“And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”” (Matthew 28:18–20, ESV)

The mandate is that we go and “make disciples”.

“Disciple” is a very Jewish concept. A rabbi would select a group of students who who follow him, sharing life with him over a period of time. The goal of discipleship was for the student to become like the teacher in every respect. Jesus, in commissioning us to make disciples, has given us the task of facilitating this process. I am to make disciples of Jesus. I am to facilitate a way of interacting with Jesus over time that results in followers being transformed into His image.

I’ve been exposed to two primary discipleship models during my years in church.

Model One: The Educational Model

This model seeks to fulfill the Great Commission by teaching doctrine from the Bible. The underlying assumption of this model is that our basic spiritual problem is ignorance. This can be corrected by proper instruction. If our problem is a lack of good knowledge, then more Knowledge of Good must be the solution.

Model Two: The Legal Model

This model seeks to fulfill the Great Commission by behavior modification. There are two forms of the Legal Model: Prohibitive and Prescriptive. One form emphasizes the behaviors a follower of Jesus should avoid. The second form emphasizes the behaviors a follower of Jesus should adopt. The underlying assumption of this model is that our basic spiritual problem is wrong behavior. This can be corrected by changing behavior through instruction and accountability.

Please understand – I’m not against any of the above. I prefer right doctrine to heresy. I prefer right behavior to wrong behavior. But teaching people the Bible and getting them to behave correctly, even if successful (and it’s usually not), will only serve to produce really good Pharisees. Do you remember them? They were the men in Jesus day who knew the most scripture, had the best doctrine, and who were the most diligent in avoiding bad behavior and doing good things. This is the category of people who, for the most part, resist Jesus.

Disciples are made through interacting with their rabbi over time. Any approach to discipleship that doesn’t teach people to interact with Jesus will fail to produce disciples of Jesus. We must teach people to experience His presence and hear His voice. Only revelation can produce transformation. Only beholding His glory can change us into His image.

“Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.” (2 Corinthians 3:17–18, ESV)

Want to make disciples? Teach people to hear God’s voice and experience His presence.

The Gift of Prophecy

It’s true that our choices can limit our experience of God’s voice. When we fail to steward well what he has already said we might limit what he says now. To him who has, more will be given. To him who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is sometimes the dynamic at work when we experience the silence of God.

But not always.

Sometimes God is silent because we are asking the wrong question. I’ve experienced this most often when seeking direction or guidance. I want to hear God within certain categories. I want him to speak into the category of behavior. What do you want me to do? Or I want him to speak into my circumstances. Where should I work? Where should I live? Where should I go to school? I have found that God definitely does speak into these categories, but they are at times not at the top of his priority list. When I’m asking questions within these categories and getting silence in response, I’ve learned to try switching categories. Identity and Core Beliefs: Father, is there anything you want to tell me/show me today about who you are in my life? About who I am in you?

Changing categories is like tuning the radio dial. Sometimes when we begin seeking God’s revelation in the area of Identity and Core Beliefs it’s like tuning in to the frequency upon which his voice is being transmitted. Once I dial in, it becomes easy to hear. In this case silence didn’t mean that God wasn’t talking, it simply meant that I was asking about something he wasn’t speaking about. I was focused where he wasn’t focused. I was trying to change things that won’t change anything that matters.

Sometimes our questions about behavior and environment are greeted with silence because we have misunderstood the way God desires to relate to us in these matters. We understand that God desires obedience (which is true), and from this we assume that God therefore must want a master/servant relationship with us. He must want a puppet-master/puppet relationship with us. But is this really the case? When God directs us he expects obedience. True. But does God always direct?

This line of thinking leads to a possible redefinition of what it means for us to be made in God’s “image” and to be given “dominion” and commissioned to “subdue” the earth. Once we begin to view our relationship with God through the filter of Genesis 1 & 2, we end up with more of an owner/steward model of relationship than a master/slave model.

Picture the moment when Adam began to name the animals. The Bible says that whatever Adam named them, that was their name. Can you imagine with me if Adam had constantly been asking God what to name them? His question might have been greeted with silence. But what would this silence mean? God doesn’t approve? I’ve done something wrong? I can’t hear God? Not necessarily! God’s silence in this case would have meant something else entirely. Adam, I have given you authority. I have made you in my image. I have commissioned you to take dominion and subdue the earth. You need to do the job I’ve given you to do. More than that, you need to give expression to the man I’ve made you to be.

