Priscilla Shirer: God is Speaking to YOU!

Priscilla Shirer shares an inspiring word on having confidence that God doesn’t just speak to famous pastors or authors, we can all hear His voice!

“God is the God of “right now.” He doesn’t want you sitting around regretting yesterday. Nor does He want you wringing your hands and worrying about the future. He wants you focusing on what He is saying to you and putting in front of you … right now.”
― Priscilla Shirer

As long as you and I are not convinced that we can hear a fresh word from God for ourselves, then at best, we will be handicapped in our faith because we’ll always be waiting on somebody else to spoon, feed us the word of God instead of knowing that we can have confidence in our friendship in our relationship with God.
My dad got tell on him just a little bit. He is technologically challenged.
Every advancement sort of goes over his head and, you know, I can sympathize with him because I’m a little bit the same way.
I’m not really into all of the new advances of technology. I can’t quite keep up. Well.
He’s been this way all the time and just to give you a little bit of an inkling on where he stands on technology.
Still to this day, my father writes down all of his sermon notes on one of those yellow legal pads.
You know, the ones that come bound together at the top and you sort of just write down on all of those lined yellow sheets of paper.
My father’s got those yellow pads laying all over the house. He still does not type.
Not a one note, he writes them all by hand to this day.
Well, his, um, lack of knowledge in regards to technology isn’t a new thing early on years ago.
I remember maybe 15 years ago or so when there were no ipads yet, you know, it wasn’t as advanced as it is now.
But about 15, 20 years ago, I recall something that happened.
My dad really wanted to figure out how to get online.
But the only reason he wanted to get online is because at the time, my youngest brother, Jonathan was playing football for Baylor University.
He wanted to get on the Baylor University website so that he could look up his youngest son, John John, who was playing football for Baylor.
And if you know anything about my dad, he may not be about technology, but he sure is about that football.
And so with his youngest son playing college level football, he want to do everything he could to look him up.
So at the time, my sister was at the house and so he called Crystal back into the guest room, the fourth bedroom of our parents home back there 20 years ago, back in that room, there was a whole monitor that was sitting on the desk there with a keyboard, but he really didn’t use it.
And so he said to Crystal Crystal, come back here, show me how to turn this thing on.
So when I tell you that they were starting from scratch. I mean, they were starting from scratch.
My sister came back to the back room and she said, dad, let me show you where the on button is.
So you will know in the future how to turn this thing on once they got it all powered up.
Then my dad said to her, how do I get to the Baylor home page?
So she showed him how to type in the URL address so that you can get to the website that you wanna be on.
So finally she got him to the Baylor home page.
And just when they got to the home page, the phone rang, Crystal had to run out of the room into the kitchen where the phone was plugged into the wall.
And so she raced out of the room and as she raced out of the room, my dad yelled after her, how do I maneuver around this page?
She said back to him use the mouse. So daddy starts looking around for a mouse.
He had no idea what in the world she was talking about.
He of course, lays eyes upon this little gadget that’s got a tail sticking out of it.
He assumes this must be the mouse.
So he picks it up, places it flat on the computer monitor and begins to drag it up and down side to side on the actual computer monitor.
Then when that didn’t work he just held it up in the air and was sort of just moving it around in mid air.
My sister came back to find our fairly bright stable father waving a mouse around in the air.
Now, here’s what you need to know that computer has been in the fourth bedroom of my parents’ house for a long time.
He also has a laptop that someone gave him and it’s, you know, folded and unused in the drawer of his desk at his office.
There’s also another computer monitor and a keyboard that is in his office space at the church.
So my point is he has computers available to him. He has technology available to him.
But technology does you no good unless you know how to use it.
Having it available is not enough, you gotta know how to use it for the next few moments.
I want to just encourage you less preach and more just teach and talk to you about the importance of us as God’s people, not just having God’s word available to us, but knowing how to use it, listen to me more now than ever before as our culture continues to be increasingly godless you.
And I are gonna have to know how to do what the palma said.
I hide God’s word in my heart so that I might not sin against him. We gotta use God’s word.
It’s not enough for us to just have um the Bible around our home because you know, you got the big pretty one that’s up on the mantel.
You’ve got the little small one that sits on your nightstand.
You’ve got the one that’s just for Decor, that might be like a coffee table book.
And then, you know, you have that one, that one that’s got all the dog ears and it’s got all the underlines and all the post it notes.
That’s the one that you take to church with you.
So you can actually look, you know, holy like you use the Bible.
We have all of these Bibles available to us, but the Bible don’t do us no good.
Just sitting there looking pretty. It only does us good if we know how to actually take advantage of the truths of God, the fresh breath of God that is available to us through the scriptures.
So I wanna talk to you to me, to us challenge us about utilizing God’s word truth.
Everyone is saying is so relative.
No one has a rev reverence anymore for the truth of God as declared in His word.
Now, more than ever, if we’re going to be unapologetic about our faith.
If we’re gonna be able to stand firm against the schemes of the enemy, if we’re going to be able high school student and university student and mother and father, wife, husband, single woman, single man, entrepreneur, ministry president, if we’re going to be having the opportunity to stand firm then we got to know the truth of God’s word.
And we’ve got to be able to live off of every word that God speaks to us.
We’ve got to be found on our knees in prayer and prioritizing our time in God’s word.
The enemy wants to convince you.
He wants to convince me that God has some sort of hotline connection between he and certain people that it’s just our spiritual leaders, our pastors, our Bible study teachers, the folks that are on staff, the people that are in full time ministry, the folks that have, you know, a microphone on their jacket, the people that are in the spotlight, the folks who we go past their Instagram feed and we are um admonished or encouraged because they are teaching and preaching to masses.
The enemy wants you to think that it’s a seminary degree that required before you can actually have a fervent ongoing relationship with God where you yourself can open up the word of God and know that the Holy Spirit can illumine the scriptures and give you guidance and direction and insight and clarity and encouragement and comfort.
He wants you to think that that kind of fervent friendship with God is only for certain people because He knows that as long as you and I are not convinced that we can hear a fresh word from God for ourselves, then at best, we’ll be handicapped in our faith because we’ll always be waiting on somebody else to spoon, feed us the word of God instead of knowing that we can have confidence in our friendship in our relationship with God.
That person who you admire rightfully.
So there are people that I admire their faith, their stability, their strength, their peace in the midst of the storm.
There are people I admire their prayer life.
I admire how they um are concrete in their faith and their beliefs, No matter what happens in culture.
There are people I admire their ministry.
I admire the fervency in which I see the presence of God operating in their life.
So yeah, there are folks that we can admire, but just as quickly as we admire them, we have to be careful and guard ourselves against thinking that what they have access to is not also something that we have access to the same holy spirit of God that lives in that person you admire is the same presence and power of God that lives on the inside of you to guide you into all truth to alumin the scriptures so that you too can hear the voice of God.
And so I wanna encourage you to not wait until Sunday morning for a word from God.
I wanna encourage you to not wait until the next time your Bible study group can get together again in person before you engage in hearing the voice of God for yourself from the scriptures.
I wanna encourage you to not depend upon someone else to spoon feed you God’s truth.
I wanna remind you that you can hear God and we need to have a daily relationship with God through His word.
Your stability is counting on it.
Your peace, my peace of mind, particularly in the craziness and chaos of the culture that we’re living in right now.
If we don’t have a relationship with God where we are prioritizing, coming to him in his word, then we will find that we are not stable.
We don’t have peace of mind.
We don’t have clarity, revelation, direction, insight and encouragement to keep on putting one ft in front of the other and not be discouraged by what we see happening around us.