Church 3/8/2026
Offertory scripture:
“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”Romans 12:21 NKJV
Sermon message:
Thesis: Hearing and knowing God’s voice.
A common question: does God still speak?
There are lots of voices in this world. Even our own flesh or others’ fleshes speak to us, and even the devil speaks to us. But God speaks to us also.
We can ask: God, is that You speaking?
Answer: yes, God still speaks. And He wants us to know He still speaks and to recognize His voice.
Don’t make God a stranger. Spend time with Him.
“The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.”John 10:10 NKJV
““I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives His life for the sheep.”John 10:11 NKJV
“My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me.”John 10:27 NKJV
This means Jesus speaks to us. And it means we can hear Him. Jesus says so.
“But he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him the doorkeeper opens, and the sheep hear his voice; and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. And when he brings out his own sheep, he goes before them; and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. Yet they will by no means follow a stranger, but will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.””John 10:2-5 NKJV
Jesus is the life giver. He wants us to have life.
Don’t make God a stranger.
If you have a relationship with Him, then you have the Holy Spirit. If so, then you can hear Him internally inside you.
Point #1: Don’t make God a stranger.
Come to church. Spend time in His Word. Pray. Worship/praise. Above all open your heart to Him. This way you will be able to hear His voice.
Point #2: Stop the insanity.
What do we mean by this?
“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.”I Peter 5:8 NKJV
The devil speaks to you and tries to be the most dominant voice, to distract you from God.
The battle for your ears and your mind is real. Stop the distractions.
Story of Pastor Tim talking on the phone with someone where an airplane is flying overhead, making it impossible to hear one another. Moral: wait for the plane to pass before speaking.
Translation: eliminate all distractions that take you away from God or from hearing His voice. Get off your phone. Get off your computer. Get off your tv. Etc. Spend time with God, and when you do, focus only on Him.
“Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!”Psalms 46:10 NKJV
“For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.””Matthew 18:20 NKJV
Point #3: Listen for code.
When we are listening for God, listen for code.
If you don’t hear this from a prophecy, then it is not from God. The word must align with God’s Word. Below are code verses:
“And when they say to you, “Seek those who are mediums and wizards, who whisper and mutter,” should not a people seek their God? Should they seek the dead on behalf of the living?”Isaiah 8:19 NKJV
Don’t talk to people who say they can talk to the dead.
“This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.”Joshua 1:8 NKJV
Confer with God’s Word instead. Any voice from God must align with His Word.
Moment of the transfiguration of Jesus. God says: “This is my beloved Son. Listen to Him!” The lesson Peter took from it:
“For this reason I will not be negligent to remind you always of these things, though you know and are established in the present truth. Yes, I think it is right, as long as I am in this tent, to stir you up by reminding you, knowing that shortly I must put off my tent, just as our Lord Jesus Christ showed me. Moreover I will be careful to ensure that you always have a reminder of these things after my decease. For we did not follow cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of His majesty. For He received from God the Father honor and glory when such a voice came to Him from the Excellent Glory: “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” And we heard this voice which came from heaven when we were with Him on the holy mountain. And so we have the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts;”II Peter 1:12-19 NKJV
Know the Word of God. Knowing His Word equates to knowing His voice. Don’t just know it cognitively, know it in your spirit also.
Any voice you hear, for it to truly be from God, must acknowledge and exalt Jesus first and foremost. It must not exalt anyone else above Himself.
“To the church of God which is at Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, with all who in every place call on the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”I Corinthians 1:2-3 NKJV
““But when the Helper comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify of Me.”John 15:26 NKJV
“Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. And this is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard was coming, and is now already in the world.”I John 4:1-3 NKJV
It must also acknowledge that Jesus Christ came in the flesh. Demons refuse to answer that question.
Does the voice give you peace?
“The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God,”Romans 8:16 NKJV
The voice must bear witness to the Holy Spirit inside of you, if indeed you do have Him.
“And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to which also you were called in one body; and be thankful.”Colossians 3:15 NKJV
Point #4: Respond to His voice.
