Did You Hear Thunder?

"⁷ My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me." John 10:27

I believe that we always hear the voice of God; often we ignore what we hear; sometimes we think we hear just the noise of our own thoughts,  and it doesn't make any sense to us, but He is always there, in us, faithfully speaking truth, imparting Life.

The goal of this journey I walk with people is not to fix them, it is to lead them into intimacy with Jesus. A beautiful side effect of learning to listen for his voice speaking in our hearts is that our day to day thoughts and feelings are radically changed, and so our behavior is changed as well.

When we bump into Jesus, we can’t help being changed by him. His presence, his personality, his grace, his lovingkindness, his words of reassurance, comfort and delight over us: all these are incredibly powerful if we will let go of ourselves and experience him for a moment. Each facet of who he is transforms our hearts.

When he walked the earth in flesh and blood as a man, people followed Jesus out of sheer delight. He is a pure joy to be around. Even though he was always saying impossible things like “Be Ye perfect as God is perfect”, or extreme things like, “sell all you have, give it to the poor, and come follow me”, people still wanted to be around him all the time. He is always trying to wake us up to our true poverty and invite us to come receive from him. I’m sure people back then didn’t understand, and we don't either, but that doesn’t matter, we want this LIFE he is offering.

 Whenever people give him even the briefest of chances to speak into their hearts, we find joy bubbling up, joy even to tears, and release of emotions, and false beliefs that may have been festering for years.

Take this woman I recently met with. We have been meeting for about 9 months now, and I have seen incredible changes in her heart and mind, and in her demeanor, and it has all happened because she learned (I’d like to say I taught her, but I didn’t really) that Jesus speaks in her heart, every day, every moment, and she can be with him in her thoughts any time she wants to. Although her story is a very tough one, full of betrayal, abandonment and lies, she has learned to look at it all differently because of God's interpretation of her life.

As we sat down for a mentoring session the other day, I pulled out a Taylor Johnson personality test she took 9 months ago, and another one that she just took a week or so ago. This test is a self-report designed to show what is going on inside a person’s emotions on a deep level, sometimes even deeper than they themselves are aware. It can be quite revealing. On several key markers she has seen incredible transformation, so I thought it was time to celebrate together. Her levels of depression and anxiety, since learning to listen to Jesus, have gone from very high, to quite normal and healthy levels  Her level of emotional expressiveness has gone from extremely inhibited to much more expressive and responsive. One of the most significant markers, subjectivity (which measures the tendency to be caught up in emotion and self-absorbed) has come way down as she learns to see things from the far broader and more balanced perspective of Jesus. Finally, after walking through forgiveness, we have seen her level of hostility drop as she becomes much more tolerant and understanding of herself and others. Her view of herself is far more positive as well; she is learning to rest in the grace of God and not in her own performance. None of the circumstances of her life have changed, but her inner world has been changed by simply spending time listening and enjoying the presence of Jesus.

Now, I’m not saying that measurements like this test are the way God looks at us, or the way He wants us to look at ourselves, but it can be very encouraging to be able to see the change in the way a person feels, thinks and acts put down in paper on a graph! There is a metric of celebration present here, yet the transformation that Jesus has worked is beyond any measurement or chart. It is a change in the spirit that is ineluctably working its way out into our daily lives. Learning to tune into what He is doing, as this woman has done, is simply a wonderful catalyst to witnessing the change as it happens.

I see changes like this in people every day, even in the course of just an hour of talking, or a few minutes of prayer time with Jesus.

Before Jesus went to the cross, He stood before a crowd and asked the Father to glorify His name. The Father replied, presumably in a voice audible to all who stood by “I have glorified it, and will glorify it again.” But the crowd that was there and heard it said it had thundered; others said an angel had spoken to him.

The same is true for all of us. We may be tempted to write off the miracle of Jesus speaking into our hearts as nothing but our own thoughts. Someone standing by might say something that amounts to the dismissal of “did you hear thunder?” But together with Jesus, you and I have a chance to witness and celebrate the miracle. Because we're with Jesus in this process, we can hear the voice of the Father saying to each of us “This is my beloved, on whom my favor rests” and so much more . . . as He reveals His amazing love to us.

I praise God for your participation in the message of the good news with me.

Charles