God Speaks Through The Holy Spirit

Amen. Well, let’s go to John chapter 16. We’ve been talking the past few weeks about hearing God, hearing God’s voice. And how many of you know it’s so important to be able to hear God’s voice? There is so much confusion. There’s so much darkness. There’s so much being advocated as truth that is absolutely just not true, right? You hear things like, follow your heart, follow your dreams. The Bible says don’t do that. Actually, your heart is wicked above all things. So don’t follow your heart. But that’s what the world says. And if we don’t know those things, we can end up in a dark place. We end up being taken advantage of. We can even get to the point where we deny that there is a God, because we’re so in the dark that we just — where is He?

We also need to be able to hear God’s voice because there is a temptation: if we don’t see immediate success, it must be a failure; therefore I can just stop. But how many of you know there are things that the Lord has called some of you to, and He’s saying, don’t stop? He’s saying, I want you to press in. My promises are yes and amen. I will come through for you. And so often, because things look like a failure at first, it’s like, well, what’s the point? I must have failed, or I must have missed something. How many of you know we have to be able to hear God’s voice, to know what He’s saying right now, so that we can move with confidence into the things that He has for us?

And so we’ve been talking about hearing God’s voice. We’ve talked about having hearts that can hear, ears to hear. We’ve talked about how God speaks through His Word. And today I want to talk about how God speaks through His Spirit — how God speaks through the Holy Spirit.

He will speak and He will tell you

And we’re going to go to John 16, and we’re going to read verse 13. This is the night before Jesus died. And how many of you know He knew He was going to give His life? If it’s the night before you die, you’re going to talk about some of the most important things, right? Would you agree? And so here’s Jesus, and He’s talking to His disciples. John 16, verse 13. It says, “However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth” — everybody say, “All truth” — “for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak; and He will tell you things to come.”

Let me read this again. “However, when He, the Spirit of truth” — how many of you know the Holy Spirit speaks truth and truth alone? — “when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth; for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak; and He will tell you things to come.”

I want you to hear this today, because I believe this is what the Lord is saying: He will speak, and He will tell you. He will speak, and He will tell you. How many of you know this is saying that the Holy Spirit has come, and He will speak to you, and He will tell you the things that you need to know?

I’ve heard so many believers say, “I just can’t hear God’s voice.” And often that’s just not true. That’s a lie from the devil. So often we just don’t have ears to hear. We’ve taken in so much of the noise, and our heart has become so distorted from being able to be tuned in to what God is actually saying. And last week we talked about how our starting point is always God’s Word, right? If we don’t know what God is saying, we can start with God’s Word, because He has already spoken it. It’s what He has said. But this is telling us that the Holy Spirit will speak, and He will tell you. Amen. He will speak; He will tell you.

And so if you’re here today and you’re like, well, I wonder if He’ll speak to me — the answer is yes. Why? Because the Bible says so. He will speak, and He will tell you.

The Holy Spirit is a person

And so what we’re seeing here — and we see this all throughout Scripture — is that the Holy Spirit is a person, and He speaks, and He will speak to you. I think sometimes people hear about the Holy Spirit and they kind of think of Him as an aura, or just some kind of floating cloud. But how many of you know that’s not true? The Bible talks about how God is three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And so when the Holy Spirit speaks to us, it is a person of the Godhead that is speaking to us. That literally is God speaking to us. So when you hear the Holy Spirit, how many of you know you’re hearing God? So the Holy Spirit speaks the word of God, which is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And so when we talk about hearing God, the voice that speaks to us is the voice of the Holy Spirit.

I want to share an example out of Acts 13. You don’t need to turn there. But Acts 13 says, “Now in the church that was at Antioch there were certain prophets and teachers” — notice, there were these prophets and teachers that were ministering — “Barnabas, Simeon who is called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen who has been brought up with Herod the tetrarch, and Saul.” Okay? Notice: “As they ministered to the Lord and fasted, the Holy Spirit said.” As they ministered to the Lord and fasted — notice — the Holy Spirit said, “Now separate to Me Barnabas and Saul for the work with which I have called them.”

So notice, as they ministered and as they fasted, we see here the Holy Spirit spoke. Now, the Holy Spirit is not just the power of God. It’s not just something that’s floating around. The Holy Spirit is sent to speak to us, to teach us, to show us the things to do, to help us navigate the things that are to come.

