Hearing Voices
How many voices a day do you listen to? I guess that would depend on who you live with, or work with, go to school with, or serve in ministry with. It would depend on who your neighbors are and whether or not you converse with them. Perhaps you have a co-dependent dog who doesn’t know he’s a dog (that would be our almost blind #MoDawg). If you do have a dog, you tend to listen to their barks, whines, or growls as they try to talk to you. The last 2 week’s posts, He Speaks and I Listen and When It Just Won’t End, would be a great place to start if you missed those.
I would venture to say, we all listen to what is happening in our culture since we really can’t help it. It is everywhere. Social media screams out all kinds of opinions and thoughts we have to sift through to discover what is real and what isn’t. Much of what we hear daily is coming from false voices. How do we filter through it all and know what to believe?
Because our culture is telling us quite a few things that don’t “seem” right as followers of Christ, we must go to the only source that is 100% true, the Word of God. No other standard never changes and is always true. Every thing God says has, or will, come true one day.
In the middle of my study of Jude, by Jackie Hill Perry, Jackie talks about how our instincts can be ignorant when we are listening to the voices around us.
In Jude, the next to last book of the Bible, the author (Jude, brother of Jesus) was warning believers about those in their midst who were defiling the flesh and rejecting authority. He didn’t want the believers to get swayed by what they were seeing and hearing. He wanted them to persevere in the Truth of Christ rather than be influenced by these false voices.
We see what happens when we listen to true voices, and when we listen to those that aren’t. In 1 Samuel 3, after Samuel heard a voice call his name, the priest Eli told him to answer that voice with, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” God loves to speak to us when we ask Him, and He always tells us the truth. Later in 1 Samuel, King Saul stopped obeying and listening to God’s voice. So, God stopped speaking to him. He even went to a medium in chapter 28 to get answers since God was silent. This was something God prohibited (Leviticus 20).
The very first part of the armor of God that Paul mentioned in Ephesians 6 is the belt of truth. It is the part of the armor that holds all the other pieces in place. And the sword of the spirit, the true Word, is our offensive weapon we use to battle the enemy and his lies.
1 Thessalonians 5:21 says to “test all things”. That is a lesson for us regarding the voices of our culture. Measure up what you hear with Scripture. If it doesn’t support the Lord’s commands and the principles He teaches us throughout all of the Bible, you can pretty well know, it’s one of those false voices. Even if someone tells you that the Bible says…whatever…look it up yourself! Do not trust it as truth especially if it feels a bit “off”. It doesn’t have to be far off the truth to become untruth!
Whose voice speaks the loudest to you? Your friends, school teachers, unsaved co-workers, the media, the cultural majority…or the Voice of Truth?
1 John 4:1-6
Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see if they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming; even now it is already in the world. You are from God, little children, and you have conquered them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world. They are from the world. Therefore what they say is from the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God. Anyone who knows God listens to us; anyone who is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of deception.
Listen to God before you listen to the world, in fact before you listen to anyone else!
If you aren’t spending time in the Word daily, if you aren’t seeking to know Jesus better through His Word and spending time alone with Him, you will be much more vulnerable to those false voices, those lies that are all around you. You only recognize lies when you know the Truth!
Banner photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
