God Still Speaks to People And Sometimes in Unusual Ways.

“Then he spit on the ground, made mud with the saliva, and spread the mud over the blind man’s eyes. 7 He told him, “Go wash yourself in the pool of Siloam” (Siloam means “sent”). So the man went and washed and came back seeing!” – John 9:6-7. 

God has always been speaking. He has spoken to people of different ages, genders, and different situations. God spoke to Adam. He communicated with Noah. He instructed Abraham. He spoke with prophets and also to common people in the Bible. But God is anything but predictable. God speaks to us in different ways. He is God so He will never run out of ways to communicate with His people.  

Every day, when God wants to make known His will to you, there is an unlimited number of ways He could choose to communicate His message. God speaks to us through the Bible. He speaks through circumstances. Or other people to name a few. But He is not limited to the practical, or logical, and even the expected. There are many examples in the Bible where God chose to work in unusual and unpredictable ways. 

For example, God spoke through a burning bush (Exodus 3). God spoke through a donkey (Numbers 22). God takes the prophet, Elijah, into heaven on the best first-class flight of all time – a flying chariot of fire. And then there is the story of the blind man found in John 9. 

Jesus could have instantly healed the guy and went on His way. But He didn’t. Instead, He undertook a five-step process that is certainly unusual. First He spits a glob of saliva on the ground. Next, He takes the glob of saliva, mixes it with some dirt until it is mud. Third, he rubs the saliva mud in the eyes of the blind man. He then asks the blind man to walk to a pool of water where he can wash the saliva mud out of his eye. And fifth, the blind man will be healed and see for the first time in his life. This process proves that the Lord often does what seems unusual and unpredictable, and inefficient to us.  

It is pure speculation, but maybe Jesus was testing the faith of the blind man. Maybe in order to be healed, this man had to trust in Jesus’ commands enough to find his way, though still blind, to the pool and wash his face. Only after trusting in God did he experience healing from God. The same is true for you and me. God is often at work in our lives, but in unpredictable ways, that calls us to fully trust even when we don’t fully understand. We don’t have to understand the “why” of God’s ways. But we do have to keep choosing to follow them. He is working things out. He is present. His plan is still good, and He can still be trusted. These are certainties even when life feels so very uncertain. The bottom line is we have nothing to lose by expecting God to do the unexpected in our lives. We may discover that the unexpected exceeds our expectations.

God speaks to us for a purpose. We have not been called to control life, to endure life, or to barely make it in this life. Jesus came that we may know life and life more abundant.

Discussion Questions:

1. God speaking equals receiving communication from God. We receive this through whatever vehicle God uses unusual or not: given this is it possible God may have been speaking to you and you may have never realized it?