One of my favorite hymns is “In the Garden” by Charles Miles. For those that may not know it, the chorus says “And He walks with me and He talks with me and he tells me that I am His own; and the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.” My favorite part of the hymn is the beginning of the second verse: “He speaks and the sound of His voice is so sweet the birds hush there singing”. The truth that I have shared more often than any other in my life as a pastor is that God speaks to us. His heart is to speak to His children, to share Himself with us through His voice. God’s desire is to not only love us, protect us, provide for us and care for us but to also tell us that we are loved, protected, provided and cared for. Everything that was ever created was created by the sound of God’s voice, He speaks and things that did not exist suddenly exist, He speaks and storms cease, demons flee, death loses its grip and men’s hearts change. Job 37:5 says “God thunders with His voice wondrously. Doing great things which we cannot comprehend.” God speaks, He speaks to us and He speaks through us. Job learned that God’s voice thunders and Elijah learned that He also whispers. He is not a God that only shouts orders and commands, He also whispers care and concern. He shouts from heaven at times but He also comes close to the broken-hearted. As important as it is to know that God speaks we must also learn that He loves to listen. In Exodus 3:7 God told Moses, from the burning bush “I have surely seen the oppression of My people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry . . .” In Psalm 18:6 David wrote “In my distress I called upon the LORD, and cried out to my God; He heard my voice from His temple, and my cry came before Him, even to His ears.” In Luke 1, when the angel Gabriel appeared to Zacharias to tell him that he and Elizabeth would have a son he said “your prayer is heard”. God is not merely a supreme being that shouts commands, that speaks to cause and see the movement of His creation, He is a Father that hears; the character of God is to both speak and to listen. When the Holy Spirit descended and filled the first believers at Pentecost there was a dual miracle, those being filled spoke in languages they did not understand and those that heard them speaking understood those languages. I think we have missed this too often, the anointing or unction of the Holy Spirit is not merely the power to speak it is also the power to listen and to hear. Today we will look at several verses from the book of John and see that the Holy Spirit is a person who both listens and speaks, in fact He is a person that does not speak unless and until He has listened. I want us to see the divine power of listening and the purpose of speaking, to see this in and through the Holy Spirit and to see it and apply it to ourselves. If we are going to be used by the Holy Spirit then we will have to be used in the same manner that the Holy Spirit works, first to hear, then to speak and to speak only what we have heard.