Sermon

Sermon # 1028
February 13, 2011
Exodus 32:7-14
John 10:19-30
Dr. Ed Pettus

“A Conversational Relationship”

The comedian Lily Tomlin once asked: “Why is it that when we speak to God we are said to be praying but when God speaks to us we are said to be schizophrenic?” Let’s face it, when we hear someone say: “God told me to do this,” we are quite suspicious. And in some cases this is the right position to take, for we have seen too many cults whose leaders claim to hear God then lead his or her people to a fatal end. The Bible is not without this kind of language: “the Lord said to Moses”, or “the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah”. Sometimes it might be an angel who speaks to Joseph in a dream or tells Philip to go toward Gaza. Does the Lord speak to us?

The first scripture reading today includes a conversation between Moses and God. The first thing we might notice is the opening narration: “The LORD said to Moses.” We wonder if Moses heard a voice. Did Moses sense God speaking? The word Moses hears is so very specific: “Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely.” We think that God has never been that specific with anything in our life. Why not? It is part of the reason we look up to Moses, these conversations, not like our prayers, not like any conversation we have ever had. God simply and clearly speaks to Moses. “9The LORD said to Moses, ‘I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are. 10Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a great nation.’”

Then Moses seems rather nonchalant about it. He just responds as if talking to a buddy: “But Moses implored the LORD his God, and said, ‘O LORD, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand?” By the end of Moses’ speech, God has changed his mind and about the disaster he planned against the people.

Maybe it is courageous on Moses’ part. Maybe Moses is like no other in relationship to God. Or perhaps Moses is an example for every believer. Perhaps this is the kind of relationship God desires to have with each one of us, a conversational relationship. We learn, in this type of conversation with God in Exodus 32, that God takes seriously our role as a covenant partner…as a conversational partner. We have a voice in the conversation that is truly considered. God listens to our side, to our perspective, to our hopes, our fears, and our insight. Perhaps we can have a conversational relationship with God.

Jesus teaches that his sheep know his voice. Listen again: “I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me; but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. My sheep hear my voice, I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:25-27). Those who cannot hear Jesus’ voice cannot hear because they do not believe. But to those who believe – the implication is that we who believe can hear Jesus’ voice. Hearing God is normal in the life of anyone who believes. A conversational relationship is possible for all who believe.

Moses, Abraham, Job, Jesus, Peter, and Paul, these and many others from the Bible teach us of the conversational relationship we have with God. We learn to listen, to hear the voice of God, and we seek to have the courage to converse with God. To that conversation we bring our voice. This is one of the wonderful things about the Psalms. What might we learn about our conversation with God from the Psalms? The Psalms give us voice, a language of prayer, if you will. The Psalms express the human condition and the expressions appropriate in addressing God: praise, fear, anguish, hope, confession, thanksgiving, complaint, worship, song, love…the language of prayer.

Dallas Willard, in his book, Hearing God, shares several guidelines for hearing from God. How can we have a conversational relationship with God?
1. Communion with God – a personal relationship, intimacy, knowing God. It is only in the context of our relationship with God that we can come to know God’s voice. As James says: “Draw near to God and he will draw near to you” (4:8). It is only in this close relationship that we begin to discern God’s voice. Communion with God.
2. Scripture is our companion…the more scripture we know the better we can hear and the better we can speak. In getting to know the people who conversed with God, we learn to engage in that same kind of conversation.
3. Pray for just such a relationship with God. Ask God to teach is to pray, to listen, to pay attention.
4. Warning: a conversational relationship with God does not make us any more important than anyone else. It is a way of life. Speaking with God has its concerns, of course, as we can sometimes grow to full of ourselves if we get puffed up about this relationship. Our prayer may need to be: “Lord, when we are wrong, make us willing to change, and when we are right, make us easy to live with!” (from Hearing God, Dallas Willard, p. 40).

God speaks to us – through impressions, a hearing in the mind, through circumstances, scripture, the community of faith, the still small voice, experience. But there is no magic formula. God speaks in many ways. More rare to have a burning bush, but more common just in a thought or impression. Most often through the Bible. This is where I believe we hear most often from God, but that is not to say that the kind of conversations like Moses had or Jesus had are not just as available and frequent as any other conversation.

One experience that I would lift up that sort of came to me outside of reading scripture or in conversation with someone: I was walking along the golf course thinking about ministry and preaching and I “heard” God say: “Just speak the truth.” It was not an audible hearing, but something deep within. There was no question in my mind that God had spoken. It is not a grand statement, in fact, it seems quite an obvious statement. Isn’t truth-telling what ministers are called to do? Well, yes, but my interpretation of the statement was to not be afraid to speak the truth as interpreted in scripture. Do not fear presenting the findings and insights from the Word of God on Sunday mornings. It was a strange experience, probably 16 years ago now, and yet I still recall the weight of what I believe God told me. Not an earth shattering word from God! No burning bush nearby – not even a burning flagstick! Some might argue that I was just hearing myself thinking through what I needed to do, if nothing else, just in trust that that is what God tells all ministers. I cannot say yes or no to that, but I can only convey that, to me, it seemed that God had spoken.

Perhaps you have had a feeling and said something like this to yourself or to someone else: “Something told me that this was not right.” There are those occasions when we sense or know something deep within. But sometimes we do not pay attention to that voice. Sometimes we tune out like hearing without listening to someone.

I had a salesman call me at church last week asking me if I thought consumerism was damaging the commitment of service among our people. I thought, how ironic that this guy is about to ask me to consume one more resource in order to teach against consumerism. Was God telling me this? Well, yes, in the sense that I have heard God speak through the scriptures and in learning about consumerism and being a servant of Christ. Was God speaking to me? Yes, but not through my other ear as I was on the phone with a guy from Texas. God was speaking through scripture, experience, education, and disgust with telemarketers!

I would not record such a word from God as: “The Lord said to me”, but I believe it to be the Lord none the less! I will still be amazed at stories in the Bible that seem much more dramatic than any daily ordinary event when God speaks. God speaks to us and we speak to God because, as Acts 17:28 says: “For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’”. God is with us and we abide in Christ, we cannot help but be at some level of conversation.


Above all, the basis for a conversational relationship with God is love. God loves us and wants to be in conversation with us. We love God and want to be in conversation with God. Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth century monk, said of this conversation:

There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful than that of a continual conversation with God. Those only can comprehend it who practice and experience it; yet I do not advise you to do it from that motive. It is not pleasure which we ought to seek in this exercise; but let us do it from a principle of love, and because God would have us. ~Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God.


The foundation of our conversation is love. God comes to us in many ways to communicate love. God speaks and expects us to speak because of love. The good news is that God has taken the initiative in love, to speak and to listen, to love and to deliver. Sometimes we might be like the two disciples on the road to Emmaus who met Jesus on the road and yet did not realize they were talking with Jesus until Jesus broke bread with them. Other times we might have great clarity like Moses, but one thing is certain, God desires to be in conversation. God speaks to us and we will hear if we pay attention: to scripture, to one another, to life, to that whisper from within, to all the ways God may be speaking. Amen.