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Hearing from the Lord
15 Plays4 years ago
Vernon talks with Torben Jensen about hearing from God. What does it look like? Does God REALLY speak to us?Torben is a Grace Ministries International Counselor and is currently serving with the organization "Joni and Friends" in Nashville, TN - https://www.joniandfriends.org).
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Transcript
Introduction of Podcast and Guest
00:00:03
Speaker
This is your host Vernon Terrell with Grace Ministries International and it's time for Walking Free.
00:00:18
Speaker
And I'm so glad that you have joined us for this episode of Walking Free. This is Vernon, and we have with us today a guest that I really think are going to enjoy hearing from Torben. Jensen, Torben, welcome so much for, and thank you so much for being here. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I've been looking forward to it.
Discussing Waiting on the Lord
00:00:40
Speaker
Well, Torben, before we dive in to our topic, and the topic is going to be very relevant. I know Michelle and I briefly spoke about something similar on an earlier episode, and we spoke about this idea on
00:01:05
Speaker
What does it mean to wait on the Lord? And what does that really mean? I mean, what are we talking about? And we use the verse in Psalms 27, 14 that said, you know, wait for the Lord, be strong and let your heart take
Hearing from the Lord
00:01:24
Speaker
courage. Yes, wait for the Lord. What does that mean? Well, we're going to today tease out a bit
00:01:30
Speaker
this idea of hearing from the Lord. What is that all about? And Torben's going to really give us some real-life thoughts on that. But before we get started, Torben, would you tell everyone just a little bit about yourself?
Torben's Background and Ministry Work
00:01:51
Speaker
Yeah, I'm happy to. I am from Denmark originally, so in case any of the listeners are wondering about my accent, that's where it's coming from. I have lived in the States the last 13 years. I'm married to Jeanette. We've been married 16 years. We have three young boys that are 9 and 7 and 4. I have worked in various kinds of ministries, doing a lot of global ministries, but also a lot of discipleship training and counseling ministries over the last
00:02:20
Speaker
coming up on 18 years. So yeah, I've been blessed to work for a number of different ministries. And currently I work for, certainly for Grace Ministries International, but I also work for Johnny and Friends. That's an organization working to help families affected by disability. So I live in Nashville, Tennessee with my family, and we've been here the last four years. Before we jump in, tell us a little bit about what's going on with Johnny and Friends. Such an incredible ministry.
00:02:50
Speaker
Yeah, it is, it is, yeah, it's a remarkable ministry. So Johnny Ericzentada, as some of the listeners might know, is a lady who at a young age of 16, she was in a diving accident. She used to be a very active athlete. She was in a diving accident and ended up as a quadriplegic and was wrestling a lot with God with that. Had to go through a lot of thoughts of suicide and a lot of depression before God really got a hold of her.
00:03:19
Speaker
and really convinced her that he had great plans with the rest of her life despite her physical condition. She was on a nationwide talk show and shared about her story a few years later. And that's really how the ministry started because people started writing letters back in those days.
00:03:37
Speaker
to Johnny and Johnny and her sister and then one of her friends started writing back and then just like trying to speak into the lives of all the families that are affected by disability in the US and all over the world. So the ministry has been going on the last 42 years. We work all over the states and work internationally as well. We bring wheelchairs and the gospel to people and I think it's 20 different nations right now.
00:04:04
Speaker
It's a beautiful ministry of just ministering to the entire family, both the individuals that are themselves affected by disability, but also to the rest of the family, because every family that has just one person that has a disability, it affects everybody. So it's a beautiful ministry of just trying to help in different ways, encouraging, helping churches provide the support and the help that's so necessary for all these families.
00:04:30
Speaker
That's amazing. We love Johnny and the ministry Johnny and Friends. And I remember so many years ago when that ministry was early in the early days. And what an incredible ministry. And I have a heart for special needs as the father of an autistic adult son now at 23. But what a journey and what an incredible ministry. And
00:05:00
Speaker
Torvin, you have, as you said, you've worked in so many ministry and aspects of ministry from counseling to training to teaching now with Johnny and friends. And this idea of hearing from God is something that you are very familiar with. Can you explain just a little bit about what hearing from God, what is it not?
