Learning to discern the voice of God is challenging, and we don’t always get it right.
Sometimes we get it very, very wrong, in fact.
In those moments it can be difficult to maintain our trust in Him because we can assume that He misled us, especially when we had our hopes in whatever we felt like He promised us.
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The most challenging time for our family was when Wendy had a dream that she was pregnant with twins. She was standing in our backyard working with her flowers and she felt like she was having a miscarriage. Her first thought was, “Oh no. I’m losing this baby” but immediately she heard the Lord say to her, in her dream: “Don’t say this baby will die if I say it will live.”
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A few weeks later she realized she was actually pregnant.
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A few weeks after that she started to lose the baby.
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People came over to our house and prayed over her. They affirmed what she had heard in her dream; that this child would not die but live.
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So, we held on tight to those promises, and especially to this dream which God had given to her long before she even realized she was pregnant.
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But then we lost the baby.
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It’s hard to describe the sense of loss and betrayal we felt.
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How could God do this? Why would He give us such a specific dream and promise of life and then take it away from us?
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Was God being cruel? Was He playing with us? Didn’t He know how we would have interpreted that dream and that promise that the child would not die but live?
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There were no answers then, only questions.
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We grieved. We cried. We wrestled with our doubts. We struggled to hang on to our faith in God’s goodness.
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Over time we began to look at all of this through another lens. Wendy had another dream later on that suggested that our daughter was indeed alive and in the presence of Jesus. She took comfort knowing that we would see her – and the other 5 children we had miscarried – one day soon.
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But that experience led us to reassess the way we interpreted God’s voice. Not everything was easy to discern. Not every word was to be taken at face value.
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In other words, we weren’t so sure about what we knew anymore.
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I recently shared this story with someone and they asked me what to do when you know that God has told you something, but you’re still struggling with doubts?
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After thinking about how to respond I had to say this:
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“The list of things I ‘know’ is pretty short these days. I can only say that God is good and He loves me. Beyond that, I can’t honestly say I “know” anything.”
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This is where we are.
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Our confidence in anything other than God’s goodness and love for us is up for grabs.
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But because we know that we are loved by a God who is good, we can handle anything else that comes our way.
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Like the man who said to Jesus, “I believe. Help my unbelief!” or Peter who said, “Lord, where can we go? You have the words of life”, we can only hold tight to Him, even if we don’t always understand what He is doing.
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So, hold fast to these simple truths: God is good. He loves you.
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Anything else is up for grabs.
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Keith Giles is the author of several books, including “Jesus Untangled: Crucifying Our Politics To Pledge Allegiance To The Lamb”. He is also the co-host of the Heretic Happy Hour Podcast on iTunes and Podbean. He and his wife live in Orange, CA with their two sons.
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