Now, what’s interesting here is it doesn’t say how the Holy Spirit spoke to them. It just says, as they ministered to the Lord and fasted, the Holy Spirit said. Now, the prophets and the teachers were the ones ministering to the Lord. The Holy Spirit spoke to one of them, and then they spoke it out so that everybody could hear what the Holy Spirit was saying. How many of you know that happens sometimes here at church, right? We’ll be worshiping in the presence of the Lord, and someone will have a sense of what the Holy Spirit is saying, and they’ll come up and say, “I feel like the Lord wants to say something.” And then, when that resonates, we say yes, let’s speak it to all the people, so we can all be blessed by what the Holy Spirit is saying.

So the Holy Spirit will speak to people. And notice in this scripture, it says they laid hands on them and sent out Barnabas and Saul. So notice, they heard the Holy Spirit speak, but then they obeyed. How many of you know that’s important? If you want to keep hearing the Lord speak, you need to have a heart that is humble, and a heart that is humble is a heart that obeys. And so they were humble, and they obeyed. They laid hands; they sent them out. See, they had heard God. They were obedient to the word. And how many of you know that had some serious impact in the kingdom? How did they know to do that? They heard the Holy Spirit. They heard the voice of the Holy Spirit.

So how do you know what you are supposed to do? The Holy Spirit will speak to you the things to do. So notice: whatever He hears, He will tell you. He will speak, and He will tell you. But notice: the things to come. How many of you know you don’t know all the things to come? Anybody willing to admit that? I mean, if we did, I think we’d have some people that are doing pretty good in stocks. We’d have some people that are doing pretty good in some other things, right? We don’t know all the things to come. We don’t know how things are going to shake out — the wars, the rumors, the politics of things. We don’t know, even for ourselves — health, right? The future. There are no guarantees about any of these things.

So we need to press in and allow the Holy Spirit to speak to us, to lead us, to help us navigate in these times. We don’t know what the future holds, but He does. And if we need to know what is to come, He will tell us the things we need to know, so we can make the adjustments and begin to prepare. Amen.

Revealed to us through His Spirit

Listen to First Corinthians 2, verses 9 through 12. This will be on screen as well. I didn’t have you turn there, did I? No. Did I say First Corinthians 2? I meant to. You might want to turn to this one, because you might want to mark it. You might want to come back to it. This is good.

First Corinthians 2, verse 9 says, “But as it is written: ‘Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him.’” How many of you know you can’t naturally see the things that God has for you? You can’t feel the things that God has for you. How many of you know it needs to be revealed to you by the Holy Spirit? How did salvation come to you? It didn’t just come from saying, okay, I guess, or I think I get it. No, the only way you can capture the spiritual things is by the Spirit of God. He reveals it to you.

“Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him. But God has revealed them to us through” — who? It’s an open screen test. He has revealed them to us through who? His Spirit. It is revealed to us “through His Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God. For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God” — notice — “that we might know the things freely given to us by God.” Amen.

He has given us His Spirit, and it is a seal of the covenant and the promise of our eternal security, and of every promise for here on earth. Amen. But listen to verse 12: “We have received... the Spirit who is from God,” notice, “that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God.” How many of you know God wants us to know these things? God wants us to know His truth. When you open your Word, does God want that to just be a meaningless, repetitious time? Or does God want to actually reveal something to you? That’s His heart. And He does that through the Holy Spirit. And so the one He sent to tell us the things of God is the Holy Spirit. Amen.

And so we have received the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God. There are things that you need to know for your life that you will go without unless we press in and hear from Him. There are victories that the Lord has for your life, and for those in your life around you, that you cannot enter into unless we receive them from Him. Okay? We must press in. We must be hearing what He is saying.

Your spirit and the Holy Spirit

But notice verse 11. It says, “For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God.” How many of you know what this is saying? There is a difference between the Holy Spirit and my spirit. There’s the Holy Spirit, and then there is my spirit — the spirit that is in me, that knows me. It knows the things about me. It knows my inner parts. It knows what encourages me, and it knows what sets me off. It knows these things. But there’s a difference between my spirit and the Holy Spirit.

And so what this is saying is my spirit knows about me, but God’s Spirit knows about God. And so your spirit doesn’t naturally know all the things of God. Only the Holy Spirit knows the things of God. And so you can hear the voice of your spirit, but you can also hear the voice of the Holy Spirit, and they’re both on the inside. But a lot of people don’t know how to discern between the two.

