When someone tells you that they love you, what does that person mean? What response is that person expecting? How does that person feel or react when they don’t get that expected response? Relationships are damaged and sometimes ruined when one person tells another person that they love them, and the other person doesn’t respond in kind.

I had this happen at church one time. Someone I was talking to suddenly said, “I love you,” to me as I was leaving. I smiled thinking how odd that was and tried to move on. As I walked away, she repeated it, albeit a little louder, “I love you!” I just smiled and continued walking. She was having no part of that. She came after me, grabbed my arm, swung me around to face her, “don’t you love me too?”

One Sunday night while we were still dating before getting married, my (now) wife Rachel needed to pray for a friend of hers. Her friend was having some personal issues and Rachel told me she didn’t know what to do. I told her, ‘there’s nothing you can do. You can’t fix her problem. All you can do is pray to Jesus and let Him help her. He’s the only one that can fix us anyway.”

Monday morning, she text messaged me, “Teach me to pray.”

The disciples once asked Jesus, “Lord, show us how to pray.” And He did. I didn’t think I could improve on what the Lord taught, so I directed her to read what Jesus said in Matthew 6:9-13:

As humans in a physical world, we experience and interpret everything through our five senses. That makes knowing and experiencing God limited to what we can perceive through those five senses. The issue with that is that we cannot directly see, taste, smell, hear, or touch God in the physical sense. An analogy I’ve heard before to describe our experience with God is that you can’t see the wind, but you know what the wind is by what it does. You can look at the effects of the wind; you can hear the roar of the wind, feel the wind touch against your body, smell scents from other places because of the wind bringing them to you, and I suppose if something blows into your mouth, you can taste it too!

There are many who claim to believe in God. If they really did, why don’t they obey His commandments? Why do they substitute their ideas, desires, etc.?

How can Christians know their experiences are any more genuine than the Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, or New Ager? 

This week we look at dealing with family and friends that believe we are self-righteous. We approach the question from 3 perspectives, 1) the believer actually does think they are better than everyone else, 2) Other people believe the Christian thinks they are better than everyone else, and 3) When the Christian lifestyle exposes issues in other people's lives.

Every election cycle it seems we are given a choice between one bad candidate or another and we have to hold our nose and vote for the lesser of two evils! How, as believers, do we deal with that?

In this episode of Taco Tuesday Theology, we examine what it takes to hear from God and especially how to recognize His voice when we do.