A few weeks ago I was sitting in my study chair and my phone began to play the tone that indicates an incoming call. I glanced at the screen as I picked up the phone and saw the word Dad. I swiped my thumb across the screen accepting the call and continued raising the phone to my ear. "Yes, sir," I said, as I always do when I know the caller is from my father.
Leah wasn't thrilled that I answered her call with "Yes, sir." But I had been sure the screen read Dad. I looked again, confused and embarrassed. Now the screen read My Lady. All I could do was try to tell my wife what happened and go on, which I did. The entire incident drifted into the fog of memory. Until yesterday.
Yesterday, about the time of day that Leah gets off work and either calls or texts me, I got a call. Like in the tale above, I took a look at the screen before answering. This is standard procedure. If I don't have a number in my contacts the call can go to voice mail. I'll return the call if it's not a telemarketer or something, and if I know the person, I add them to my contacts for next time. I like to know who I am talking to when I answer. I glanced and read the two wonderful words I expected. My Lady. I swiped acceptance, put the phone to my ear and spoke. "Hello, My Lady, my love." Nothing. No response. The call had ended, which happens sometimes when Leah's phone drops calls. I called her back. No answer. I tried again, and again the call went to voice mail.
What was going on? She just tried to call me, so why wasn't she answering? I sent her a text.
Are you OK? A few minutes later she sent a return text.
Yes why? Before I could finger the answer the screen transitioned from the text app to an incoming call. My Lady. I answered the same as the time before and heard my wife's lovely voice asking me why I wanted to know if she was OK. I explained, to which she informed me that she hadn't called. But the screen showed the call was from her. But she wasn't even in the same room with her phone at the time, and no one else was in there either.
Now, if this was a horror movie that would be time for Leah to get her stuff and get out of the office and then tell her boss she wasn't returning to work until her office was moved to another building. Phones don't dial themselves. Or maybe it would be time for me to leave the house and warn Leah to meet me somewhere else. She hadn't called but my phone said she did. In horror movies, people never take the hint and leave. We don't in real life either. What I did was try to figure out what was going on. I looked at my phone log after the call with Leah ended. It showed a call from a number not in my contacts from Savannah, Georgia that lasted for seven seconds, time enough for my salutation and several seconds of silence before some surprised and confused telemarketer decided to hang up rather than pitch the fool who had just called him or her his lady and his love.
Evidently, when a call comes in on my phone, the first ID that pops up on the screen is the identity of the last caller before the present one, and then either doesn't change because the call is from the same person as the previous call (the vast majority of my calls are from my wife anyway) or switches to the correct ID for the call. If I answer too quickly, before the ID catches up, I answer with the chance of having the caller be someone other than who I thought was calling. I told Leah what happened, and she laughed. She thought it was hilarious, and I thought so too, once I got over my confusion. The solution to the problem is simple. I need only wait long enough to answer to let the ID catch up, so that I know that the screen is giving me the correct identity of the caller.
But then the situation made me think how sometimes this happens with our spiritual phones as well. A thought comes and we think it's God, until it turns our it wasn't after we already answered and messed up. Or, doubting our Spiritual Caller ID app, we think it probably wasn't God when it was and missed the call. When was the last time God spoke to you and you knew it was Him? Or when was the last time God spoke to you and you realized later it was Him? Recently? Been a while? Or perhaps you're unsure if God has ever spoken to you or not?
This is important information for us to know. If we are going to act on what God tells us and obey His voice, we need to know when He's the one speaking and it's not our own thoughts, the misguided thoughts of others or,even worse, the enemy trying to mess with us. How do we turn on Spiritual Caller ID and make sure it's accurate? How do we know when God is calling?
Well, if you have come to surrender your life and will to Christ, then you have at least once accurately identified the voice of God speaking to you. He said come, and you said yes. Our faith is a gift from God, and we have to hear the call and respond in order to activate the gift of faith and engage the gift of grace in our life. That means that every Christian has heard God speak. Still it can be a scary and confusing situation, listening for God's voice. For one thing, He doesn't speak to us in the big booming voice of the mountain to Moses. It's not so much an audible voice as something that does actually sound a lot like the voice of our own thoughts. So how do we know it's not just our own thoughts?