And this is how you know: your spirit can’t tell you what God knows, because your spirit doesn’t know what God knows. Your spirit can only tell you what you know. Okay? And so if you’re hearing things down inside that you could not know — things that were revealed to you. You know those times when you’re in the Word, right, and maybe you’ve read a verse a hundred times, and on the hundredth time, all of a sudden it hits you different, and there is a new revelation, this aha moment? Okay. How many of you know that’s the Holy Spirit showing something to you, speaking something to you, revealing something to you that you can now have? Amen. So the Holy Spirit knows what’s inside of God, which is the knowledge of all things.

The still small voice

Now, here’s something interesting about the voice of the Holy Spirit. It’s not the loudest voice, right? It’s that still small voice. How many of you have ever been to Chick-fil-A, and they have those double drive-through lanes, right? Sometimes I’ll pull up in there — not just Chick-fil-A; that’s a bad example, because they’ll usually come to your car. Let’s say a McDonald’s. Okay, we’ll go down a step. All right, so here we are. We’re in the double drive-through lanes, right? And all of a sudden you hear a voice, and sometimes I’ll think they’re talking to me, but it’s the lane next to me, right? And all of a sudden I’ll start talking, and the person’s like, “Hold on a second, please.” They’re not ready to take my order, because I’m hearing the wrong voice.

You see, how many of you know, when you get to be sensitive to the difference between your voice — the spirit, the voice on the inside — and the voice of the Holy Spirit, you begin to recognize more and more when He speaks? And the way we become more and more familiar with His voice is through the Word. So when we fill ourselves with His Word, we become more familiar with it: what the sound is, how He leads us, the things that He speaks, the words that He speaks.

You see, this is where the confusion often comes in. We don’t know how to discern between the voices we hear, because there are so many voices. There are voices on the outside; there are voices on the inside. But may we be people that have ears to hear Him and can discern the voice of the Holy Spirit.

He will teach you all things

And so what kind of things could the Holy Spirit speak to you about? You see, your spirit can only tell you things you know, but He can tell you about anything. Anything. Listen to what Jesus said in John 14:26. Jesus said, “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things” — everybody say, “All things” — “and He will bring to remembrance all things I said to you.”

Notice: He will teach you all things, and He will bring to remembrance all things I said to you. In other words, the Holy Spirit will teach you all things. Is there any limitation to what the Holy Spirit can teach you? No. I mean, I want you to think about this. If you are studying science and you are struggling with your studies, do you think the Holy Spirit can help you with that? Absolutely, because He knows everything. If you are looking to study home decorating or physics, the Holy Spirit can teach you those things, because He can help you with all things.

Sometimes we run into problems and we just don’t know the solutions. Amen? Anybody else? And so we can say, well, Lord, I need wisdom. But we can actually say, Holy Spirit, would You show me? Would You show me what to do? Would You unlock things? Something that my oldest son is very good at: sometimes we’ll misplace keys or we’ll lose something, and the first thing he says is, “I gotta pray about this,” right? I gotta pray. And how many of you know the Holy Spirit oftentimes helps us even find things that we’ve misplaced? Is the Lord interested in that? Isn’t that interesting? You would think the Creator of the universe, the one who holds all things together by the word of His power — you would think He’s got better things to do than worry about where you put your keys. But how many of you know He sees you? He loves you. He cares about you and the things that you are struggling with. He wants to help with that.

But we have to know what He says. We have to know what He said in His Word, and we have to allow the Holy Spirit to reveal that to us, to a place where it’s not just in our head; it’s in our heart. Didn’t Jesus say that I will write My law on their hearts? It won’t just be in their minds. Isn’t He wonderful? This is how real God is to us. This is how personal, how intimate He is.

Nothing hidden

Listen to what Jesus said in Mark 4:22. It says, “For there is nothing hidden which will not be revealed, nor has anything been kept secret that it should come to light. If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.” Notice: there is nothing hidden which will not be revealed. How many of you know we need to ask more? There are things that you don’t know, and He has the answer. We have to have ears to hear, and it requires a humble heart.