Life-Changing Mission Conference Experience
00:05:27
Speaker
What is it? Can you help us out with that?
00:05:29
Speaker
Yeah, I would love to. I think for me, when I think of this, again, I have to go back, in my case, 20 years. 20 years ago, my life changed drastically. I was a young man headed for what I thought would be a very lucrative career working in the area of communications. That's where my plans were. And I was headed for that and was in the middle of my education for that. God got my attention.
00:05:58
Speaker
It's a funny story. Sometimes God will use a broken heart to change your life forever.
00:06:04
Speaker
At the time I was dating a young girl from Norway and she ended that relationship and I was sitting at home and crying about that and thought that my life was over as you do in your 20s when something like that happens. And most of my friends were headed to a missions conference in the Netherlands that took place there. And I was like, okay, I can sit at home and be sad or I can go with all of them to this missions conference. I was like, okay, I'll go.
00:06:31
Speaker
and went to this mission conference and it was all very interesting. Lots of thousands of people there, lots of missions organizations, but nothing that really touched me until the very last evening of this conference. And this, I would say is the first time that I heard God speak directly to me. I was sitting there along thousands of other young people and a lady spoke on a passage that I'd heard lots of sermons about before. It's the story where Jesus feeds the 5,000 plus with
00:07:00
Speaker
little bread and some fish from a young boy. And I heard God say to me through this sermon that that's what I want from you. I want you to give everything you have to me. I'm gonna have to do something that you will not understand. I'm gonna have to break it. When I break it into pieces, I can bless this, bless it and it will multiply.
00:07:23
Speaker
And I sat there and I knew that I had a choice to make. I could say yes to this challenge. And I knew, even though it wasn't fully clear, I knew that my life would change forever if I did that, or I could say no. And I sat there and I chose to say, yes, okay, this is what I want. I want whatever it is you have for me. Nothing was specified as far as the direction there. But this was the first time that I heard God speak. And I knew when I left that conference that my life was changed forever at that very moment.
00:07:55
Speaker
So, I mean, when you're talking about you heard from God, I mean, did God just, you know, speak into some, you know, megaphone into your ear and just say, Torben, and it reverberates and let me speak to you. I mean, what was it like? Yeah, it's been many different experiences of hearing God speak. At that point, what I remember was
00:08:23
Speaker
Again, it wasn't necessarily an audible voice, but it was a very clear thought where what I heard from the lady speaking to thousands of people was personalized. And I heard my name in my thoughts, told them, this is what I want from you. And I just knew that this was God speaking to me. I knew that He was calling me to a radical life change.
00:08:50
Speaker
from having grown up in the church, of course, that this is how Jesus would walk around and call people as well. He tells them, come, give everything you have to me and follow me. So I knew it was God. It was crystal clear to me and I knew that the implications would be huge from saying yes to this. This was not just a...
00:09:13
Speaker
I'm inviting you to a little experience that you'll forget about in a few moments. None of this was an invitation into an experience and in this case, a lifelong experience of experiencing Jesus as Lord and giving Him the Lordship and truly saying, okay, whatever you tell me to do, whatever that looks like, I'm going to say yes to that.
00:09:39
Speaker
So yeah, that's how it played out in that sense. It was really this strong sense in my thoughts, a sense of hearing my own name being spoken and of this passage being personalized for me.
00:09:53
Speaker
It's like you're hearing God and you use the idea in your thoughts and really in your spirit. You're hearing that you're sensing God in your spirit through your thoughts, telling you something.
Listening to God's Guidance
00:10:10
Speaker
How do you see most Christians when they talk about hearing from God or listening to God? What does that look like?
00:10:23
Speaker
in your experience for most Christians? Like I said, I've worked in discipleship training and counseling for 18 years. So I've had the privilege of working with a lot of Christians of different ages. And very often what I encounter is that for most people, the idea of hearing God lead them directly is a foreign concept.
