THE STILL SMALL VOICE OF GOD

The cacophony of secular ideas and thoughts have slowly but surely silenced the still small voice of God calling us to gaze upward into His countenance, to emanate the light of His glory, and to surrender to His perfect will. We are being bifurcated in our allegiance; on one hand, we pledge to follow Him all the way, but on the other hand we are drawn to the stirring of the growing barbarians – the relapse to neo-paganism where we make our own gods out of our hearts and our minds.

Let us stop on our track, pause for a moment, before we go any further down the path of foolishness or in a cruder form, a sublime stupidity. Why? How could we ever live our lives without the Lord? How could we even try to make sense of our lives by ourselves? We need the Lord. We need to learn to gaze into His face. We need to surrender to the perfect will of God!

There are no options and no substitutions to being in the presence of God. It is better to spend a day in His court than a thousand elsewhere. It is better to hear the still small voice of God and walk in obedience than justifying and debating within ourselves because of the rational yet dissonant sound of secular ideas and philosophies. We have the Word of God. We have the Spirit of God. We need to open our hearts to the leading of the Lord.

I am struggling with my mental processes, my imagination, what the Bible says, and what I see within and without the church. All of these have given me a spiritual “headache”. As an example, I don’t see how people could say so easily “God said these” or “God spoke to me” or “God told me to tell you.” How could we use terms like these so easily and freely? How do we know that we know He has spoken? What is the indication? What is the sign that He said it? Is it audible? Is it an impression? Could our impression be wrong? How often have we been right? Is there a possibility of presumptions and assumptions when we said it so freely? If we could use it so freely, then those who can’t means what – they are not in tune, not in close intimacy?

Yet I can’t deny the fact that God would choose to do that either. I have read in the Bible how he had spoken in a still small voice to the prophets. It is a known fact that God does speak in such fashion.

So what should we do? I believe that it’s a learning process for all of us. I think I will have to press in and press through, patiently wait upon the Lord and learn to hear and recognized His voice when He speaks. There’s no other way to go. Even if we said that He speaks through His Word we still need that still small voice reassuring us from deep within that indeed He meant for that text, that passage or that portion in the Bible to be personal to you. Perhaps one of the most assuring thought from the Scriptures is found in Isaiah 30:18-21 –

Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you, and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you. For the Lord is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for him. For a people shall dwell in Zion, in Jerusalem; you shall weep no more. He will surely be gracious to you at the sound of your cry. As soon as he hears it, he answers you. And though the Lord give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction,  yet your Teacher will not hide himself anymore, but your eyes shall see your Teacher. And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, “This is the way, walk in it,” when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left.

I think now is the time when God’s grace is found in abundance. He will be gracious to our cries. He will hear us as soon as we call upon Him. Isaiah said that even though God gave us “the bread of adversity and the water of affliction” – times of testing and trials – yet in the midst of it all the Holy Spirit, the Teacher of righteousness will not hide anymore. We will see the Teacher of righteousness and will hear when He leads and guides us with the still small voice from behind us – “this is the way, walk in it.”