What is God’s will? Sometimes God wills for us to exercise our will. So don’t misunderstand God’s silence. Adjust your categories. Ask God to speak to you about who he is and who you are in him. Begin to respond by aligning your perceptions of reality in congruence with his presence and voice. If God has opinions about issues of behavior and environment, allow him to speak into those things and be sure to obey him. That’s what stewards do when owners direct. But if the owner is silent, it may be because he expects you to do business with what he’s given you. His will may be for you to exercise your will in keeping with who he is and who you are in him.

Teddy, my seven year old, was on the other side of the house playing video games. I called him. Nothing. Again I called. Still no response. It was time for him to shower. I feel he needs to do this daily. In his opinion, this should be only a weekly occurrence. He didn’t hear me.

He has an uncanny ability to hear what he chooses to hear and filter out what he chooses not to hear. When I speak, his choice to hear or not hear is an active choice, not a passive one. He never fails to hear me whisper the words “ice cream.” It is more rare for him to hear me clearly articulate “clean – your – room” regardless of volume.

This is because listening (or not listening) is active. It is an action we intentionally choose to do. Our eardrums and those little bones convey sound waves. That part is passive. Our ears have an amazing ability to convert those vibrations into some kind of digital format which is transmitted via nerve to our brains. This is also passive. But whether or not we listen is a choice. It has to do with our focus, desires, priorities and attitudes.

Hearing God works the same way. He is always speaking. All Creation is sustained moment by moment by the Word of His power (see Heb 1:3).

The verse above (Rev 3:20) makes this idea very clear. Jesus is knocking. His voice is available to us. We have been given the spiritual capacity to hear what He’s saying. Our choice doesn’t cause Him to talk. He’s talking. We can’t manufacture the capacity to hear. That too is given to us by God. It’s also passive. But He still says “if” I hear His voice. If.

The specific grammar attached to the verb “hear” is also active. It conveys the kind of action that I choose to intentionally do, not the kind of action that happens to me unintentionally. Hearing is something I do, not something that someone else does to me.

Jesus is speaking. He’s knocking. If you will intentionally choose to hear, He will come in and share a meal. Let’s choose to listen today. His words are life!

God has made us three part beings: body, soul, and spirit. Our body is the physical house in which we live. Our soul is comprised of our mind, emotions, and will. The soul may seem more abstract than the body, yet it is deeply integrated with our physiology. The intellect, emotions, and volition are all part of the amazing functionality of the human brain.

The human spirit is perhaps the most difficult part of us to define. My spirit is me – me at a deeper level than what I think, feel, and want. Thinking, feeling, and wanting are all things I do. There must be a me doing those things. Thinking, feeling and wanting are all experiences. There is an underlying me experiencing these experiences. My spirit is the deepest part of who I am.

I believe the human spirit is also functional. God is a Spirit and we were designed to be one with Him. We were designed to be connected to God as our source of life and identity. My spirit is my capacity to be joined to God. In this sense, the human spirit is like an electrical plug designed to connect to an external source of power and thereby receive what is needed to fulfill purpose. I was made to live by His life. Spirit to spirit connection with the Almighty is what makes me truly alive. Disconnection with God would truly be death. Disconnected, my spirit would be about as useful as a disconnected electric chord of some appliance in my home. Of course there are other spiritual realities to which humans can choose to connect. Dangerous indeed.

In this marvelous passage from Romans 8 Paul is talking about the role of the Holy Spirit in bringing us into an experience of Sonship. His Spirit talks to our spirit and tells us that we are His sons. We belong. We are connected. We are safe and secure. We are loved and valued for who we are. We are all longing for this kind of connection. We were made for it. A human spirit that doesn’t experientially know this kind of Father to Son connection is what some refer to as an “orphan” spirit, a spirit that is fatherless. I believe the orphan spirit is rampant in our generation.

God wants to heal the orphan spirit. The Holy Spirit wants to talk to your spirit. Picture your spirit like a branch attached to a vine (see John 15), receiving from the vine everything you need. The Holy Spirit wants to impart love to you, belonging, security, identity, provision, and value – everything a good father gives to his children. The only thing that will heal the orphan spirit is the experience of the Father’s love.

He is speaking. Can you hear Him?

The Bible occasionally says things that are so outside our assumed reality grid that we often just bypass them rather than explore the full implications of what has been said. “But we have the mind of Christ” is one of those mind blowing, grid expanding statements. Why is this statement so difficult to face? Simply because I know my own mind. I’ve experienced my own thoughts. I certainly hope Jesus’ mind is better than the one I live with every day.