00:10:48
Speaker
And what I often hear, like if you talk about having to make some sort of life change, very often it's a, okay, I have decided to do this. I'm going to go to this college or I'm going to take this job. I'm going to move to that city. And then we ask God, okay,
00:11:05
Speaker
If you have something to say to this, please tell us or we will then make the assumption that if you don't cause the house to collapse overnight, then that's the sign that this was you speaking. And what I'm challenging people to do is something quite different from that. I had a conversation just a couple of weeks ago.
00:11:25
Speaker
who contacted me, who had heard me speak. I just spoke a little bit about John and friends at a men's breakfast. And he wanted to talk to me because he was very intrigued about this idea of following Jesus and listening to Jesus.
00:11:41
Speaker
And he said as well that, he said, okay, I'm coming towards the end of my career and I have all these different ideas for how I would like for God to use me. And I said, what if you do something completely different? What if you instead of telling God different suggestions, what if you just ask Him, okay, Jesus, what do you want to do with my life?
00:12:02
Speaker
blank slate, no suggestions, no ideas, nothing like that. We had a great conversation around those different things there and he sent me a message a couple of days later and said he put a notice on his fridge where he just said, Jesus, what do you want me to do?
00:12:20
Speaker
And I love that and I know that Jesus will speak into that. But of course, what's scary about that is in the reason why so many people don't pray like that and don't live like that is that He could tell you to do something crazy. He could tell you to do something that's very uncomfortable. He could tell you to do something that you don't want to do, like the most recent example for ourselves. Again, we live in...
00:12:42
Speaker
in the natural area here in Tennessee, and we came here four years ago because we were in a situation in
Family's Move to Tennessee by God's Direction
00:12:50
Speaker
Colorado where a work situation had deteriorated to the point where I had lost my job. We were also facing homelessness because the people who were renting our house had decided to stop renting it out to us, so we were just sitting there.
00:13:05
Speaker
We had a five-year-old and a three-year-old and a two-week old baby. So we sat there and we're like, okay, what do we do, God? And we have lived this way of expecting God to lead us directly. We've lived like that for many, many years, my wife and I. So we were just, okay, so what's next? And God, in the middle of the night, spoke to my wife and told us to go here to Middle Tennessee and we were like,
00:13:28
Speaker
Why? We don't know anybody in all of Tennessee. We have no context there. There's no real reason for us to go there, but that's what God had to say. And over the next several days, there were a couple of ways that He confirmed it through different people who would speak to us.
00:13:44
Speaker
about this area out of the blue. That was just God's way of sort of confirming that, okay, this is what I want you to do. But He didn't give us any more details. And I've talked to many people since we came here to Tennessee, and a lot of people will look at me and think, you're crazy. Like, are you serious? So you just packed up your stuff and yourselves and your family, and you drove across the country from Colorado to Tennessee without anything else, without any idea of where you're going to live,
00:14:12
Speaker
what you were going to do and how any of it would look like. And I said, yes, absolutely. Because when I look at the Scriptures, when I recently we've been watching The Chosen, this multi-season TV series about Jesus, and that's what I was seeing. The Spirit as well just lived out on the screen this sort of way that Jesus would just call his disciples. He walks up to Matthew who has a solid job.
00:14:38
Speaker
who has a career, who has respect and he just says, follow me and he puts down his stuff and follows them. This is, according to the Scriptures, according to the Bible, something that we can expect as disciples of Jesus that He will tell us what to do. He will tell us where to go.
00:14:56
Speaker
So for us, this is how we live. This is what we expect from our relationship with God that we don't tell Him that this is what we need to be doing. This is what it needs to look like. But no, we actually, yeah, whenever there's a situation where we know we have to make some sort of decisions like, okay, Jesus, it's up to you. How do you want to speak to us? How do you want to lead us?
00:15:21
Speaker
We don't get to decide. And I think that's where you get to experience God leading in specific ways. And you have the joy of knowing as we were driving across the country from Colorado and ended up living in an Airbnb. And I started networking from the one person I knew who knew a person here that I knew all along that we were here because God told us to come here, not for any other reason.
00:15:46
Speaker
You know, I use illustration. I think there's so much in what you said that we can unpack a bit, but I use illustration that...
