DOES GOD STILL SPEAK?
(If He does, is He speaking to me?)

Does God still communicate with His creation? Does He care enough about us that He wants a relationship with us just like any father does with his children? Or has He created us and left us to our own devices, never to be heard from again?

The answer is yes, God does still speak, but to hear Him we must first settle in our minds that there is a God, that God exists.  Why would we even bother trying to listen to God if we didn’t think He was real?

Another thing that we need to have settled is God cares for us. We may believe that God is real but we also need to know that He cares enough to want to speak to us.

 Maybe you remember or can even quote that well known verse “For God so loved the world…” God loves His creation, and He knows and loves each one of us. He made a tremendous sacrifice for us, His Son was tortured to death for our sakes, just so the lost relationship with His creation could be restored . All the plans and efforts to restore the relationship between us and God were designed and initiated by Him, God’s longing for us should be pretty evident.

God’s existence, His love for us and His desire to restore the relationship between us should make us think that the problem isn’t that God is no longer speaking, maybe it’s because we can no longer hear Him or, we just are not listening.

Jesus taught us many things about our Heavenly Father and about sin and the need for salvation and our need to have spiritual ears. After Jesus taught, he would sometimes say, “He who has ears, let him hear.” Of course, most of the people there had two ears but Jesus was talking about different ears and a different way of hearing. Jesus said “My words are spirit and life”. Jesus was saying that only people with spiritual ears could hear His spiritual words. God is Spirit and He speaks in a spiritual manner that is not heard or understood with our natural ears or mind. 

That ability to hear spiritual words has mostly been lost when creation fell and our relationship with God was cut off. Now when we hear God speaking it’s just a vague sense, or a feeling. Some call it a “gut feeling” that usually goes unnoticed by us. God’s spiritual voice has become foolishness to us. The apostle John describes an incident when God spoke from Heaven to a crowd of people and, although all the people heard the sound of the voice they were divided about who spoke. One group thought it was God, some thought it was an angel that spoke and others thought it was just thunder. Isn’t it a shame that we can become so spiritually hard of hearing that when God calls out to us His voice can sound as ordinary as thunder?

There has to be a change in us, a transformation from a fallen creation that has become spiritually deaf and blind to a new creation, to have that lost relationship restored and to renew the capacity to hear God.

There was a man named Nicodemus in the Bible who came to speak with Jesus, even though Nicodemus had expert knowledge of the scriptures and was a “teacher of Israel”, he really didn’t have a full understanding because he couldn’t “hear” what God was saying. Nicodemus didn’t have spiritual ears. 

Jesus told Nicodemus the solution was to be “born from above.” This spiritual rebirth is available to all and is God’s design for us to renew our relationship with Him. With this spiritual rebirth we become a new creation, a spiritual creation.  The relationship is restored and the hearing is restored.

So, for the question, “Does God still speak?”, the answer is yes, but do we have ears to hear Him?