By TIMOTHY L. MELTON, PASTOR
(Transcribed by Myra D. Colgate)
Cherokee Pentecostal Holiness Church
Read Hebrews 5:12-14; 1 Corinthians 1:26; 1 Corinthians 14:33; Jonah 1.
“Father, we thank you for this time together, today. We pray You’d allow the Word of God to come to life on the inside of every hearer around the world this day. I pray, Father, that the Power of the Gospel would indeed reach all the way into the hearts of the men, women, and children, to move and to shake them, O God, from their very core. I pray, God, that as we preach today, it wouldn’t be by the voice of a man, but I pray, Holy Spirit, the Real Preacher, and Teacher, would show up and speak a powerful Word into this House today. We give You Glory, Honor, and Praise, and everybody says. Amen.”
Added, Pastor Tim, “I want to spend some time here today because the Truth is there are so many voices that each hears day in and day out, we must ask, is this True? I realize one is saying this, and another is saying that, and so many times, the voices that we hear don’t even make sense. It doesn’t always add up. So today I want to focus on three of the voices we hear, even this day.
“First, I want to focus on the Voice of God. I want to share with you five things from the Scripture that teaches us how to discern the Voice of God.
“Then I want to talk about the voice of the devil. I’m going to show you five things that I’ve discovered out of the Word of God, that’ll help each of us know when it’s the voice of the devil.
“And, then there’s the third one, which is perhaps even tougher to discern than the first or the second. It’s your own voice in your own head. How many of you have trouble with that one?
“I do have to admit it’s the one that can cause me the most trouble, when I look at Hebrews, Chapter 5, and I get to Verse 14, He tells me that we must “exercise our senses” to discern the good and the evil.”
In other words, there are voices that are coming in and out, day in and day out, and one has to be able to decide, “Was that the Voice of God, was that Tim, or was that the devil?
These are real voices that we need to learn to discern. Now we’re going to do some real traveling in the Bible, back and forth and we’re going to see what He has said.
If you’re taking notes today, then here is #1. The Voice of God always brings Peace. The Bible will teach us through Peace. He will rule by Peace as in all churches of the saints. Sometimes we need more teaching and clarification, to really know what God is saying to us.
When God said here, through the writing of Corinthians, He told us, “I did not come to bring confusion into your life, but He did not say, that one would not be confused.
If one doesn’t understand what God is saying, He knows every language on this planet and even some that we don’t even know. If He’s trying to say something to a person, He knows how to say it to them. If it’s taken one’s whole life to figure it out, then it’s probably not from God. Our God is not the God of confusion.
One can go through a storm and still stay in the center of God’s Will. In other words, one can go through a mess and still be in God’s Will where one is still supposed to be, and they will still know it by the Peace that’s inside of them.
All that went on in our lives this year was a real storm, but we could look up each day and see God there. He still holds us in His Peace. Even in that rough patch, we came through, we also saw our God standing there, directing that storm, and we realized that the God of our Peace still holds us, with our hands in His.