00:15:56
Speaker
And this is not always the case. Sometimes you need to just sit quietly and just receive from the Lord, but often I find that the Lord really will steer the bike if you start pedaling and just say, Lord, show me where you want me to go. And you don't have the direction, similar to what Abraham or Abram back in the day in Genesis 12, when the Lord said, hey, just go forth from your country and from your relatives and from your father's house.
00:16:24
Speaker
to a land I will, in the future, show you. Go that way. It's like, okay, don't know anybody there. I have no clue, but okay, I'll start walking. I'll start walking that way. And that's exactly what you did from Colorado. You just said, okay, Lord, we're gonna start driving to Tennessee. And that's pretty cool.
00:16:54
Speaker
Yeah, it's just, again, it creates this life where, again, I talked to a lot of Christians as well who say that they just long to experience God. And I'm like,
00:17:07
Speaker
That is, I have to be honest, a foreign idea for me, because of course I experienced God, because I live in this sort of way. I live in a daily expectation that He is going to lead me, that He is going to tell me what He wants me to be about. Yesterday I was at a
00:17:26
Speaker
a business appointment and I was about to leave this coffee shop and I had a sense this time it was just a sense that there was a man sitting not too far from us and I was like
00:17:38
Speaker
I think I need to go and talk to him and it's not really a habit of mine to go and strike up conversations with strangers necessarily, but went over and saw that this young man was looking at the Bible and I asked him, so what are you doing? And he shared, he was a youth pastor and I sat down and we talked for the next, I think, hour.
00:17:59
Speaker
And he was right at this point, he was ready to considering, him and his wife were considering leaving this solid job they had as youth ministers at a church and stepping out into something much more scary. They had a sense that God was calling them into a life of following him into some church planting, into some different looking, very different looking discipleship work. And he kept asking me, can you tell me stories of God's provision
00:18:26
Speaker
When you came here to Tennessee, can you tell me how did he help you guys in those years that have gone by since you came here? And it was exactly what he needed to hear. He needed to hear from someone like me, who in this case was just a few steps further down that journey, he was about to embark on himself with his family. He had three little kids, just like I do, many similarities between us.
00:18:50
Speaker
But I would not have known that. I would not have experienced the blessing for myself talking to him. He wouldn't have received the blessing if I had not been listening to that little notch that just said, you need to talk to that guy.
00:19:03
Speaker
So how do you know, Torben, how do you know that it's the Lord speaking and it's not the enemy or it's just something that is in your subconscious that you saw on a show?
Recognizing and Confirming God's Voice
00:19:21
Speaker
How do you know? Is there some secret sauce around that?
00:19:29
Speaker
I think the secret sauce has to do with confidence in your relationship with God. As we talk about in this podcast and many of these other episodes where it's like the key to walking free and in this case to living in this sort of way where you experience God as a living daily reality in your life has to do with confidence in your relationship with God. I know who God is. I know how He sees me. I know who I am in Him.
00:19:59
Speaker
There's no doubt about that. I know that He wants to lead me. I know He wants to speak to me. I know He wants to speak to me and through me. And so for me, it has to do with that confidence that comes from that. And then what I typically do is I just double check with God. When I have some sort of thought and it sounds a little crazy, I'll double check with God and just ask Him, just praying in my head, okay, God, is this from you?
00:20:28
Speaker
And I just ask you to give me a sense of peace here. I have a sense this is what you want me to say. This is what you want me to do. And he'll confirm that if it's from him and if not, that that thought will vanish as it typically does because then it was just some crazy thought of my own.
00:20:43
Speaker
And so, again, to me, it's been a matter of just growing in that both as a counselor, as a person in any sort of conversation, just knowing, OK, God, I think you want me to share this. I think you want me to take the conversation in this direction. Is this where we're going? OK, let's do it.
00:21:01
Speaker
And to me, it's just a reality as we're seeing it in the Scriptures as well of those that knew God well, that this is what we can expect as followers here in 2021 as well.
