Episode 338: I’m Talkin. . .Message
I’m Talking, episode 338 for October 6th, 2024.
This is Joel from the I’m Talking microcast, where I share my thoughts on a topic that has piqued my interest this past week.
This week we’re talking message.
So message is a very common word.
We hear it a lot in our world today.
Many different contexts, maybe the most used one is in a text message because we do that quite often in the world that we live in today.
Other times you might have heard someone say, well, I didn’t get a hold of them, but I left a message years ago in office talk.
I think you could, you know, leave a message with the secretary.
She would write it down and take it to the boss or something like that.
Or, you know, I have a message for you because someone told you something and you’re relaying it to another person, those kinds of things.
And then some people might even say they have a message from God.
And therein lies the challenge for those of us who call ourselves Christians.
So do we still, are we able to, as Christians, get a message from God?
Well, of course we can.
And of course we do.
And the reality is that there are things to question when we talk about that message from God.
How do we get it?
When do we get it?
What might it be?
And then how do we react?
So just to get things straight, I think the way I believe it to be and have heard from many pastors as well is how do we hear from God?
Well, the reality is that God has left us his word.
He has it in a written form that many of bigger minds than mine have translated into languages for us, whether you are English speaking or another language, another dialect.
Most people can get the Bible in their language.
And that is how God speaks to the current day Christians, through God’s word.
And when does that happen?
Well, it happens anytime you are in his word, anytime he brings his word to mind through scripture memorization, those types of things.
It might be in Bible study.
It might be in church, listening to a pastor present a sermon, lots of different times that God can be giving us a message.
So what might that message be?
Well, that is going to be different for everybody.
The one thing that I love about the Bible, among many, is that when I read it, even if I have read that passage numerous times before, it always says something different to me.
Is that because the word of God changes?
No, because we know that God never changes and never casts a shifting shadow, as his word says.
But what it means is that our position in life changes, what we may be going through changes.
Our struggles, our joys, our relationships, all those things can change.
And so what God says to us through his word in any given moment and through different mediums—could be podcasts, could be preachers, could be friends, could be reading the scripture, could be prayer—all of those things are impacting our lives as we are living them at the moment.
And that is the thing that’s so cool about how God speaks with us.
And then the reality is that we have to react to that.
And so when we say we have a message from God, we need to make sure that it lines up with God’s word.
These are things we get from God’s word—a scripture that we’ve never quite read that way before or a scripture that meant something new to us because of what we’ve experienced or what we are experiencing in our lives.
And then what we have to do as Christians is be discerning.
And when someone says they have a message from God, especially if they think it’s for us, that we know that that lines up with God’s word, that we know how that was communicated to the person who is now talking to us, and that it wasn’t like a dream or some other weird thing that doesn’t line up with God’s word, and then we can react appropriately to that as well.
So the reality is that we as Christians still need to be listening for a message from God to direct our everyday, to direct our very future, to direct how we interact with the world in which we live.
God still talks to us.
Until next week, this is Joel from the I’m Talking Microcast.