Do You Hear God's Word?

Christ said to the religious Jews in His day, “He that is of God heareth God's words: ye therefore hear them not, because ye are not of God” (John 8:47). That men will hear men there can be no doubt. They will receive the witness of men. But no man apart from the grace of God will hear GOD. Unless we are chosen of God, redeemed of God and quickened by the Spirit we cannot and will not hear God. To hear God we must “hear God’s words..” The truth is, a man may speak the truth but we only believe what we know to be true from God’s words. We only believe God when we have seen it for ourselves in His word! That’s why so many people are deceived, they receive the witness of men, of preachers often times who do not speak according to God’s words.

God’s preacher wants people to see if they are telling the truth by checking them in God’s word. The Bereans were said to be “noble” because they searched the scriptures to see if the things Paul said was true (Acts 17:10-11). Paul was an apostle of God but the test of this was to see if he was preaching God’s words. In spiritual matters of the soul we are not to take the word of any man without checking the word of God. “To the law and the testimony, if they speak not according to this word it is because there is no light in them" (Isaiah 8:20). “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1).

How do we do try or test what we hear? The holy scriptures! Only then do we really “hear God.” Satan seeks to blind men and women by making them lazy, not studying the word for themselves but leaving all in the hands of a fallible preacher. We preach the truth as it is in Christ Jesus but it falls on deaf ears. The Lord Jesus said that some will hear! “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me" (John 10:27), and, "They know not the voice of strangers” (John 10:5b). Those born of God will hear God’s words, hear them so as to believe them and act on them. They will hear the written Word of God as coming from the mouth of God Himself. Let man say what he will, they hear God. “The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the LORD hath made even both of them” (Proverbs 20:12). If we do not hear God, we are not the children of God!

-Gospel report by preacher Gary Shepard