Competing Voices

We often have a problem distinguishing the voices we hear. We are not talking about your friends, mother, father, spouse, employer, etc. We are talking about voices that cannot be confined to any particular person, but may be combinations of some of those voices. That probably sounds a little confusing. Hopefully it will make more sense by the time we finish here.

I write a blog as you all know. Sometimes people make comments to posts on the blog. It is my decision to determine whether to post those comments, edit them, and/or respond to them. My decision is to publish all comments as they are written. (Although I have recently had to rethink that position because I seem to be getting spam comments of late. Any that appear to be spam will not be published.) There once was a dissenting voice to that decision. That voice was made up of multiple voices supposedly representing a multitude of voices. That voice gave me the option of taking down the whole blog or finding another local church with which to fellowship. I firmly believe the Holy Spirit directed the writing of this blog, and in fact, it was within the confines of that same, local church that I originally recognized the working of the religious spirit in this area. I assume you know which option I chose.

When confronted with the voice of man or the voice of the Holy Spirit, I feel confident most all of us would choose to follow the latter. We do have scriptural precedent for that, by the way. Acts chapter 5, starting at verse 17 tells the story of Peter and friends being told by a religious spirit (Yes, I know it was speaking through the high priest at the time.) to cease and desist from preaching the name of Jesus, healing people, casting out demons, and leading people to faith in Jesus as the Christ. (Loose paraphrase.) If you go back and look at that passage, you will notice an angel speaking to Peter, telling him what he should do. The voice of the angel is in direct dissent with that of the high priest. Recall that the high priest, at that time in history, had, to some measure, the power of life and death over the Jews. It was he and his associates that had convinced Pilate to crucify Jesus. Peter chose to listen to the voice of the angel rather than that of the high priest. The end result was the disciples received a spanking from the high priest and went on about their business, making thousands more disciples.

My motivational gift (Romans 12) is not encouragement. However, some have found encouragement from my life or my words from time to time. That is the way it should be when we are operating in God's kingdom.   Paul asks the question in 1 Corinthians 14:43, "How is it then, brethren? Whenever you come together, each of you has a psalm, has a teaching, has a tongue, has a revelation, has an interpretation..." Whenever people gather together, Jesus is there to minister to them and to those they touch (Matthew 18:20). It does not matter what gifts they may or may not have. It is the Holy Spirit who is doing the work.

The purpose of this post is simply to encourage the author and the readers to consider what voices they may be listening to. Hopefully, the answer is the voice of God. The voice of God? How does one know if one is actually hearing the voice of God? This is one of those concepts that is so simple, we have made it much too difficult. It must agree with the written Word of God. Note, it is not that it must agree with what anyone else thinks the Word says, but rather what the Word actually says. If you do not understand that, 1 John 2:27 might help. If it does not, hit me up with a comment or an email to thechurchinsantamariaca@gmail.com. God bless.