This article was organized by an AI agent from the sermon transcript delivered by Pastor Luo Mingzhu (羅明珠牧師) at Ruifeng Church (瑞豐教會) on May 17, 2026. It is not the pastor's original manuscript.

Rights to the sermon content remain with Pastor Luo Mingzhu. This post is an edited reading version prepared for the blog.

Ruifeng Church: https://www.kaoshc.org/html/main


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Introduction


This sermon does not begin by encouraging the pursuit of unusual spiritual experiences. Instead, it resets a more fundamental understanding: God has not stopped speaking; the deeper problem is that human ears, expectations, and inner habits often prevent people from hearing. Pastor Luo Mingzhu unfolds this theme through church ministry, grief stories, biblical exposition, testimony, and practical exercises. A church care report, a bluebird at a burial, a grasshopper at a memorial service, Job's suffering, night dreams, and meditative Bible reading all converge into one main claim: the issue is often not divine silence but human resistance and distraction.

The sermon also refuses to treat "hearing God's voice" as a private mystical technique detached from church life or Scripture. Listening is placed back inside discipleship. In that frame, hearing is not about collecting striking moments. It is about being corrected, comforted, guided, and formed so that a believer can actually follow.

Seen as a whole, the message moves in a very clear progression: it begins with the church's pattern of prayer and care, explains that God continues to speak, identifies the two main barriers that keep people from hearing, addresses dreams and discernment, and finally turns to practice and response. The sermon is therefore not only about how to hear, but about whether a person is willing to turn back toward God.



1. The Sermon Begins with a Church Already Moving Toward People


The message opens with Ruifeng Church's evangelistic event, "Encounter Happiness." The Best list of people under prayer and care had grown from 93 names to 134 within a week. That sounds like a routine ministry report, but it quietly establishes the sermon's direction. Hearing God is not about becoming more preoccupied with one's inner sensations. It is meant to make people more prayerful, more loving, and more ready to move toward others.

Pastor Luo lays out a three-part rhythm: pray first, then care in concrete ways, and only then invite. That order matters. It reminds the church that spiritual obedience is not just about wanting visible results. It is about letting God shape the process. Listening to God, in this sermon, is already tied to patient love and relational faithfulness.

That opening matters because it shows that listening is not something restricted to the private corner of personal devotion. If someone claims to be spiritually sensitive but has no patience, no intercession, and no concrete care for other people, that sensitivity may only be self-absorption in religious language. By beginning with prayer, care, and invitation, the sermon establishes a firm foundation: God speaks not to increase spiritual talk, but to shape people into more concrete love.

For that reason, the sermon does not begin on a mountaintop of spiritual intensity. It begins with the ordinary structure of following Christ. Prayer, care, and invitation may not sound mystical, yet they are exactly the kinds of habits through which a church learns to walk in step with God's leading together.



2. God Keeps Speaking, and His Channels Are Wider Than We Expect


The sermon's first major image comes from the grief of an American pastor's wife. At the burial, a bluebird landed on the coffin and stayed there for an unusual length of time, carrying bread in its beak. At the later memorial service, a grasshopper entered calmly, circled the grieving family, rested on a flower, and then left. Pastor Luo does not use these stories to tell people to chase symbols everywhere. Instead, she uses them to ask whether we have limited God too quickly, assuming that He may only speak through the channels we already recognize.

That question leads directly into Job 33:14-16. God speaks once and twice, yet people do not perceive it; then He opens their ears through dreams and visions in the night. The logic is straightforward: the issue is not that God has become passive, but that human beings often fail to attend. Once that biblical frame is established, the earlier stories are no longer isolated emotional moments. They become illustrations of how narrowly people often define the ways in which God may comfort, correct, or direct.

The sermon handles these examples with restraint. It does not encourage believers to turn every coincidence into a spiritual code. Instead, it warns against dismissing too quickly the possibility that God may use a circumstance to arrest attention. For a grieving person, comfort may come through a sentence, a friend, a moment, or a scene that reopens the awareness that one has not been abandoned.

The sermon also refers to Joyce Huggett's writing, grouping common channels of divine communication under Scripture, dreams and visions, and nature. The order matters. Scripture remains the final standard. Any impression or symbolic experience must return to the Bible for testing. That keeps the message balanced: God is not confined to human expectation, yet neither is every strong impression automatically treated as revelation.



3. Why People Often Fail to Hear: Inner Noise and Preset Expectations


Pastor Luo identifies two major barriers. The first is inner noise. Job is her central example. Pain, fear, sorrow, anxiety, guilt, and emotional collapse can become so loud inside a person that God's gentle voice is drowned out. Job's struggle is not presented as rebellion in a simplistic sense. It is suffering so intense that it fills the whole interior landscape. That is why the sermon is pastorally strong: it recognizes that spiritual deafness can happen in the middle of sincere pain.

The second barrier is expectation. People decide in advance what God's answer is supposed to look like, and then reject every answer that arrives in a different form. The sermon uses the familiar flood parable: a boat comes, then a rescue team, then a helicopter, but the man refuses all of them because he expects God to save him in some other way. Pastor Luo then tells a more ordinary and painful story of a brother who lost his wife and later his job. He rejected conversation, practical care, and even a work opportunity because none of those responses looked dramatic enough to count as God's intervention.