00:21:16
Speaker
that God wants to speak to us. God wants to direct us. God wants to lead us. It's not this sort of, it has to be so formal. It has to be like, Oh, God, I don't know, ask church leadership what they think necessarily. No, like again, Jesus lives inside of you. He wants to lead you. He wants to direct you. He wants to bring about blessings to people around you. He wants you to be a source of
00:21:42
Speaker
encouragement, whatever that may look like.
Uber Driving as Ministry Opportunity
00:21:45
Speaker
And for me, I had a year where I was driving Uber full time here in Nashville, and I never thought I would be driving Uber. But this was another time where God was speaking to me and challenging me in ways that I thought
00:22:00
Speaker
sounded really odd because again we're coming here to Nashville and to be honest I thought and lots of people around me thought they were like oh wow you guys came across the country so surely God must have something phenomenal planned for you guys straight away and I'm like yeah I don't think that's necessarily how it works again just because you obey God doesn't mean that things will turn out great but that's of course what people were saying to us but I certainly had some thoughts that okay there was something
00:22:24
Speaker
very specifically wanted us to be about here but we came here and very early on i was like i kept networking trying to get a job applied for all sorts of stuff and i was like okay so i want you to do something crazy i want you to be a full-time uber driver and i'm like i cannot make enough money being a full-time uber driver for a family of five and we homeschool our kids
00:22:45
Speaker
And God in that conversation there we were having as I was praying about, it was like, no, that's true, but I'll take care of the rest. You just work hard and I'll take care of the rest. I'll show you miracles when it comes to finances. And then there was the second challenge that he gave me was, okay, I want to show you that now, for the first time in many years, you're not a minister, you're not a counselor, you're not a pastor, you're not a missionary. You are just a, in my case, first name that they struggle to pronounce.
00:23:15
Speaker
taking them from A to B in Metro Nashville. And I'm going to show you that I will do ministry through you as you drive people around town. And I was like, okay, guess we'll do that. So that's what I did for a full year. Drove more than 5,000 Uber trips. And what I experienced was, again, I didn't have any crosses or Bibles or anything hanging in my car. I was just myself. And of course, the Holy Spirit is present.
00:23:43
Speaker
If i had a dime for every time some stranger would say i don't know why i'm telling you this box and here comes the confession i would be a very wealthy man. Confession of an affair maybe it's telling about struggles in his marriage maybe it's talking about how do i do this with my kids with other relationships whatever it may look like.
00:24:03
Speaker
I had so many opportunities to speak truth, life, hope into people's lives. I had so many opportunities to pray for people. Remember this one gentleman who, as soon as I asked him, how are you doing?
00:24:17
Speaker
He just spilled the beans and said that, hey, I'm a believer, but I've gotten lost. I'm in the middle of an affair and I just sense a conviction just sitting here talking to you. And we ended up sitting and praying outside of his very fancy apartment complex at 3.30 in the morning. And he wrote me a message the day after saying, okay, I have enrolled in counseling and I have ended the affair because I know that this is not what God has for me.
00:24:48
Speaker
And all of this is just examples of God leading you. I never thought I would be an Uber driver for a year. That was not my dream. But it was an opportunity to see God do His work just by me being obedient, just by me driving people from A to B. Sometimes we were talking about the weather or sports or whatever. But very, very often it would lead into any sort of spiritual conversation or maybe just someone needed.
00:25:12
Speaker
a dad to help them navigate life. I talked to a lot of young people and I have enough gray hair to be in that position with them. And yeah, it was just a phenomenal time where it's like you get to see God at work. You sit there, I would sit and have these...
00:25:29
Speaker
since God maybe wanting to ask them a question and like I said, I would kind of double check if it was a question that sounded a little odd and just ask them, so what's going on? What's happening with this? Can you share about your marriage or your family or whatever it may be? And all of a sudden, we would have a conversation that would lead into something meaningful. And that's when Jesus was on this planet.
00:25:52
Speaker
He was talking to everybody, and sometimes I guarantee it. He was talking about sports, if you will, or talking with the little children about games. And, you know, I said, yeah, let's have a conversation about anything, but always bringing it back to an encouraging word, a loving word. Jesus has called us to love one another. That is the mission.