I don’t  think Paul is suggesting that by default every thought that pops into the mind of every believer is Jesus’ thought. Common sense rules that out as a possible meaning. So, what does it mean then for me to have the mind of Christ? Let’s look at the context. In verse 9 Paul discusses what we don’t know.  “…no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him.” Man doesn’t have access to accurate information regarding the goodness God has laid up for those who’s hearts belong to him. We just can’t access that information. Or can we?

Verse 10 tells us that the Holy Spirit is the one who has access to that information. And the good news? The Holy Spirit reveals them to us. Reveals what? Well, contextually it would have to be the good things God has prepared for those who love him. How does the Spirit know these things? Paul then uses the analogy regarding our experience as humans. Others don’t have access to our own thoughts. Only we do. Only the spirit of a person has access to the thoughts of a person. Likewise, only the Spirit of God knows the thoughts of God. Again – what thoughts is he talking about specifically? God’s thoughts regarding all the good he wants to do for those who love him. So how do we have access to these thoughts? The same Spirit who has acces to God’s thoughts because he is the Spirit of God lives in us. We are joined with the one who has access to God’s thoughts.

But how do we access that which we now have access to? How do we perceive the thoughts of God the Spirit of God who lives in us has access to? The key is in verse 14. The natural man is unable to receive the things of God. What is a “natural man”? The Greek word ispsuchikos. It’s root is psuche, the word four “soul”. The soul of man is comprised of three interacting and related parts – the mind, emotions, and will. So a “natural man” is a man governed by his own soul, by what he thinks, feels, and wants. This is the kind of man who is unable to receive the things of God. This is the kind of man who is unable to access the information the Spirit of God has access to in the mind of God regarding the good he wants to do for those who love him. So, to access the mind of Christ, to receive the things of the Spirit that can only be received in a spiritual manner, I must first NOT be a psuchikos. I must NOT be a person governed by what I think, feel, and want. It seems I can either be governed by my own mind or his. I can’t serve two masters. I wonder how many people struggle to hear God because they’ve never really come to terms with their need to surrender.

How is it that we can hear a powerful and revelatory proclamation of God’s word, receive it with faith, feel so transformed in that moment, and then wake the next morning to discover we haven’t been changed nearly as much as we had hoped?

One of my favorite teachers, Dutch Sheets, explains it this way. “All truth comes to us in seed form.”

It may be revelation in the teacher, but when I receive it I receive it as a seed.

Matt 13:3-9
3 Then He spoke many things to them in parables, saying: “Behold, a sower went out to sow.  4 And as he sowed, some seed fell by the wayside; and the birds came and devoured them.  5 Some fell on stony places, where they did not have much earth; and they immediately sprang up because they had no depth of earth.  6 But when the sun was up they were scorched, and because they had no root they withered away.  7 And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprang up and choked them.  8 But others fell on good ground and yielded a crop: some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.  9 He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”
NKJV

There are so many truths in this passage that perhaps we sometimes miss the most obvious one: the word is delivered to us like a seed. When I receive the word it is a seed. Before it can bring forth fruit in my life there must be good soil, water, time, sunlight, pruning, etc. I believe there are times where we come to the conclusion that God’s word doesn’t work for us when the reality is simply that we haven’t cared properly for the seed planted to bring it to a place of mature revelation and lasting fruitfulness.

But how does God’s personal, living, and powerful word accomplish this? What is the nature of God’s word?

God’s word is creative. Review the following verses and see the implications of each concerning the creative power of God’s word.

Gen 1:3
3 Then God said,”Let there be light”; and there was light.
Col 1:16-18
16 For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. 17 And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist.

John 1:1-4
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.

Ps 33:6
6 By the word of the LORD the heavens were made,
And all the host of them by the breath of His mouth.

Ps 33:9
9 For He spoke, and it was done;
He commanded, and it stood fast.

Ps 148:1-5
Praise the LORD!

Praise the LORD from the heavens;
Praise Him in the heights!
2 Praise Him, all His angels;
Praise Him, all His hosts!
3 Praise Him, sun and moon;
Praise Him, all you stars of light!
4 Praise Him, you heavens of heavens,
And you waters above the heavens!

5 Let them praise the name of the LORD,
For He commanded and they were created.

Heb 1:2-3
2 has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds; 3 who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,

So we see that all things have been created by God’s word, Jesus is God’s word, and at a point in history, God’s word became flesh and came to live among us. The key thing to observe here is that God’s word is creative in nature. When God speaks, stuff happens – things come into existence.

