How do you hear God speaking to you?

Judges 6:11-12

Last week we learned about Israel’s feeling of utter devastation from being continually assaulted by their current rulers. They are at the low point in the cycle, and God identifies Gideon and approaches him:

Now the angel of the Lord came and sat under the terebinth at Ophrah, which belonged to Joash the Abiezrite, while his son Gideon was beating out wheat in the winepress to hide it from the Midianites.  And the angel of the Lord appeared to him and said to him, “The Lord is with you, O mighty man of valor.” (Judges 6:11-12)

The Midianites, every year, destroy Israel’s harvest, so Gideon has hidden whatever crops he could salvage in the winepress, a small room or a large basin that usually holds grapes. Now, picture a young man, harvesting grain in hiding, living among a community that is continually harassed and beaten. A stranger comes along, sits under a pistachio tree, calls him “mighty man of valor,” and tells him “God is with you.”

I’m pretty sure Gideon didn’t feel mighty, and we’ll see next week how he really questions whether the Lord is “with him” after years of being oppressed. But, the point is that God sent someone to deliver a message, and the message was something Gideon wasn’t expecting to hear.

When you think about your own experience in your family business, has God spoken through someone to deliver a message you didn’t expect to hear, but needed to hear? It’s perhaps easier to think of God speaking through a particular event or a church pastor, but think more broadly with me: Perhaps it was a compliment or encouragement when you weren’t feeling good about your current situation. Or a challenge to your ego or pride when you thought you had the world by the tail. Or a request, or an observation, or just a whisper, that you knew – either right then or a little later – had a spark of the Divine.

How do you determine, and place value upon, the ways in which God speaks to you? If you have heard God speaking through another person, how long did it take you to realize, or hear, His word?