If you don’t respond, your hearing becomes dull.
“But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.”James 1:22 NKJV
“He who is faithful in what is least is faithful also in much; and he who is unjust in what is least is unjust also in much.”Luke 16:10 NKJV
He who is faithful in little will become also faithful in much. The converse is also true. If you’re unfaithful in little, you’re unfaithful in much.
Respond immediately once you’ve confirmed it lines up with the Bible and exalts Jesus and gives peace not strife to your soul.
Note after the sermon: I could tell this sermon and the next (which I’ll post tomorrow) were trying to speak to me. I’ve been in an extended period of struggle and low spirits. As I review the main bullet points, I both resonate with and feel angry resistance at the same time. I’ll take each bullet point and (I hope) make a confession out of it, because ultimately the goal needs to be repentance and restoration, and not digging in.
First, I do feel as if God has been a stranger for quite some time now. As I review what our pastor stated about it, it boils down to the fact that, until last August when I finally “broke,” I was religiously reading my Bible and at least attempting to pray. I was (and still am) a regular church attender, and I’m in the praise and worship band essentially every time I go.
Last August, I broke because I couldn’t keep the faith anymore. Between the immense 3-year trial living with my now-in-laws which broke me psychologically, this gut condition that is finally better than what it was last year (but I can tell still has a way to go before I can consider it a full healing), and a layoff that only got reversed after the last minute (and during which I applied to well over 150 jobs in six weeks and never got past the first interviewing phase (and even then, I only got around 7 or 8 interviews)), up until that point I had kept my faith disciplines because I had hoped not only would they get me through, but also that out of it some new breakthrough would emerge. The former happened, but not the latter.
Sometime in September or maybe October I picked up the Bible reading discipline where I had left off. Through August, I had been reading scripture through the year like I had done in 2024, but as I was going through the “dry” part of scripture, specifically the era of Israel and Judah’s rebellion post-Solomon and pre-exile, it was like even the Bible was letting me down. I even pivoted from something like 2nd Chronicles/2nd Kings to the Gospel according to John just to have a break from the negativity that was meeting me every day on top of the negativity that was already in my life. It helped. But no miraculous breakthroughs came. And eventually reading through the book came to an end. I could go back to reading how yet another Israelite king was giving God the middle finger. Or I could just… take a break. I took the break. I didn’t know what else to do. I was in the middle of reading through the whole Bible and generally, trying to read through different parts of it ad hoc generally didn’t work for me.
Unfortunately, as breaks are wont to do, this one just kept extending. What I figured might be “just a week or two” turned into well beyond that. I would say that it was at least a month before I finally picked up where I was again and just learned to swallow the difficult parts of scripture. But one of the consequences of “swallowing it” was that, to this date, my Bible reading has not been daily. Sometimes I might read my daily Bible reading two days in a row; other times I might read one Bible chapter a week. Now at roughly 6 months after I picked the habit up again, I just finished the Gospels. I still have to go through the rest of the New Testament.
So yes, I do feel like God has been a stranger. I’m not going to say that I’ve been perfect at my disciplines – in fact, I’m aware I’ve been far from it – but at least I can argue that I am trying. And contrary to what I imagine some might argue, this feeling is not only been the last six or seven months, so you cannot trace my feeling distant from God to my simply “dropping the Bible reading habit.” I’ve been sensing this has been the case for at least two years now, and probably closer to three.