Listen, the worst thing you can do is come into the presence of the Lord with a proud heart, because you will not receive anything. I remember there was this one time I went to a two-day conference, and there was this speaker that I loved, that I listened to regularly. I was really excited to be there. And I was sitting in the congregation, and during the time of worship, this person in front of me was flapping around, dancing — couldn’t sing — it was the most distracting thing ever. And I remember in my heart just being like, oh my goodness, would you just stop? And I felt like the Lord said, if you’re going to have a heart like that, you’re not going to get anything, because that was a sweet fragrance to the Lord.

A proud heart receives nothing from the Lord. In fact, the Bible says God resists the proud. He actively goes against it. When we come into the presence of the Lord and we start critiquing the speaker, we start critiquing the worship, we start critiquing the people around us, you can bet your bottom dollar you’re not going to get anything. And you’ll say the Holy Spirit isn’t here. But He was here; you just didn’t have ears to hear.

A humble heart receives from the Lord. A humble heart can receive from the Lord in the most difficult, most distracting, most noisy places. A heart of humility is a lifestyle of humility — we said this a few weeks ago — and a lifestyle of humility is a lifestyle of hearing the Lord, because you’re always in position to receive and you’re always deferring to Him. I heard a pastor say once, you want to know what the sign of your eternal security is? It is a life that is yielded to Him. You want to know that you’re going to go to heaven? It’s marked by a life that is yielded to Him. Whatever He says goes. Amen.

There is nothing hidden which will not be revealed. Listen, there are things that you are going through, and the Lord is saying, listen, there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed. There are things that you may be struggling with, and the Lord is saying, I have the answer for you. I know what to do. What am I going to do with my future? The Lord knows what you should do. How am I going to get out of this situation? The Lord knows a way out. Where am I going to get my next job? How many of you know the Lord has a perfect place for you? But we have to ask. We must ask. We need to ask more. There is nothing hidden which will not be revealed. The Holy Spirit is on our side, and He will speak to you about anything. But we must come to a posture of listening.

Led by the Spirit

I want to close with this scripture. This is short; this is sweet; but the Lord is beautiful. Romans 8:14 says this: “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God.” As many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God. How many of you know we must be led by the Spirit? He has freely given Him to us. He wants to speak to you. He wants to show you the things. And a sign that you are with Him, a sign that you are a son or a daughter of the Most High, is that you are led by the Holy Spirit.

And so may we be people that constantly defer to Him, that constantly seek Him, that will put aside our ambitions, that will put aside our schedules, our priorities, and we begin to say, no, Lord, You’re the priority, because You have things that I need, things that I don’t know. And what did we say? What did we say? He will speak, and He will tell you. Jesus said this: He will speak, and He will tell you. How many of you believe that today? Do you believe that, as we ask, He will speak? He will tell you. Amen.

Let’s stand together. I’m going to pray over you. Father, we thank You for Your Word. Lord, I pray that You would do a work in each of our hearts, Lord, that You would bring us to utter and total dependency on You. Lord, You have everything that we need. Lord, You said, seek first My kingdom and My righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. Lord, when we put You first, everything else comes into place.

And Lord, I pray right now that You would give every person in here ears to hear Your voice. Lord, I declare that spiritual deafness is falling off ears today, in Jesus’ name. Come on, let’s just lift our hands to the Lord. Come on, let’s lift. Lord, I declare in the name of Jesus that spiritual deafness is falling off of Your church, off of Your bride, off of Your people today, in the name of Jesus. That every other voice would become nothing compared to the voice of Your Spirit. Lord, that You would give us ears to hear.

And Lord, I thank You that You said He will speak, and You will show us, Lord, the things that we need to know when we don’t know what to do. Not only will You give us wisdom, but when we walk it out, You will back it, Lord, with Your Word, with Your power, to do the things that only You can do. And so Lord, we just pray for breakthrough in areas where we have been stuck, Lord, where there have been obstacles or walls. Lord, I thank You that it is Your power that breaks through the barriers, that breaks every chain. Lord, we break everything that is holding us and keeping us from the things that You have for us, from the assignment and the plans that You have for our lives.

Lord, we ask that You would give us ears to hear Your Spirit, that we would be led by You. As many as are led by You, these are the sons of God. As many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God. And so Lord, we commit that we will have a humble heart. Lord, we come to You today with a humble heart that says, yes, Lord, whatever You want to do. We thank You, we praise You, and we give You thanks, in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Transcribed from the message recording and lightly edited for reading.