Are We Hearing From Him? - Part 1

I should probably start by saying that I don't really have time to be blogging right now. In case you didn't notice, it's been a while since my last post. But the title of this post has at least two meanings in my mind and both of them have a sense of urgency associated with them, which is why I figured this shouldn't wait.

So what do I mean when I say, "Are We Hearing From Him?" First off, the Him is referring to God. And, for the sake of this post, I am taking for granted that one of the ways God speaks is by the events that are happening every day all around us if we would have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.

When the Pharisees came to Jesus asking him for a sign from heaven, He said this:

"When it is evening, you say, 'It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.' And in the morning, 'It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.' You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times.
Matthew 16:2,3

The Pharisees 't didn't have their eyes and ears open to the signs of the times in their day and what God was saying to them in Jesus. They weren't hearing from Him. So the question for us is: do we have our eyes and ears open to the signs of the times in the events that are happening around us today? Are we hearing from God through them?

This past weekend, John Piper began his expositional preaching series through the book of John. He has no idea how long it will last as he preaches verse by verse through this account of the gospel.

A few days before that, he wrote an article about preaching that is tethered to the Word of God compared to preaching that is not.

Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, recently released a book called, He Is Not Silent: Preaching In A Postmodern World. Tim Challies today wrote an excellent review of it here. I have not read this book, but would love to do so soon (though I don't think that will happen).

I just got done teaching my systematic theology class about bibliology, the doctrine that talks about the origins of the Bible and the characteristics of the Bible. We talked specifically about four characteristics of the Bible: it's authority, clarity, necessity, and sufficiency.

So I'm asking myself: am I hearing from God through these providences? What are the signs of our times? Al Mohler's new books says that He is not silent. But God being silent and our hearing from Him are two completely different things.

Lord willing, in the next couple of weeks I will write some reflections based on the hearing from God that I have written about in this post giving a couple of reasons from the Bible why I think that what the Church needs most in order to hear from God is an unflinching commitment to the expository preaching of the Bible (the other aspect of hearing I was referring to at the beginning of this post) by pastors in the pulpit from Sunday to Sunday.