Addressing the next point, “stop the insanity,” I do agree; however, I feel quite powerless to stop it. I understand the Bible says that I can do all things through Jesus’s strength, but even when I have asked for it, I haven’t experienced it. At most, I may be able to put the phone and Internet away for two or three days. But then it comes back. I think what creates angry resistance in me regarding this point is that it assumes and expects agency. And this is part of a much larger beef I have with what I’ve called “conservative psychology.” (The “suck it up, deal with it, and grow up” mentality without providing an actual roadmap to help the person struggling (and whatever roadmap they do provide on its own is often not enough, largely because its success counts on the struggling person to be able to decode what they’re given (which is not a given if the person has experienced a critical mass of trauma to the point that it has psychologically “broken” them. This does happen.). As much as I endorse our current president and hope that measures get put into place to help keep our country conservative fiscally, economically, morally, and yes, politically, I recognize that ultimately it will not last. I believe that our country’s return to liberal politics is inevitable (after all, Jesus Christ is coming back, and a return to Marxism and to depravity are key ingredients to hasten its day), and I firmly believe that this Achilles heel of an otherwise strong foundation and structure that Trump and co are establishing is what will someday lead people back to liberalism. If it gets to a point where a person’s psychology is so important to them, then as “single issue voters,” they will happily vote for the Democrat party once again, even when it would otherwise be insane to do so. For the current conservative movement to be a long-term, multigenerational success, I exhort all conservatives to learn to close this gap. Be willing to help struggling people without resorting to talking down to them or shaming them. If you don’t, such people will learn to look back to the government and not God for help. And that also means, for a person to stop the insanity, sometimes it might need to be you to sacrifice to stop the insanity for them, because no matter how many times they hit rock bottom it doesn’t teach them. After all, the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”) As such, I officially and formally counterargue that for a truly insane person, stopping the insanity requires outside intervention. Expecting a person struggling so hard that it leads to their insanity to change on their own is by definition insanity on your part.
I’ve never been good at listening for code. It was never something that was ever taught for one thing, and due to a combination of repeated trauma, lack of timely healing, and either lack of teaching or bad teaching (or both), I’ve never had the bandwidth to learn how to understand code, let alone how to decode it. This is like learning Greek or Chinese to me. (Or, dare I say, Navajo.) I have always been a “take it at face value” kind of person, out of necessity and survival. So if somebody says or indicates or gestures something to me that isn’t a “face value” expression, the odds are excellent that I’m going to miss it.
Now, before I get too carried away with this point, I do understand and recognize the underlying message, check everything against the written word of God. If it doesn’t align, it’s not from God. With God’s help, I have been learning to do that more, and it makes great sense. Doing precisely this is what has helped me recognize questions about certain past season what I genuinely was confused about whether something was from God or from the devil. So, I want to assure the reader that I absolutely appreciate this. I want clarity. I hate confusion. I’m glad to know that God is not the author of confusion. It’s just that where offshoots of this topic begin to rile me up is when whoever interprets the word of God, then proceeds to interpret it as if to back up certain trite statements such as “turn that frown upside down” – as if to say that it is therefore on the responsibility of the person who is struggling (and potentially insane) to check themselves at the door, so as not to upset other people. As far as I know, the Bible doesn’t say that! But, what it does say is to bring your pain and issues to the cross of Jesus Christ. To be fair, I don’t believe my pastor has ever abused scripture in this manner; in fact, he says that we can talk to God. So I’m glad for that. But sometimes, when a person is struggling in the relationship with God, along with other areas of life, what they really need in the short term is a person (ideally a Godly one) who is willing and able to come alongside them and help them get back up without shaming them or giving them trite statements, such as “turn that frown upside down.” Real struggles cannot be resolved, even in part, with a 15-minute conversation and a “nice pretty bow on top.” Real struggles require far more intervention and actual Biblical Agape love that both meets the person where they’re at and lifts them up. I dare say far too many Christians, including conservatives, have no clue how to do that. (You know, maybe that’s why our pastor felt led to preach the sermon!)
First, I do feel as if God has been a stranger for quite some time now. As I review what our pastor stated about it, it boils down to the fact that, until last August when I finally “broke,” I was religiously reading my Bible and at least attempting to pray. I was (and still am) a regular church attender, and I’m in the praise and worship band essentially every time I go.
