April 29, 2007: Does God Speak Today?

A war of words erupted recently in Christianity Today concerning whether God still speaks to us. In an article titled "My Conversation with God," an anonymous professor of a Christian university wrote about "hearing" God tell him to write a book and donate its royalties to a needy seminary student. Pastor and theologian John Piper responded with "The Morning I Heard God's Voice," where he countered that we hear God every time we read the Bible.

Piper doesn't deny that God gave the professor a special communication. He writes, "What makes me sad about the article is not that it isn't true or didn't happen. What's sad is that it really does give the impression that extra-biblical communication with God is surpassingly wonderful and faith-deepening. All the while, the supremely glorious communication of the living God that personally and powerfully and transformingly explodes in the receptive heart through the Bible everyday is passed over in silence."

Well, Piper has a point that every-day communication from God in the Bible should not be "passed over in silence." God speaks through Scripture, a fact which renders inexcusable our neglect of it. As I conduct a baptism class for young people, one of the things I repeat to them is that they need to start reading the Bible on their own (if they haven't started already). Get the Bible in your bones, and you will know the voice of the Lord.

But in addition to that, could God still speak a word to us and not others, and, contra Piper, would it be a sad thing if we found that extra-biblical communication "surpassingly wonderful and faith-deepening"?

My mother read the Bible countless times, and had it so well in mind that she could spout quips such as a sarcastic dismissal of the jogging fad ("The wicked flee when none pursueth") or a playful resistance to her husband's wake-up call ("A little more sleep, a little more slumber, a little more folding of the hands to rest"). But her knowledge of Scripture and constant dependence on it did not keep her from valuing one "surpassingly wonderful" occasion when God spoke a couple words directly to her.

She was 57. Her husband, my father, had passed away suddenly a couple years before. Having spent 33 years as a homemaker raising 5 children, mom suddenly had to brush up on her office skills, and she managed to find a job as a secretary at Continental Bank in downtown Chicago. Her health was marginal. She was exhausted, and it required more energy than she had to commute on the train and walk 4 blocks each way and work 8 hours. Once while trudging back to the train station on a bitterly cold winter evening she prayed, "Oh Lord, please, deliver me from this job."

And the Lord said to her, "Deliver yourself." She testified later that though the words were not audible, they might as well have been. The message was as clear, simple, stunning and forthright as could be. And she knew it was the Lord.

She put in her notice to quit that job - not knowing where she would find another. But she did find one right away: immediately the Lord provided low-pressure, easy employment nearby working as a maid and cook at the manse of a Catholic parish. That job was as much a Godsend as the message to quit the first one.

Mom was no charismatic. She had little patience for those imaginative and gullible souls who carry on dialogues in their head and label one of the voices "God." The way she put it was, "God speaks, but not in complete sentences." Of course, technically, "Deliver yourself" is a complete sentence, but her idea was that if God is going to say something to us that isn't in the Bible, it will probably be short and sweet and to the point. Something like, "Step to the side" a moment before a piano crashes down from above onto that very spot of the pavement where we had just been standing. I think mom was right.