How Does God Speak To Us?

In response to a group text regarding Lev 10:1-2 and the question “How do we know how to worship God today?,” a friend recently responded that we should worship “the way the Holy Spirit leads us.” I am not 100% sure what my friend meant by that, but I think she meant God would tell us directly through our feelings how He wants to be worshipped.

But that is NOT the way God instructs us; never has been. The main point of Heb 1:1-2 (“God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son ….”) is God now speaks to us through His Son, but did you catch how God spoke to the Hebrew fathers (ancestors), that is, the Jews before Christ came? He spoke to them through the prophets. Again notice Eph 3:3-4 “How that by revelation he made known unto me the mystery; (as I wrote afore in few words, … Whereby, when ye read, ye may understand my knowledge in the mystery of Christ).” See, it works the same way in New Testament times. Then and now God doesn’t speak to every single saint directly. Instead He has always spoken through his representatives, the Patriarchs, prophets, apostles. These prophets wrote down what God revealed to them in words, and we get God’s will for us by reading and studying that revelation, the scriptures. Paul said in I Cor 15:3 “For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received …“  So the old testament and new testament prophets “received” God’s law directly from God Himself. And then they “delivered” it to us in the form of the Bible.

Our feelings are not reliable anyway. Prov 14:12 says “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” Evidently that is what Nadab and Abihu were using to determine how they should worship God in Lev 10:1-2 – their feelings. They “felt” like God wanted them to offer a particular kind of fire/incense to God, but obviously it was not what God had instructed. If you think God is revealing directly to you through your feelings or dreams/visions/emotions, you need to know that such is going to lead to the same result as in Nadab and Abihu’s case.

Eph 6:17b reads “the sword of the Spirit … is the word of God,” so the way the Holy Spirit reveals to us, the way the Holy Spirit leads us is through the word of God. Before guns, the tool the soldier used to attack his enemy and defend himself was the sword. So Eph 6:17 is saying the tool the Holy Spirit uses to convict and convert people is the word of God. Other passages helps us to see that same thing. The primary point of James 1:25 (“But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed”) is we should be a doer of God’s word (not just a hearer), but where does the verse tell us to hear God’s word from? It is by looking into the perfect law of liberty (the New Testament); not by hearing God directly through a small still voice as some claim. Doesn’t II Tim 3:16 also tell us “scripture … is profitable for doctrine,” not what we think, or what someone claims the Holy Spirit told them directly? So we learn the doctrine of Christ through scripture. God does not tell us what parking space to take at the WalMart.

Rom 1:16 says “the gospel … is power of God unto salvation,” not our feelings. Rom 10:17 says “faith cometh by hearing … the word of God,” not by some small still voice in the back of our head. So if you want to know how to worship God today (or how to please Him in any area), the Holy Spirit is not going to tell you directly. Instead He has already told everybody the same thing about how to do that – in the New Testament. The Israelites didn’t learn God’s will for them through direct revelation; instead it was by learning from the part of the Bible that existed at that time (Neh 8:5,8). And it is the same for us today – John 17:17 “Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.”

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