Last August, I broke because I couldn’t keep the faith anymore. Between the immense 3-year trial living with my now-in-laws which broke me psychologically, this gut condition that is finally better than what it was last year (but I can tell still has a way to go before I can consider it a full healing), and a layoff that only got reversed after the last minute (and during which I applied to well over 150 jobs in six weeks and never got past the first interviewing phase (and even then, I only got around 7 or 8 interviews)), up until that point I had kept my faith disciplines because I had hoped not only would they get me through, but also that out of it some new breakthrough would emerge. The former happened, but not the latter.
Sometime in September or maybe October I picked up the Bible reading discipline where I had left off. Through August, I had been reading scripture through the year like I had done in 2024, but as I was going through the “dry” part of scripture, specifically the era of Israel and Judah’s rebellion post-Solomon and pre-exile, it was like even the Bible was letting me down. I even pivoted from something like 2nd Chronicles/2nd Kings to the Gospel according to John just to have a break from the negativity that was meeting me every day on top of the negativity that was already in my life. It helped. But no miraculous breakthroughs came. And eventually reading through the book came to an end. I could go back to reading how yet another Israelite king was giving God the middle finger. Or I could just… take a break. I took the break. I didn’t know what else to do. I was in the middle of reading through the whole Bible and generally, trying to read through different parts of it ad hoc generally didn’t work for me.
Unfortunately, as breaks are wont to do, this one just kept extending. What I figured might be “just a week or two” turned into well beyond that. I would say that it was at least a month before I finally picked up where I was again and just learned to swallow the difficult parts of scripture. But one of the consequences of “swallowing it” was that, to this date, my Bible reading has not been daily. Sometimes I might read my daily Bible reading two days in a row; other times I might read one Bible chapter a week. Now at roughly 6 months after I picked the habit up again, I just finished the Gospels. I still have to go through the rest of the New Testament.
So yes, I do feel like God has been a stranger. I’m not going to say that I’ve been perfect at my disciplines – in fact, I’m aware I’ve been far from it – but at least I can argue that I am trying. And contrary to what I imagine some might argue, this feeling is not only been the last six or seven months, so you cannot trace my feeling distant from God to my simply “dropping the Bible reading habit.” I’ve been sensing this has been the case for at least two years now, and probably closer to three.
Addressing the next point, “stop the insanity,” I do agree; however, I feel quite powerless to stop it. I understand the Bible says that I can do all things through Jesus’s strength, but even when I have asked for it, I haven’t experienced it. At most, I may be able to put the phone and Internet away for two or three days. But then it comes back. I think what creates angry resistance in me regarding this point is that it assumes and expects agency. And this is part of a much larger beef I have with what I’ve called “conservative psychology.” (The “suck it up, deal with it, and grow up” mentality without providing an actual roadmap to help the person struggling (and whatever roadmap they do provide on its own is often not enough, largely because its success counts on the struggling person to be able to decode what they’re given (which is not a given if the person has experienced a critical mass of trauma to the point that it has psychologically “broken” them. This does happen.). As much as I endorse our current president and hope that measures get put into place to help keep our country conservative fiscally, economically, morally, and yes, politically, I recognize that ultimately it will not last. I believe that our country’s return to liberal politics is inevitable (after all, Jesus Christ is coming back, and a return to Marxism and to depravity are key ingredients to hasten its day), and I firmly believe that this Achilles heel of an otherwise strong foundation and structure that Trump and co are establishing is what will someday lead people back to liberalism. If it gets to a point where a person’s psychology is so important to them, then as “single issue voters,” they will happily vote for the Democrat party once again, even when it would otherwise be insane to do so. For the current conservative movement to be a long-term, multigenerational success, I exhort all conservatives to learn to close this gap. Be willing to help struggling people without resorting to talking down to them or shaming them. If you don’t, such people will learn to look back to the government and not God for help. And that also means, for a person to stop the insanity, sometimes it might need to be you to sacrifice to stop the insanity for them, because no matter how many times they hit rock bottom it doesn’t teach them. After all, the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”) As such, I officially and formally counterargue that for a truly insane person, stopping the insanity requires outside intervention. Expecting a person struggling so hard that it leads to their insanity to change on their own is by definition insanity on your part.
