Pastor Matthew continued with week 3 of our Holy Spirit series, this week on hearing the voice of God.

God has been speaking since the creation of the world and has never stopped. We need to hear His voice to know His heart.

In our culture we often place doing before being, and it should not be this way. We need to focus on who we are becoming, because if we have an intimate relationship with Jesus we will also have His guidance and grow deeper and deeper with Him.

The Bible provides plenty of guidance on how to hear God through His Holy Spirit. If we seek Him with all our hearts He will speak to us.

The best way to know the heart of God is to know and to be with Jesus. The Holy Spirit reveals Jesus to us, just as Jesus revealed the Father. This is a lifestyle and a process that we learn, it is a journey. The Jesus revealed to us is the same one we read about and see in scripture, which is why we need to get to know the Biblical Jesus.

Pastor Matthew made three primary points:

1. The Spirit carries on Jesus' work.

The Spirit does not reveal Jesus in a vacuum, He does so through His people by their proclamation and their lifestyle.

2. The Spirit helps us to become intimate friends with Jesus.

True friends can have intimate secrets with one another, and we can have that kind of relationship with God through the Holy Spirit. We should be able to hear Jesus’s words as clearly today as His disciples did 2000 years ago. Believing this is half the battle.

3. We need to implement safeguard for listening to the voice of God.

Does it look like Jesus? The Spirit will only teach us what is consistent with the Biblical Jesus because God is always true to His character.

Is it motivating you to demonstrate unselfish love, which is Gods heart? The Spirit wants to lead us in giving our lives away.

Are you hearing in a vacuum or do you have a community of friends? We need one another to walk out the Christian life.