First, let me say that God does speak to us, yes, even you. If your are His, He talks to you. If you are not His yet, He is calling you to become His. He's talking. Sometimes we're not hearing. Sometimes we're not even listening. Sometimes we're not realizing it's Him. But He's speaking to us. Beware the impulse to feel rejected when we don't feel like He's speaking to us (there are periods of quiet and more often, times when we can't hear or don't recognize that we are hearing) or condemned for not understanding when it's God that we're hearing. Jesus said that the sheep hear the voice of the shepherd and know it, and that's a great promise that we'll hear and know the voice of the Good Shepherd Jesus. But that can also make us feel like maybe we're not His or like we're doing something wrong or that we're the exception, when we don't know, when we're not sure when and if it's His voice, when we may not even realize that we're hearing.
So before going any further lets nip that blooming weed of doubt from the enemy in the bud really quickly by extending the same analogy that Jesus used. The sheep hear the shepherds voice and know it. Sheep are mature. They hear and they know because they learned His voice when they were little lambs. As lambs sometimes they heard the shepherd speak and didn't respond until they saw the older sheep respond. Sometimes they heard something and began to move toward it and then stopped, realizing no one else was responding to what they heard. They learned what sounds actually were the voice of the shepherd and which ones weren't.
We have to do the same thing. We have to learn. And the way to learn is to listen. God speaks to us through His Word, through our thoughts, through the mouths of others (which means His voice goes through their thoughts), through music and signs. But how do we know? Couldn't it just be imagination or coincidence? Not if it's God. Sometimes to learn His voice, we have to look back. Something happened, we didn't see or hear God at the time, but after we realized it was Him. Sometimes we respond to His voice, thinking it is simply our own thinking and inadvertently obey God. We can ask the Holy Spirit to show us those times in our past that God has spoken to us and we didn't realize it. We can be attentive to that possibility as we review our day and look for retroactive signs that God spoke to us throughout the day. When we see the hand of God on our past, there may be times when we then also see that He spoke to us at the time or before hand. We can log that as the sheep moving and learn to listen and look for those moments in our present.
But while retroactive listening can help us learn His voice it's not enough. For one thing it doesn't help the present and give us direction, and for another thing, it's awfully convenient to look bad and attribute what worked out to God and what didn't to us. If that's all we do, we won't learn His voice or mature into sheep. We need to know His voice when it comes.
So, we take every thought captive. That means we wait a second before we act. We don't dismiss the intuitive thought as fantasy or wishful thinking nor do we accept it as the voice of God without examination. Give it time for the ID to be verified. The first filter to run the thought through is the Word. Does the instruction or direction the thought is giving or leading line up with the Word? If it conflicts with the message, overall theme or instruction of Scripture, it doesn't matter what the screen is showing, it isn't Daddy.
Is the message consistent with Daddy's character? We need to study the Word for more than instruction. We need to learn the nature and personality of our Adopted Dad. This way, even if someone sounds like Daddy, we'll know if it's Him or not. God doesn't change. His character, who He is and how He loves, remains steady. So, if the message twists His nature or isn't motivated by or furthering the pouring out of His love, it's not His voice. Also our thoughts are not His thoughts and His ways are not His ways, so when our thoughts line up with His ways and thoughts, it's by grace, which is by His Spirit, which means somewhere in there we're hearing His voice and His thoughts influencing our thoughts.
Is there any confirmation? On the big things there is more than one place in the Bible when men of God who had heard God speak before and presumably knew His voice said, "Um, this is a really big deal, and I want to be sure, so please confirm the message." Say it again God. Say it in a sermon or a song or a Scripture or someone else, or some other way, but let me know that it's not just me before I step out to obey on this issue that is life changing. We may not need to do this before we give a beggar $10. Worse case for us if we're wrong is that we're out a little cash. But before you quit your job, sell your house and move across the country because God told you to, you might want to get a confirmation. The good news is that there is not one instance where confirmation was asked for on something crucial that God didn't give it. He doesn't get mad at us for making sure it's Him.
Does it go beyond our ability and resources and take us out of our comfort zone? God loves to use us to show His glory, which means we get told to do things that are beyond us They stretch us. They take us out of our comfort zone. They have us wading into a Red Sea before it parts so that if God doesn't do His part we drown and when He does His part there's no question who did it. If everything God's telling us to do is easy, comfortable and within our level of skill of ability, we're missing some messages.
Would it be pleasing to God? Is listening to this voice going to bring us closer to God or bring others closer to Him? Is it loving? Is it based on truth? Is it going to be something that will show His glory? These are some of the filters that we need to run each thought through to get an ID before we act on it. The more we respond and make not of Daddy's voice, the more easily we recognize it when it comes. We can make note of our mistakes and see where a thought slipped through the filter and learn what His voice is not also. Today, let us turn on our Spiritual Caller ID and ask the Spirit to show us His voice in our lives, even after the fact for those of us still learning or in need of encouragement that we are being spoken to.
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