Rom 4:17-18
17(as it is written, “I have made you a father of many nations”) in the presence of Him whom he believed — God, who gives life to the dead and calls those things which do not exist as though they did;

I think most believers don’t view God’s word as being creatively powerfully in this way. Many believers hear the term “God’s word” and immediately think of scripture. The Bible certainly is the word of God, but the term “God’s word” refers to more than scripture. But even if we narrowly speak of God’s word in terms of scripture, do we really think of God’s word expressed through scripture as having creative power? I don’t think so. Not usually.

The most common illustration I’ve heard all my life is that the Bible is a manual for life. “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth” is the little acronym that serves to make this point. The concept is that we are like manufactured products and God (the manufacturer) has given us a manual. If we will learn the principles contained in the manual and apply them, then our lives will operate according to design. I believe this is how most of us regard God’s word expressed in scripture. The Bible is a repository of principles to live by.

But how much power does a manual have? What ever got created by a manual?

A manual would be the perfect solution if my problem was simply behavioral. If what I needed was mere instruction regarding what to do and what not to do, then a manual would do just fine. But I need more than that. I need a LOT more than that. I need Life. I need power. I need motives I don’t have. I need strength I don’t have. I need peace I don’t have. I need a lot of things I don’t have. A manual can’t give me what I don’t have; it can only tell me what to do with what I do have.

Even the things I do have positionally in Christ I need to enter into experientially, relationally. A manual cannot give me relational experience.

Thank God he has given us more than a manual. His word expressed through scripture is so much more than a manual. The very breath of God is on it and in it. Through scripture (the written word) I can come to Jesus (the living word). As I hear the living word speak by the Spirit through scripture and in scriptural ways (see my Hearing God series) things change within me. Stuff I didn’t have before appears. My motives get transformed. My identity gets formed. God’s word creates. If I’m a new creation (2Cor 5:17), then this is exactly what I should expect God’s word to do. It’s what I need. It’s what God does in me through his word.

I’m fascinated by Gen 22:18, specifically the phrase …because you have obeyed my voice. God doesn’t really promise anything new here. The content and themes referred to here have been part of God’s promises to Abraham all along. God initiated these promises from the beginning in Gen 12 when Abraham was a pagan, and then again in Gen 15. Abraham didn’t do anything to merit them or deserve them. Then at the end, God says that it’s “because” of Abraham’s obedience.

Earlier we see that righteousness is accounted to Abraham because he believed the promises, but the promises themselves and their fulfillment have nothing to do with Abraham’s performance. Now, after all that, Abraham somehow gets the credit based on performance, based on his obedience.

God initiates. God redeems. God fulfills. God brings us to a place of living faith worked out in obedience, God rewards us, and then God says it was because we obeyed. He rewards us for the obedience he produces in us.

This would be easier to swallow if I were a Calvinist, but it does give me some context for what Paul says in Romans 2…

Rom 2:6-7
6 who “will render to each one according to his deeds“: 7 eternal life to those who by patient continuance in doing good seek for glory, honor, and immortality;
NKJV (emphasis added)

Rom 2:13
13(for not the hearers of the law are just in the sight of God, but the doers of the law will be justified;
NKJV (emphasis added)

In Romans 10:17 we see that faith comes from hearing His voice. In Genesis 22:18 we see that we are rewarded when we obey his voice. We hear, we believe, we obey. Through this process we enter into the purpose, promise, and reward of God.

John 1:1-3
1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

Col 1:17-18
17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

Rev 4:11
11 “You are worthy, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things,
and by your will they were created
and have their being.”

Heb 1:3
3 who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power ,

In these verses we see that all things have their origin in and are presently sustained by the Word of God. All of Creation came into being through the Word. All of Creation is currently upheld by the Word.

God spoke and from nothing everthing came. This is miraculous don’t you think? All that appeared in that moment owes the continuance of its existences to the continuing reality of the Word. Is this any less miraculous? In fact, it is in the exact same category – existence resulting from the voice of God. Want to see more miracles? Consider that your very existence and the existence of the material world in which you live are both miracles.

We usually think of miracles as being those things God does which are outside the norm of nature. But what if nature itself is miraculous? If that is true (and it is), then there is no categorical difference between my observation that the sun came up this morning and my expectation that today God might speak to me about healing some sick people. No difference at all.

Ps 107:20
20 He sent forth his word and healed them;
he rescued them from the grave.

Matt 8:8
8 The centurion replied, “Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word , and my servant will be healed .

Are you listening?