00:26:18
Speaker
And part of that is, yes, sharing Christ as God gives opportunity, sharing the cross, sharing forgiveness and life, but it's loving. That is the mission that we are called
Belief in God's Constant Guidance
00:26:30
Speaker
to love. And something you said, and this is an assumption that I think is the foundation of what you're talking about, we must truly believe
00:26:42
Speaker
and accept that God is always talking and leading. 2 Corinthians 2.14 says, but thanks be to God who always leads us in triumph in Christ and manifests through us the sweet aroma of the knowledge of Him in every place.
00:27:07
Speaker
And He is always leading. He's always leading us in triumph, and He's always manifesting through us this sweet aroma of the knowledge of Him in every place, whether it's an Uber vehicle, whether it's at a retail shop if you're working, whether you're working in ministry or not, a corporate job, it doesn't matter.
00:27:32
Speaker
If you're a believer in Jesus Christ, He is always leading and always talking to you. The question is, are we listening and taking action?
00:27:43
Speaker
Exactly. And I think that's the invitation that Jesus has for all of us.
Full Surrender to Experience Guidance
00:27:51
Speaker
But what it requires, of course, is that we surrender to Him fully. And I think that's what hinders a lot of Christians from experiencing what I'm describing.
00:28:04
Speaker
that there are still areas of their lives where they still want to be in charge. I remember talking to someone here in the Nashville area and we were talking about being just open to God leading wherever He wanted to lead us. And this man, it was almost a little bit humorous, at least to me, but he was so honest and he said, yeah, like I say to God that I'm willing to go to any of these three counties
00:28:29
Speaker
So he had three counties here in the United States, and the United States, I think I looked it up at some point, there's like 4,500 counties. But of course, what he meant by that and what so many people, they live like that, where it's like, you know, I'm willing to move where here, here, as long as my family is there, as long as my friends are there, as long as I have a great house, but I'm like, that's not being led by God. That's not a full surrender to Jesus. That's not saying you're in charge.
00:28:57
Speaker
And I think that's why so many people simply don't experience this sort of just natural daily experience of, hey, Jesus is alive in me. Jesus is working through me. Jesus is helping me parent. Jesus is helping me connect with my kids. Jesus will stop me in my tracks as I'm thinking something, I'm about to do something that might be dumb and He'll lead and He'll guide and He'll direct me.
00:29:25
Speaker
And I think that's where, but it has to do with that full surrender and saying to Jesus, you know what, you have it all, whatever you want me to do, whatever you want me to be about, however you want us to live, wherever you want us to live, however you want things to work out with our kids, we're not in charge, you're in charge. And when we submit to Jesus in that way, and we can only do that if we trust Him, we can only do that if we know that He is good,
00:29:52
Speaker
and if we know that His plans for us are good, even if it's incredibly painful.
00:29:57
Speaker
The last four years for our family have been devastatingly painful since everything blew up in our face in Colorado. And yet we can say now looking back and even though not everything has been answered by any stretch, but we're so thankful for what has come out. We're so thankful for what we've learned about God's provision, God's care for us and our family. We're so thankful for the fact that
00:30:25
Speaker
He's always known what he's doing. He knows what he's doing right now. He knows what life is going to look like. My life doesn't look at all the way I thought it would at this point. I'm 44 years old and I live in a rented house south of Nashville. I never thought I'd be doing that. I thought I would have some sort of fancy, high-powered career and have some super cool house somewhere in a boat or something. Who knows? But it doesn't matter because Jesus knows
00:30:53
Speaker
what He wants us to be about. Jesus knows what's best for us. So all of that has to do with trust, has to do with surrender, surrender to this love of God, surrender that even when He leads us through these terrible, terrible valleys of the shadow of death, He's still there with us. He's still gonna speak to us. He's still gonna honor us. He's still gonna change our lives. And just thinking about Psalm 23, this picture of
00:31:22
Speaker
David talking about, hey, you prepare a table before I'm in the presence of my enemies. You may have enemies following Jesus. I've certainly had that. I've had lots of people in my life in and outside of the church. In my case, sadly, mostly within the church who have
00:31:38
Speaker
behaved like enemies when I have followed God, when I have spoken the truth, when I have taken a stand against something that was wrong. That has cost me a lot. But in that place, in that valley, he prepares a table, a table of acceptance, a table of communion, a table of telling me who he is and telling me who I am. And that's what I did. And a table of provision right there. Exactly.
