Hear You Him

 adventure that explodes, impacting many other lives in the process. The weary are strengthened. The frightened are emboldened. The powerless are encouraged. The weak are made strong. Closed doors are opened. The imprisoned are set free. Names and lives are changed forever. As a toddler, my son, Jake, had a few favorite and very exciting

Bible storybooks. Each night, he begged us to read them over and over and over. Integral to each story was a very specific conversation between the person in the story and God. Interestingly, Jake never questioned how the individual heard God speak to him he even heard God talk out loud. He, like most children, inherently understood that talking is a basic method of communication. Jake didn't express doubt that God spoke in the past or in the present, or that God could be heard or understood by people of any age or of any occupation. Jake just seemed comfortable with the idea that God talked to everyone because everyone talks.

So, on one occasion, when I had to discipline my young son for unruly behavior, I sent him off to his bedroom for what we called a time-out. As he sauntered down the long hallway to his room, I suggested that he get "alone with God" and have a conversation with Him about his attitude. What is a mother to do when her child yells from his bedroom after only a few short minutes in confinement, "Mom, I talked to God and I told Him I'm sorry and He told me I can come out of my room now!"

If children find so easy to believe that God talks to us and they possess a basic understanding of why God talks to us, then why does the idea of God talking to us seem so difficult for adults to grasp?

In his book Hearing God, Dallas Willard explains that if we could envision ourselves in a Bible story, then we'd view the Bible less as dogma and doctrine and more like our own reality. He writes that biblical men and women were no different than men and women of any generation, saying, "If we are really to understand the Bible record, we must enter into our study of it on the assumption that the experiences recorded there are basically of the same type as ours would have been if we had been there.Those who lived through those experiences felt very much as we would have if we had been in their place. Unless this comes home to us, the things that happened to the people in the Bible will remain unreal to us. We will not genuinely be able to believe the Bible or find its contents to be real because it will have no experiential substance for us."

Give it a try. Put yourself within the mix of the writers of the psalms as their friends or family members were mocking them, or their employers were hunting them down to destroy them. Can you relate to their struggles? Do you have similar needs or concerns? As you read the following passages, do they inspire you to direct these words toward the living, loving God, or to make them your own?

Psalm 138, verse 3 says, "As soon as I pray, you answer me; you encourage me by giving me strength" (NLT).

Psalm 25, verse 14 says, "The Lord confides in those who fear him; he makes his covenant known to them."

Psalm 119:34, 38 says, "Give me understanding, reassure me of your promise" (NLT).

One hundred and fifty psalms contain the written conversations of those who knew God talked to them directly. This belief is evidenced by the way they poured out their hearts to Him, as if to say, "Talk to me!" Packed with verbal expressions of need, hope,and inquiry, the psalmists transparently and honestly relayed their utter dependence on their God they could not see but were convinced was always present and available to talk to them. Verse after verse of the psalms has the ability to carry you away to a place of passionate, emotional, two-way conversations with God. In fact, the entire Bible - both the Old and New Testaments - consistently reveals the pattern of God talking to men and women in order to make himself and His ways known to them.

Will you allow the living, loving God to talk to you?

As the Creator, overall, He has a plan to reveal to you.

As the King of all, He has the power and authority to impart to you.

As your Savior, He is able to rescue you.

God talks to us because He knows, and we know that talking is the best and sometimes the only way to deliver an important, even urgent message. Talking is how human beings reveal a secret or deliver confidential information. Talking is the oral method of communication that provides comfort to those who are anxious or afraid; it imparts wisdom or counsel; it can serve as a warning to save lives; and it can gently refocus or abruptly shake sense into someone!

The third reason God talks to you is because He has something significant to tell you that will help others.

When God talks to you, He invites you to cooperate with Him to either speak into the lives of others on His behalf or help them in their time of need.

Most of the great men and women of God whom I've personally known, or whose remarkable lives I've read about in books, had a common thread: they would tell you without hesitation thatGod talked to them. Frankly, to confess that God talks to you takes guts! But the written accounts of their lives reveal they specifically knew what God said to them, where they were when He said it, and more important, how (or if) they responded to Him. And very often, they risked their lives or reputations because they believed God asked them to do something unusual or unexpected in order to stop or start something that they had no strength or