Does God Speak To Us Today?

Last year I received several email forwards from friends that related a story of a man’s desire to know whether or not God speaks to us in an audible voice today. In the story, the man asked God to “speak to him” and he would trust and obey His voice. While the man did not hear an audible voice, he felt a strong sense of being led by God. Following the leading of the spirit, the man was compelled to buy a gallon of milk and delivered it to a house in an unfamiliar part of town. The man knocked on the door and the man who opened the door did not seem to be very happy with this late night visitor. After handing over the milk, the homeowner began to cry and explained that he had just fallen on hard times and he and his wife was just praying for some milk for their baby just before the knock on their door. The wife then asked the stranger if he was an angel sent by God. The email forward concluded with God is alive and well and His voice will become clearer the more we listen and obey. The forward then said to pass it on if I believed.

I could not bring myself to forward this email even though I have heard about things like this, and have no doubt that God can guide or speak to us in this way. For myself, I want more assurance that I’m not down the end of a gun barrel when I knock on a stranger’s door. Call it a lack of faith, if you will, but there are some things that I wrestle with when I think that I’m “hearing the voice of God.”

There was a time when I used to think that I knew the “Voice of God” and I used to prophesy. One day after I made a prophetic declaration, I was bewildered when the Voice of God was wrong and it really distressed me that God could be wrong. After wondering how God could make a mistake, I had to ask myself several questions. These questions were, “Was God wrong?,” “Did I misunderstand?,” and “Was it really the voice of God that I heard?”

If God was wrong and God can make mistakes, then how can I trust Him? If I heard wrong, then how could I trust myself? What I thought I heard seemed perfectly clear to me on the day that I heard it. If it wasn’t God that was speaking, then who was it? After struggling with these questions for a season, there are three underlying questions that I ask myself before I come to a conclusion. They are:

1. I have been wrong before and I most likely will make mistakes in the future. In the past, I have had an intuition about some things and have been “sure” about other things. Sometimes my feelings or intuition were correct. Other times they were wrong. What or who can I trust?

2. The Scriptures say that we should test everything. I believe this includes our thoughts, feelings, and motives (I Thessalonians 5:21, I John 4:1) to see whether they are from God or from another source (II Corinthians 11:14-15). What is the standard for my test?

3. The Scriptures claim that it is flawless, right, and true (Psalms 33:4, 119:160). The “Living Word” (Jesus) claims that His words are sure, dependable, and eternal (Matthew 7:24, 24:34). Do I believe this?

The conclusion that I have come to is that I should not always believe the voices in my head when I often do not believe or obey the revealed words of Jesus (Matthew 5:23-25, 44, 25:40, 45). So far in my life, there is no one or nothing that I have complete trust in. On the other hand, there really is no one in running except the “Voice of God” (Jesus) in Scripture.