00:32:07
Speaker
I will tell you, Torben, as we just wrap up this first part, and we're going to have Torben, and we're going to talk about a lot of things in future episodes as well, but this idea of hearing from God and following what you hear
00:32:28
Speaker
we have to really believe, number one, that He truly cares for us, and He does. That He truly loves us, and He does. That He's able to provide for us, and He is. If we can, and often I have to ask, do we really believe that? Because if we don't, well,
00:32:50
Speaker
we may hear something but we're not going to take action on it. Is he going to give us what we need to say like when he was telling the disciples that, hey, you're going to be brought into some pretty tough places and even before the synagogues and the rulers and authorities and what he told those disciples, he says, look, don't worry about how or what
00:33:15
Speaker
you are to speak in your defense what you're to say a lot of us want to plan out everything we're going to say and this is in Luke 12 11 and 12 and he says for the Holy Spirit will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say and you know when when you come up like you gave the illustration of you said say I need to talk to this person what do I say can we trust the one who is omnipotent
00:33:43
Speaker
the one who loves us, who is our comforter, can we trust Him in us to speak the words that we need to say through us in that moment? Yes, we can. And that's what it's all about. Torben, what final words of encouragement could you give us before we wrap up?
Overcoming Barriers to Hearing God
00:34:04
Speaker
I would just encourage anybody who is listening where if they are honest and they would say that, hey, listening to God and hearing Him speak to me, that is a very rare occurrence. Or maybe it's what I've sometimes asked people like, tell me the last time, tell me your last experience of Jesus in your life. And sometimes it's a little shocking to me how people have to go back many, many years. And I'm like, no, no, like if Jesus is in you and the Word of God is alive,
00:34:33
Speaker
Surely you have something from today or yesterday. There's got to be something going on. But if that's not your experience, I would encourage anybody listening to find somebody to actually address that with, to start that conversation with a trusted friend, a pastor, a counselor, whatever. Just say, okay, so what is it?
00:34:56
Speaker
that's between me and experiencing Jesus this way. Like what is it that I am not willing to surrender? What is it maybe about God's care that I have not fully experienced so that I feel that I can trust Him fully with my life and I'm willing to give it all to Him and then actually get to experience Him
00:35:18
Speaker
leading, speaking, directing, and just experiencing a life that's exciting. I've often said that life as a disciple of Christ, again, if I sometimes talk to Christians who think it's boring, and I'm like, boring? Seriously, I don't understand that at all. Again, like any other emotion I can relate to, but boring, not in a million years. It's never boring with the living God in your life. I can assure you of that.
00:35:45
Speaker
But I would encourage anybody to start that conversation, starting to pray to God as well. God, what is here? What is hindering me from having that experience that you lay out in the Scriptures that is supposed to be something that's normal to us? This is not just for Paul and Peter and David and those guys from the Bible. This is for all of God's children who wants us to experience Him as a daily living reality that changes our lives moment by moment.
00:36:14
Speaker
Well, as we say on the podcast often, a lot of people will talk about it.
Encouragement to Act on God’s Voice
00:36:21
Speaker
They talk about identity. They might talk about hearing from God, and there are many that just aren't. They just talk and talk and talk, and they don't take that actual step and that step of faith. And I don't know what the step of faith might be for you if you're listening. As Torben said, it might be
00:36:42
Speaker
asking God to reveal those things you're holding on to, that you're holding on so tightly that you need to let go of, and release that to the Lord. And then listen, and listen to His direction. And once you listen,
00:36:59
Speaker
And once you hear from Him, then you take that step of faith, whatever that step is. So as I close this podcast, let me just say our tagline that just says this, it might be time for you to stop talking and start walking.
00:37:21
Speaker
You've been listening to Walking Free, a production of Grace Ministries International in Marietta, Georgia. For more information, go to our website at gmint.org. That's gminc.org.