Simply Church: A House Church Perspective

A few days ago I received an email that is a great example of what can happen when a group prays and listens to God corporately.  So this is a brief break from my thoughts on how to hear God.  The email is from Brenda Harkins.

"I am chiming in on this kind of late, but would like to share what happened at our gathering Saturday night.  We have been meeting for 15 months now and the first 10 months or so were very much like the passage you shared, David.  We prayed and listened and weren't afraid of silence and waited on the Lord to begin to orchestrate what He wanted to do during our time together.  I am not sure what happened, but somewhere we got out of step with that and the core team started having their own ideas about what we should "do" during our time together.  Everyone sensed a discontent and we all knew we weren't flowing in the Spirit as we had.  We kept saying, "We just need to make prayer the priority and not do anything until we pray."  But somehow we kept getting off track from even the simplicity of praying for guidance. Talk, talk, talk kept us from praying and seeking and listening. 

Well, Saturday night after our dinner and fellowship time we gathered in the living room and someone started to play some worship music, but our 14 yr. old daughter…who has been in on the conversations about our need to make prayer the priority…spoke up and said, "Can we just pray before we do anything else?"  So we prayed.  Boy, did we pray!  As we each began to just share our hearts with the Lord and ask for HIs guidance and pray as the Spirit was prompting us to pray, the Lord began to set the order for the night.  We were in and out of prayer for hours, being interrupted by a song someone would share, a tongue, an interpretation, prophetic words and specific prayer over individuals as the Lord led.  Then as one prayer was for the eyes of our heart to be enlightened, we turned to Ephesians and spent another hour…actually almost two hours…pulling treasures out from the first two chapters of Ephesians.  At midnight…six hours after we began…we started to feel the intensity of His presence lift, but a sweetness remained that kept us just talking and sharing in groups of 2 and 3 for awhile longer.  As the last person drove away Mike and I turned to each other and said, "Now THAT is what we've been missing!"  And it was all because of prayer.

It's not about our agendas or good ideas…whether agreed upon by all or not.  It's all about Jesus.  And if we can't get into agreement about seeking Him first before we do anything on our "list", then we will continue to settle for mediocre at best.  I have learned all over again the simplicity of prayer.  Why is it so easy to forget?  And even in saying this I know I am in danger of trying to replicate what happened Saturday night…and it's not about that either.  It's about seeking Him together…fervently…and not stopping until He begins to move.  What He does may, and probably will, look different every time.  But if we want HIM to be the orchestrator of our time together, I believe all over again that sincere, fervent, unified prayer is the key."

When we pray and listen to God together, He shows up!

God delights to communicate with
us.  He loves to answer our
questions.  He conveys His approval
and acceptance of us.  He guides us
when we do not know what to do.  He
brings light when something is bothering us.  There are no shadows in His goodness.  He loves us to seek Him and pursue Him,
and He delights even more to reveal Himself to us.

There are many promises in the
Word of God that highlight God’s desire to speak to us.  The Scriptures say that He will guide
us, give us wisdom, communicate with us (Romans 8:14; James 1:5; 1 Corinthians
2:10-12).

So how does God communicate with
us today? 

1. His sheep recognize His voice.
   

Most of the
time, as described above, God speaks to us through our own thoughts.  So how can we learn to recognize and
identify His voice?  I could be in
a room with a hundred people, all of them speaking out loud, and I would
instantly recognize the voice of my husband, Tony (and not just because he
would be the only one speaking with a British accent!)  What is the reason for this?  I love to spend time with Tony.  We spend hours enjoying each other’s
company.  In human terms, there is
no one else I would rather spend time with.  Over the thirty five years that we have been married, it has
come to the point where we regularly think the same thoughts simultaneously and
complete each other’s sentences. 

God longs for
an intimate relationship with us too. 
As we spend time with Him, we learn to recognize His voice.  As we read His word, we come to
understand His ways and His thoughts. 
There is no substitute for time spent in His presence, adoring Him,
loving Him, meditating on His Word and His character and listening to what He
has to say to us. 

I learned to
recognize how God speaks to me many years ago.  At that time I used to do a lot of counseling.  Several times a week people would come
to me with their problems.  In
order to cut down on the amount of time it took to get to the root of their
problem and to find a solution, I developed the habit of praying for them
before they came.  I would empty my
mind of my own thoughts by waiting on God, and I would pray for them, often in
tongues.  Then I would write down
the thoughts that came into my mind. 
Later, after the counseling session was over, I would go back to my
prayer journal and see if I had written anything relevant to their
situation.  Most of the time I
had.  Obviously not everything I
wrote was relevant, but usually, 85-90% of the time, a good portion of it
specifically addressed their problem. 
I would note this down.  As
this happened more and more frequently, I gained a confidence that God would
speak to me in that way.

[Oral Roberts
addresses this use of speaking in tongues in his book, A Daily Guide to Miracles. 
In a section entitled, “I speak to God; God speaks to me,” Roberts
describes that when we pray in tongues, we are speaking to God.  We can trust that the thoughts that we
have while this is going on are God speaking back to us.]

