Before I was a Christian I was raised a Catholic. When I became a Christian I stopped going to the Catholic Church and started to attend another church, a spiritual church. It was a great offence to my grandmother, and she was deeply offended by it. We had some significant issues over that and anyway her birthday was coming up. I thought I need to get her something and my thinking in those days was you better make it up somehow, thought I'd get her a nice gift, so I went downtown. The day came and went and I got so busy I missed it. I thought oh no, double banger. [Laughter] I missed the birthday, and I didn't go to church and I'm going to hell, you know? This is not good [Laughter] so I thought then what I need to do then - my reasoning, which is not a good reasoning, was I need to buy a nice gift to make it up. Actually that would never make it up. You just couldn't appease the thing like that, but I did want to buy a gift anyway so I went to the shops and I was looking and I couldn't work out what to get.
I went past this shop and I felt the Holy Spirit say go in there. It was a religious shop, books and things, and I went in there and I looked around and there was stuff I didn't really like there. It was full of all kinds of stuff, and I was wrestling with God over it. I saw a little picture there and it was the shepherd with the sheep - you know the picture, I'm the good shepherd and there's a picture of a lovely shepherd, robes and Jesus [laughs] and he probably doesn't look anything like that, but that was the picture. Anyway I felt the Holy Spirit say I want you to buy that and I just resisted. I just really - I thought no, no, no, I don't even like those things. So I walked up the street, came back and I thought no, I can't see anything, I'll go back to the shop. So I went back, I thought I've got nothing to lose. I feel God's telling me, I'll just get it, I'm just going to get the picture.
So I bought the picture, and I bought some dried flower arrangement, and I put it all together, bundled it off with a note, sorry I missed your birthday, here's a little gift and blah blah blah. Anyway I met my grandmother a little later and I said to her did you get the birthday gift? She said yes, thank you very much, I really enjoyed the little dried flower arrangement. It was very, very pretty and smelled nice and so on. Oh good. I said what about the picture? She said oh, she said that did bring back some memories, and she said when I was at school in boarding school at the age of 12, a girlfriend and me got into trouble with one of the teachers. We wanted to try and put it right with the teacher, and so we decided we would buy a gift, and we bought that picture for her. [Laughter]
Now only God could come up with something like that. We're talking something like 60 years prior, and God knew what she did, and when she saw the picture it triggered the memory of trying to put something right in a relationship that was wrong, and she associated with my gift a desire to put right with her something that was wrong. Now only God could come up with stuff like that aye, so this is the blessing of being able to listen to the Holy Spirit on different situations. Okay, getting the idea? So we need to hear what God is saying. Alright then, so another example is found in Acts 14, Verses 8 to 10. Paul is in Lystra and a certain man without strength in his feet was sitting, a cripple from his mother's womb, he'd never walked, and the man heard Paul speaking. Paul - now notice what it says - Paul observed him intently, and saw he had faith to be healed. Now that's an interesting statement.
Paul fixed his eyes on the man - in other words he stared at him, and as he stared at him he perceived, that's in his spirit, that the man had faith to be healed. What does it look like if you've got faith to be healed? What would you be looking for? What would you be looking for? He perceived. In other words there was an inner knowing that this man had faith. He went to him and prayed and immediately the man rose up and was healed, so this is he saw something. So in flowing with the Holy Spirit, or hearing the voice of God, we begin to hear that sometimes we see things, sometimes we hear things, sometimes we will just perceive or sense something in our spirit. So let's now have a look, as we've seen how Paul operated, and we see how Jesus operated, and we see that it's by the hearing of faith that we can work in miracles. Now we want to look at how to hear the voice of God.
What does the voice of God sound like? So the first thing I want to do is to point out this, is that when you hear the voice of God, you will hear from within, not from without. God put His Holy Spirit within you. 1 Corinthians 6 and Verse 17 says he that's joined to the Lord is one spirit, so that's like a husband and wife being married. So being born again, your spirit is joined to the Lord, so if you're going to hear the voice of God you will hear Him in your spirit. You won't necessarily hear Him with your audible ears. You won't necessarily see anything with your natural eyes. You will have to develop your spiritual sense. Getting the idea? Okay then, now what I want to do is I'm just going to get three people up, and I want to just do a visual illustration for you to give you an idea of something - I want to put something visual in front of you, to help you understand something spiritual. So I won't refer to all the notes as I do it, but what I've got in the notes I will teach it by doing a visual demonstration for you. That okay?