I’ve never been good at listening for code. It was never something that was ever taught for one thing, and due to a combination of repeated trauma, lack of timely healing, and either lack of teaching or bad teaching (or both), I’ve never had the bandwidth to learn how to understand code, let alone how to decode it. This is like learning Greek or Chinese to me. (Or, dare I say, Navajo.) I have always been a “take it at face value” kind of person, out of necessity and survival. So if somebody says or indicates or gestures something to me that isn’t a “face value” expression, the odds are excellent that I’m going to miss it.
Now, before I get too carried away with this point, I do understand and recognize the underlying message, check everything against the written word of God. If it doesn’t align, it’s not from God. With God’s help, I have been learning to do that more, and it makes great sense. Doing precisely this is what has helped me recognize questions about certain past season what I genuinely was confused about whether something was from God or from the devil. So, I want to assure the reader that I absolutely appreciate this. I want clarity. I hate confusion. I’m glad to know that God is not the author of confusion. It’s just that where offshoots of this topic begin to rile me up is when whoever interprets the word of God, then proceeds to interpret it as if to back up certain trite statements such as “turn that frown upside down” – as if to say that it is therefore on the responsibility of the person who is struggling (and potentially insane) to check themselves at the door, so as not to upset other people. As far as I know, the Bible doesn’t say that! But, what it does say is to bring your pain and issues to the cross of Jesus Christ. To be fair, I don’t believe my pastor has ever abused scripture in this manner; in fact, he says that we can talk to God. So I’m glad for that. But sometimes, when a person is struggling in the relationship with God, along with other areas of life, what they really need in the short term is a person (ideally a Godly one) who is willing and able to come alongside them and help them get back up without shaming them or giving them trite statements, such as “turn that frown upside down.” Real struggles cannot be resolved, even in part, with a 15-minute conversation and a “nice pretty bow on top.” Real struggles require far more intervention and actual Biblical Agape love that both meets the person where they’re at and lifts them up. I dare say far too many Christians, including conservatives, have no clue how to do that. (You know, maybe that’s why our pastor felt led to preach the sermon!)
Regarding the final point, I hope this blog post proves that I am trying to respond. I have tasted the pure Word of God, and I have found nothing wrong with it. I fully agree that the Bible is not only infallible but inerrant. But therein lies a key point: for the Bible to be truly inerrant, it must always be interpreted correctly. The more and more I go on this journey, the more and more I realize that the adults God placed in my life when I was young, not all but many, are nothing but a bunch of narcissists. The consequences of this have not only pertained to biblical knowledge, but knowledge across the majority of life: how it works, what is right versus what is wrong, what I need to do to succeed, and how I should behave in different situations. I’ve done a lot of wrong things in my life, and I’m still doing quite a number of them. At the end of the day, the Bible is the plumb line, the double-edged sword that divides between bone and marrow, and soul and spirit. Sin is sin, period. Repentance is beautiful. However, I have no clue what I’m supposed to be doing with my life. I am blessed to have a very cushy job (albeit on a contract basis), a wife who loves me, an apartment, food I can eat, and money in the bank, along with those things. It is far better than being alone on the street. And I know that I could very easily have been there at any point in my life. however, I’m aware I’m being (and have been for a long time) challenged in ways that I don’t believe I am able to respond to, and that makes it very, very, very hard. I still maintain that it’s not because I don’t want to. But the lack of clarity regarding my purpose is very angering, especially when I’m being told to “have faith” and obey in certain ways when I’m still not convinced that doing certain things are even worth it. The Bible makes it clear that God rewards obedience and faithfulness. Great! I’d like to know what exactly the rewards are, please. By the way, this isn’t the first time I’ve prayed this precise prayer – in fact, far from it – so I don’t know what to say about expecting a response, given that I haven’t gotten one yet.
I don’t really have a stirring or uplifting way to close this post, so the best I can say is that tomorrow’s post will be a bit more positive. Stay tuned.
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