The third man that I want to speak about who heard the voice of God is Jeremiah. This is what Jeremiah says in Jeremiah 18:1-6:
This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Go down to the potter’s house, and there I will give you my message.”
God said, “If you want to hear my voice, you’ve got to be in a certain place; I’m going to speak to you but you’ve got to be in the right place at the right time.” So, Jeremiah obeyed. He said:
I went down to the potter’s house, and I saw him [the potter] working at the wheel. But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as it seemed best to him. Then the word of the Lord came to me: “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter does?” declares the Lord. “Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.”
You see, there was a time and a place. God wanted Jeremiah in the potter’s house because He wanted him to see what the potter was doing with the pot on the wheel, because that was going to be a picture of how God was going to deal with Israel, and also how God is dealing with Israel today. Remember today Israel as a pot in God’s hands, and He’s shaping them on the wheels of circumstance and history right now. That message is true today. But Jeremiah couldn’t get the message until he was in the right place. He had to obey. He had to be there.
God made a kind of appointment with Jeremiah. He said, “If you’ll go to the potter’s house, I’ll speak to you.” And you see, before Jeremiah had a message for others, he had to hear from God. It’s always impressed me that in Bible schools and seminaries, they spend so much time training people how to speak, but seldom do they train people how to hear. If you’ve never heard from God, you have nothing to say. And believe me, a man who’s heard from God is worth listening to, even if he doesn’t have all the fine points of homiletics. What people are waiting for today is a man who’s heard from God.
I just want to close this with a little example from my own experience. Some years back I was in Europe. I was in Denmark, the native country of my first wife, Lydia, and the Lord very clearly directed me to go to a certain cliff top overlooking what the Danes call the Western Sea, what the British call the North Sea, and it was a fine winter afternoon. The sun was going down in the western sky. The rays were falling across the water and shining into my face, and when I got there to the cliff top and quieted my heart before God and looked at the sea, the Lord spoke to me for about one hour. He showed me that the conduct of the sea, the way the sea’s waves behaved, was like the history of the Church. The Church started with high tide, but gradually the waters went out and there was low tide, the Dark Ages. Then the tide turned and the waters began to come in again, but they came in wave by wave, one great move of the Spirit after another. And God showed me things that I’m not free to share with you right now about what’s going to happen as the Church age comes to its climax. But all that happened because I had an appointment with God on a cliff top overlooking the North Sea. So I would like to encourage you: if God tells you to go some place, be there. God might take that opportunity to speak to you in ways you cannot imagine.
Father, help me to always be at the right place at the right time, especially when You want to direct me to a special place, to speak to me. Help me, through Your Holy Spirit, to be sensitive to Your directions. In Jesus’ Name, amen!
