jesus are given to us for a few reasons – first to point to the presence and power of God in Jesus.  They point to Jesus as the expected Messiah.  When John the Baptist was in prison, he sent two of his followers to as Jesus directly, are you the Messiah.  Jesus replied,

Go and show John again those things which you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up and the poor have the Gospel preached to them.  [Matt. ll.2f]

Jesus is saying clearly that he is the promised Messiah and the Kingdom of God has begun to break through into this world. The miracles point to this fulfilment of prophecy. [Fr Crouse sermon]

But each of the miracles also has a spiritual meaning for us.  Today the significance of opening the ears of the deaf and mute man, signifies Jesus’ promise to open our ears to the voice of God and to open our mouths in thanksgiving.

I imagine that all of us would like to hear God speak to us individually, and I know that some of us here have heard that word.

In the Old Covenant, we read about how God spoke very clearly to individuals at different times and in different ways.  In Genesis there are many examples of God speaking directly to individuals, sometimes in the day other times at night in dreams.  And sometimes God spoke indirectly through an angel.  When Moses was leading God’s people through the wilderness he invited others to come to Mt Sinai to hear God’s voice, but  the people in the camp were terrified and asked him to hear on their behalf and tell them.

“When all the people perceived the thunderings and the lightnings and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid and trembled, and said to Moses, ‘You speak to us, and we will hear; but let not God speak to us lest we die.’” [Ex 20:18-19]

There was a fear of hearing the voice of God directly.

Later God chose to speak through judges and prophets and kings.

God prepared a way to mediate between His voice and the people, the gift of the Law.

And we know as we read through the history in the Old Testament that the Law could be read but not received in the heart, in a way that was really truly heard.  Hearing the Word requires also faith in that Word so that it would bring about obedience and love.

What about us?  Are we hearing the voice of God speaking to us in a way that is profoundly shaping us?  Would we like to hear God more directly?

The Epistle accompanying our Gospel today, is to remind us of the difference between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant because of the gift of the Holy Spirit through our baptism and faith.

Now if the ministry of death, carved in letters on stone, came with such glory that the Israelites could not gaze at Moses' face because of its glory, which was being brought to an end, will not the ministry of the Spirit have even more glory?

As Christians, under the new dispensation in Jesus Christ, we are to expect the possibility of hearing God’s voice directly or indirectly in an individual way in our lives.  The Almighty God, Creator of all that is, seen and unseen, cares for each one of us as a heavenly Father and, as part of our healing, will open our ears to hear His voice, and our mouths to give praise.

How will God speak to us?

Foremost we have the voice of God, the very words of the Word made flesh, recorded for us in the Bible.  But we know that we can physically hear those words and yet be deaf to them, or that it is heard rationally in the mind but doesn’t land on us in a way that really moves our hearts.

But it is the experience of many of us that as we are reading God’s Word, the same story we have read many times before, will suddenly awaken something in us, a new insight that moves us to change, maybe all of a sudden bringing about true repentance or a word of deep encouragement in our suffering.  We can open ourselves to this possibility of God working in this way by putting Scripture before our eyes expectantly day in and day out.

And that process of reading daily, will also allow for another way that the Spirit will work in our lives.  Remember this promise of Jesus to His disciples on the night he was betrayed about the coming Comforter [St John 14:26]:

the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.

The Holy Spirit will work within us to remind us of Jesus’ Words in particular situations if we have Jesus’ Words in our memories from having read them.

But there are other ways too:

God spoke through the Prophet Joel [2:28] to explain about this new dispensation that will come with the pouring out of His Spirit.  St Peter quoted this passage from Joel in his first sermon on the Day of Pentecost [Acts 2:17f], describing to the crowd what was happening to the Apostles:

it shall come to pass afterwards,
that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh;
your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
your old men shall dream dreams,

To prophesy is to hear the voice of God – to be given a word to share.  To be given a dream by God is to hear the voice of God.

Prophesy is one of the gifts of the Spirit that St Paul speaks about in 1 Corinthians 12.  But note that not everyone has this gift, we are not all going to hear the voice of God in this way.

Then comes the difficulty of discerning God’s voice from the myriad of other voices in our minds, some may inspired by wishful thinking, some by darker sources.

Someone who I know has this gift to hear God's voice, who had previously been confused by voices from the evil one, says she knows when it is God’s voice by a warming of her heart and the experience of tears first just before or at the hearing of the words.

Dreams are something that we all experience, but how do we distinguish if a dream is from God or from our own soul?  I do think dreams can be helpful in understanding something about our own souls (to understand something of our subconscious thoughts) but that they are not normally a direct message from God.  In my own life I have experienced a few times a dream I believed was from God.  It had a clarity about it that other dreams do not, and it resulted in a deepening of my faith and love for God.  I think those are good signs it is of God.

Whether prophesy is of God or not, God gives through Moses the most simple of means of discernment –

if you say in your heart, ‘How may we know the word that the Lord has not spoken?’— when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him. [Deut 18:21-22]

And here I add a word of caution.  Charismatic movements that arise in the Church in many denominations from time to time can be important instruments of renewal and reminding us to not forget the gifts of the Spirit and to walk in expectation.  But these movements can also be immature in their assumptions about what is truly God’s voice and what is not.

When I was in Utrecht at Holy Trinity Church, we offered a course on Hearing God’s Voice.  And I must confess to becoming more cautious about people who have certainty that they are hearing God’s voice as there can be harm done by those who are not mature.  One of the warnings in the course is never to tell someone about their future even if you think you see something.  I have seen that rule violated more than once.

But I hope we are encouraged by today’s readings to live with a real expectation, an anticipation, of hearing God’s voice.

• When we are praying – do we leave time for silence before God? Are we fostering contemplative prayer, quietening down the thoughts of our mind so that we are ready to hear a still small voice within, as Elijah did in a cave after all the noise? [1 Kings 19:11-13]
• If we have a particularly important decision to make, do we combine prayer with fasting, as we see the Apostles do repeatedly in the Acts of the Apostles? And they received very direct guidance from the Spirit for their circumstances.
• Are we reading Scripture regularly, so that God may use this for very direct and personal advice, both at the moment of reading and by having it brought our minds later by the Spirit?
• In our conversation with others – our spouse, our families, others in the Church also gifted with the Spirit, do we have an openness to their critique of us or their advice to us?
• And in our dreams – this is one I’m especially expectant of as I become an old man! Your old men shall dream dreams!

Our Liturgy is build all around the expectation of God speaking to us, by the build up to hearing the words of Jesus spoken at the Gospel, this central moment in the Liturgy, and to preaching on it, and it is all leading us to be ready to receive Christ in our hearts.

Let us prepare ourselves now for the Holy Communion of Christ’s Body and Blood.  Pray God will take from us any blockages from hearing His voice.  And as we return from the sanctuary, with Christ in us, in quiet, let us ask Him, Speak Lord, for your servant is listening. [1 Sam 3]  And our mouths will be opened and compelled to give thanks!

Amen +