195 God speaks to us through other Christians - a podcast by Dr David Petts - Pentecostal preacher, former AoG Bible College Principal

Talk 11 God speaks through other Christians

Welcome back after a short break. Let’s remind you what we’ve been saying so far. We’ve seen that:

• God speaks to all humanity through his creation
• He spoke to Israel by the prophets
• He has finally spoken by his Son
• He speaks today through the Bible
• He speaks through other people - parents

 

Why believe that God speaks to us through the Bible

Tells us about Jesus

Jesus believed that God speaks through scripture

The apostles and early church believed…

The Bible shows us the way of salvation

 

How to understand the Bible correctly

What part of the Bible are we reading – OT or NT?

What is the context of the passage we are reading?

            Literary context

            Historical/sociological context

            Immediate context

 

Different ways God speaks through the Bible

He teaches what we should believe and how we should behave

He shows us what to expect by giving us examples from the lives of God’s people

He encourages us by giving us many wonderful promises

He directs us by bringing key verses to our attention

 

God speaks through other people

Last time: Parents

Today: other Christians

 

 

 

I suppose that if we were to ask most Christians who it is they expect God to use in speaking to them, their answer would almost certainly include preachers or pastors or prophets. And we will be dealing with these in later talks. But it's very important that we should realise that God often speaks through Christians who do not come into any of these categories.

 

Of course, there are those who are especially gifted by God to speak for him. Ephesians 4:11, for example, mentions apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers. But the New Testament also makes it clear that God expects all his people to speak for him. As I have pointed out elsewhere, there is a sense in which all God’s people are prophets[1]. The Holy Spirit can use anyone he chooses.

 

For example, the great church at Antioch was first started by ordinary Christians spreading the word. In Acts 8:1-4 we read that, as a result of the persecution that followed the death of Stephen, the Christians were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. But they spread the word wherever they went (v.4). Acts 11:19-21 tells us:

Now those who had been scattered by the persecution in connection with Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch, telling the message only to Jews.

Some of them, however, men from Cyprus and Cyrene, went to Antioch and began to speak to Greeks also, telling them the good news about the Lord Jesus.

The Lord's hand was with them, and a great number of people believed and turned to the Lord.

 

So this church was founded, not by the apostles, who had all remained in Jerusalem (Acts 8:2), but by ordinary Christians spreading the good news of the gospel. God can speak through any one of us, and he can speak toany one of us by whomever he chooses, as the following examples from my own experience demonstrate.

 

I have already mentioned Laurie Dixon whose testimony changed the course of my life. The year before I met Laurie, I was on holiday in the Lake District at a Baptist Summer School where I made friends with a young man named Michael Stewart. Michael told me that the following year he was planning with a couple of Christian friends to take a car and visit several countries in Europe. He asked if I would be interested in joining them. Travelling abroad was far less common in those days than it is today, and I jumped at the opportunity.

 

So, in 1958 I found myself in Switzerland with Michael and three new friends climbing a mountain. The long climb in the heat of the August sunshine had been tiring. We were unaccustomed to this kind of exercise and the cool water of the mountain stream was inviting to our aching feet. Graham, Michael, and Daphne sat down to rest, putting their feet in the water. But it was my first visit to Switzerland, and somehow I felt that we were wasting an opportunity when there was so much to see. Leaving the others to paddle their feet, Laurie and I climbed higher following the path of the stream, but half an hour later we had had enough too. As we looked down at the others a few hundred feet below us, we realised that we had come up the hard way. To our right there was an easier way down.

 

Gratefully we turned to take it, when suddenly, as if from nowhere, a large rock came hurtling down the mountainside toward the stream and I was directly in its path! As a fairly athletic nineteen-year-old, I should have been able to jump clear with relative ease, but I was gripped with terror, unable to move. As a Christian I might have thought of praying, but my mind refused to function. In a second it would hit me. The end had surely come. But when the rock was only about a yard away, it struck a small protusion in the ground, changed direction, and crashed into the stream below, missing me by inches! The danger was over as quickly as it had come.

 

I heaved a sigh of inexpressible relief.

 

Wow that was lucky! I exclaimed.

 

Lucky, David?

said Laurie who’d been watching from a few yards away.

That wasn't luck. I believe God has a purpose for your life and that rock couldn't have hit you.

 

It was that simple statement of faith that started a process of enquiry which was to lead to an experience which revolutionised my life. This man was moving in a dimension of Christianity that I knew little or nothing about. So I questioned Laurie to see if I could discover the basic difference.

 

Although from different denominational backgrounds, I discovered that we had much in common. Doctrinally, our beliefs were almost identical. We believed the same Bible, preached the same gospel, and worshipped the same Saviour. We both knew what it meant to be a born again Christian. We had both been baptised as believers by immersion in water. Basically, we had very much in common. And yet this man had something which I didn't have, something indefinable, but very real. I asked him what it was.

 

He started to talk about an experience he had received after his conversion - being baptised with the Holy Spirit he called it - when the Holy Spirit had come and filled him to overflowing. He said he had spoken in tongues and told me I could read about it in the book of Acts. It was at this point, however, that my interest began to wane. I certainly wanted to experience more of God in my life, but as for speaking in tongues, I frankly couldn't see the point of it. If being baptised with the Holy Spirit meant that I had to speak in tongues, I decided that I had better forget about it. And for a while I did!