Mark Virkler
also talks about God speaking to us. 
Many years ago I read his book entitled Dialog with God.  In it
he describes a way of learning to listen to God.  One of the things he writes about is the art of
journaling.  If we deliberately
quiet our hearts before God, waiting in His presence, God will speak to
us.  When we have entered that place
of knowing we are in His presence, where our minds are not distracted by a
myriad of thoughts about the affairs of our day, then we write down the
thoughts that come into our minds without attempting to make any sense of them
until we have finished writing. 
When the stream of thoughts comes to an end, we then go over what we
have written.  Does it make
sense?  Is it in accord with
Scriptural principle? 

I use this
pattern frequently.  Usually I have
spent time in the Word and time worshipping God.  I will then quiet my mind by waiting on God, bringing every
thought captive to Him so that I am no longer working with my preconceived
ideas.  Then I will write down a
question.  It may be as simple as,
“Is there anything want to say to me today?”  Or maybe it will be more specific—“What do you want me to do
about this situation?”  Then I
start to write down the thoughts that come into my mind.  Usually I will write for several
minutes.  When the flow of writing
stops, I go over what I have written to see if it is relevant.

My experience
is that much of the time, what I write is in general good, but fairly
non-specific.  It is Scriptural, but
not life-changing.  But sometimes
it brings clear revelation from the Lord, often about the Scriptures I have
been meditating on.  And
occasionally it is a very specific word. 
For example, a few months ago, I wrote that it appeared as though He was
warning me that I was going to experience a very specific kind of spoken attack
that I would not be expecting and from someone that I thought was a
friend.  He also stated that it would
rebound to His glory.  Within three
days, the contents of a phone call absolutely shocked me.  But I was prepared.  It meant that I was able to deal with
the situation it represented in a more godly fashion.

Quite often God
speaks through a picture.  At a
personal level, I tend to be more auditory than visual.  I tend to think in words rather than
pictures.  But often I will catch a
glimpse of a picture as I am praying. 
As I think about what I have seen, concepts come into my mind and the
meaning becomes clear and relevant.

It does not
take long interacting with the Lord in this way before one becomes familiar
with the way the Holy Spirit speaks and learns to trust the quiet whisper in
the heart.

Jesus told His disciples that it
was better for Him to go away because if He did so, He would send the Holy
Spirit to them (John 16:7).  Could
anything be better than having the physical presence of Jesus with us?  Jesus thought so, because the Holy
Spirit is not limited in time and space but can indwell each of us.  Jesus lives within us by His Holy
Spirit.  Living from the Spirit
within is living a life in close fellowship with Jesus, knowing what He is
saying and doing.

But there is also another factor
to consider.  There is someone else
who would like to penetrate our thoughts. 
“Satan is prowling around like a roaring lion seeking whom He may
devour.”  He can impact us in a
number of ways.  For example, maybe
we are watching the news on television, and feel too lazy to turn it off when
the news is over.  All of a sudden,
we find ourselves watching semi-pornography.  The enemy has used our sight (physical) to get to our mind.  Or maybe we are concerned over a
situation—finances are difficult, for example—and we find ourselves becoming
depressed and anxious. Daniel 7:25 in the NASV says of Satan, He will speak out against the Most High
and wear down the saints of the Highest One. The word translated “wear down”
means to harass constantly. 

The main spiritual battleground occurs
in our soul.  Satan tries to gain
control of our thoughts and emotions. 
In John 10:10 it says that the thief, (Satan) has come to steal, kill
and destroy.  He steals our joy and
gives us depression; he steals our peace and gives us fear; he condemns us and
lies to us (John 8:44).  Praise
God, Jesus has won the victory over Satan for us.

 So our thoughts can come from three
different sources, ourselves, Satan or God.

The majority of our thoughts are
our own ideas and ramblings.  Most
of us have a constant stream of them running through our heads.  All of us are familiar with this.  We think about the task we are doing, we
mull over something that happened yesterday, we plan our next vacation.  These are our normal thoughts.

However, sometimes our thoughts
might take a darker turn.  Maybe we
imagine a certain scary scenario occurring, and fear enters our minds.  Or we rehearse something that has
offended us and we become angry. Usually, if the reaction that a thought
produces is negative, we can reckon that it comes from Satan and we should refuse
to entertain it. Jesus told us that we know the source of something by its
fruit.  If the fruit of a thought
is negative, then we can reckon its source is certainly not from God and is
probably from Satan. In 2 Corinthians 10, we are told to take every thought
captive to Christ.  There is a
battle going on for our minds.  The
weapons that we are to use in this battle are spiritual ones; praising or using
the Word of God will send those thoughts running.

However, often God speaks to
us.  He too will generally speak
through our thoughts.  The fruit of
His speaking is always good—it brings peace or clarity to a situation.  Even if He is speaking something
negative, for example, convicting us of sin, it is specific rather than general
and convicts rather than condemns. 
So, for example, if Satan is speaking, he generally offers a blanket
condemnation.  “You are just too
bad.  If you lived a better life,
this would not be happening to you.” 
In general, when Satan condemns, he is not specific and offers no way
out.  And the way to deal with his
thoughts is through spiritual warfare. 
On the other hand, when the Holy Spirit convicts, He will tell you of a
specific situation you need to put right, and He will tell you what to do about
it.  And the fruit of obeying Him
brings great peace and joy.