 

On returning to England, I dismissed the subject from my mind and might have ignored it forever, had it not been for the remarkable series of events which took place the following summer. Eileen, my fiancee, and I were sitting in the youth meeting at church singing from a well-known chorus book, when I happened to notice a list of books advertised on the back cover, one of which was entitled, The full blessing of Pentecost, by Dr Andrew Murray. Immediately I concluded that this book must be dealing with the subject Laurie had been talking about last year in Switzerland, and I suggested that it might be good to get it. In a few days, Eileen received a reply from the advertisers saying that the book was no longer available.

 

A little disappointed, I returned home from Eileen’s to my parents’ house for lunch. As the meal was not quite ready, I went into the sitting room to wait. On entering, I happened to notice a book lying on the piano and casually picked it up - The full blessing of Pentecost by Dr Andrew Murray! But how did it get there? No one, except Eileen, knew anything of my interest in the subject. My parents did not know where the book had come from. It is true that my father had always had a large collection of books, but if it was his, he certainly had never read it, and didn’t even know that he possessed it. Anyway, why wasn’t it in the bookcase and how did it get on the piano? No one to this day has any idea how that book came to be there on the very day that I had thought it to be unobtainable. The answer must surely lie in the realm of the supernatural. With great anticipation, Eileen and I both read the book, and then we both began to pray fervently that we too might be baptised with the Holy Spirit. But the rest of the story must wait till later in the series.

 

So God used Laurie Dixon to speak to me. This was not only by his words but also by his actions. No doubt we’re all familiar with the expression, Actions speak louder than words. Less well known is the Latin motto, Facta non verba, which means, Deeds not words. We’ve already seen how God speaks to us through Jesus both by what he said and what he did. His actions as much as his words show us what God is like and how he wants us to behave. And this is how he often speaks to us today

 

A good example of God speaking to me through the actions of another Christian is our friend Jill Cooper who used to help Eileen serve coffee on Sunday mornings at our local church. What she did was incredibly simple, but before I tell you what it was, I need to give you the background story.

 

In February 2010 Eileen and I went to India for a month at the invitation of the Finnish Pentecostal Churches who asked me to go and teach about the Holy Spirit where they had missionaries working in Mumbai and Machilipatnam. Now while I was the Principal at Mattersey Hall Bible College we had the privilege of training many overseas students several of whom were from India, and when our former students heard about our trip, they were quick to ask us if we would visit them too so that I could preach in the numerous churches they had planted since returning from Mattersey.

 

We, of course, were delighted to agree, but I knew that the schedule they organized for me would be quite intense and, as I have always believed in observing a Sabbath principle, I asked that one day in seven should be a rest day. However, in practice this didn’t happen, as the day they scheduled as a rest day was the day we had to travel from one place to the next! As a result, and because that year the temperature in India was higher than usual, I was suffering from dehydration and to the disappointment of all concerned, a few of the meetings scheduled had to be cancelled.

 

Apart from this, we had had a great time in India and after a few weeks back in England I thought I had fully recovered. But towards the end of April, on a preaching trip to Essex, I started to experience similar symptoms to those I’d had in India. I couldn’t understand this as the temperature in England was about half what it had been in India. Without going into unnecessary detail, the next two years proved to be extremely difficult. I continued to experience similar problems every time I preached. I began to wonder if the time had come for me to give up.

 

Then, at just the right time, Eileen and I were in Exeter at a meeting for Assemblies of God ministers and their wives. The guest preacher was John Glass, the General Superintendent of the Elim Churches. He was preaching on Jeremiah 1 when he came to verses 11-12:

The word of the LORD came to me: "What do you see, Jeremiah?" "I see the branch of an almondtree," I replied. The LORD said to me, "You have seen correctly, for I am watching to see that my word is fulfilled."

 

He explained the play on words that we find in these verses – the Hebrew word for almond is very similar to the word for watch. The almond tree is among the first to blossom in spring. It’s something you watch for as a sign that spring has come. Winter will surely be followed by spring because God watches over his word to see that it is fulfilled.

 

Now in England most of us don’t see an almond tree too often, so John likened it to crocuses. In his garden they’re the first flowers to bloom in spring. They’re the sign or guarantee that winter won’t be forever. Then John broke away from his notes and said something like this:

 

There are some of you here who are feeling that your ministry has come to an end. You have been experiencing a bleak winter, but the Lord wants you to know that it will not be forever. You will experience a new springtime.

 

Eileen and I looked at each other. Was this for us? Surely it must be. But there were a lot of other people in that meeting. Could it be that John’s prophetic word was for them and not for us? We drove home after the meeting hoping, rather than believing, that this really was a word from the Lord for us.

 

And then, that evening, Jill Cooper arrived on our doorstep and said, I’ve brought you a little present. To be honest, I had bought it for someone else, but then I felt the Lord tell me to give it to you instead.

 

What was the present? A bowl of crocuses! And without a doubt, I have experienced a new springtime in my ministry. So the Lord does speak to us through other Christians, both by their words and by their actions. And, as the story I have just told you clearly illustrates, he most certainly speaks to us through preachers. But that’s the subject for next time.

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