Pastor Luo then uses the song "The Ten Things Mom Says Most Often" by the band 831 (八三夭) as a mirror. The lyric about wanting to live one's own life becomes a picture of a familiar spiritual posture: wanting God close enough to help, but not close enough to interrupt. In that sense, the problem is not simple unbelief. It is resistance to being re-ordered.

That is why Revelation 3:20 becomes so pointed in the sermon. Christ stands at the door and knocks, and the context is not outsiders but the church. The message is sharp because it exposes a hidden condition: spiritual stagnation may not always come from lack of revelation or unusually difficult circumstances. It may come from a will that has grown too large, a life that wants comfort without correction, and a heart that no longer asks what God wants to say.

From the standpoint of discipleship, this is the core issue. If a person will not listen, that person cannot truly follow. If one only wants consolation and refuses correction, growth will remain shallow. The sermon therefore treats deafness to God's voice not as a passing emotion but as a spiritual habit that must be confronted.



4. Dreams Are Not Spiritual Performance but Moments When Defenses Drop


The sermon's treatment of dreams is strikingly practical. Pastor Luo's point is not that dreams are impressive. Her point is that nighttime often becomes a place where human defensiveness weakens. During the day, people are crowded by tasks, worries, self-protection, pride, and the urge to control. At night, those layers loosen. In that condition, God may open the ears more easily.

She illustrates this through a dream that came after the death of her older brother. In the dream, the family was waiting for him. He appeared first on a powerful motorcycle and later came running down a slope, no longer weak or limited as he had been before death, but strong, upright, and renewed. The force of the story is not merely emotional. It brings into view a grief marked by regret, unfinished sorrow, and the pain of absence. The sermon presents the dream as an instance in which God did not ignore that pain.

Just as important, Pastor Luo does not stop at the dream as a dramatic testimony. She explains why such a dream carries weight: it is clear, coherent, memorable, and it must finally be tested by Scripture. That prevents dreams from becoming mere emotional release or spiritual self-importance. If a dream is truly from God, it does not end in fascination with the experience itself; it leads toward comfort, reverence, and renewed trust.

Acts 2:17 is also placed within this frame. Dreams, visions, and prophecy belong to the Spirit's work in the last days. Yet the sermon consistently refuses sensationalism. A dream may matter, but it is never self-authenticating. It must be weighed, tested, and brought back under biblical authority. For that reason, this section is not an invitation to chase dreams, but a call to discernment.



5. The Sermon Offers Three Concrete Practices for Reopening Spiritual Hearing


One of the strongest features of the message is that it does not stop with diagnosis. It gives people something to practice.

  1. Begin with five minutes of silence each day. Find a quiet place, lower the internal volume, and pray something simple such as: "Jesus, I welcome You. Holy Spirit, I am willing to listen." The point is not to force an experience. The point is to become still enough to receive.
  2. Learn to listen in creation. A walk in a park, the sound of water, wind, flowers, trees, and open space can become settings of attention. The sermon does not encourage superstition, but it does challenge the habit of assuming that God would never use the created world to draw attention, comfort, or correction.
  3. Read the Gospels meditatively. Pastor Luo urges listeners to move beyond finishing a reading plan. Instead, one should enter the scene, imagine standing before Jesus, watch His expression, and hear His words personally. John 11:39-40 and Mark 5:28-32 become models here. Scripture is not reduced to information. It becomes a place of encounter, prayer, and response.

Taken together, these three practices move in one direction. They are not designed to make a person more dependent on rare spiritual intensity, but more able to be still, to notice, to discern, and to turn the heart back toward God. Silence adjusts the inner rhythm. Attentiveness in creation trains the mind not to rush past what is being given. Meditation on Scripture turns reading into response.

That is why this section is so important to the sermon as a whole. Listening to God is not reduced to sudden impressions. It is shaped through silence, attention, Scripture, and repeated practice. Those habits are ordinary, and precisely for that reason they can become durable. Spiritual maturity often grows not through one extraordinary moment, but through a long process of learning to distinguish the voice of self from the voice that calls one to stop, listen, and follow.



6. The Sermon Ends by Calling for Response, Not Mere Agreement


Near the end, Pastor Luo addresses three groups: those who do not yet know the Lord, those who feel they have grown distant and no longer hear Him, and those who already have some spiritual foundation but want greater discernment in order to help others. That threefold call makes the sermon expansive. Listening is not presented as a niche subject for unusually spiritual people. It is a necessary part of Christian life at every stage.

Just as important is her redefinition of the altar. Coming forward is not simply about receiving prayer from someone else. It is an act of response, offering, and commitment. That matters because strong emotion alone does not produce change. A sermon may move a person, even deeply, yet without response and commitment, the moment passes quickly.

The altar, in this sermon, is not presented as a place of spiritual performance. It is the place where resistance, stubbornness, and self-enclosure are brought before God. That is why the final call is not there to generate a religious mood. It is there to press the whole message into life. The beginner must respond because a relationship must begin. The distant believer must respond because the ear must reopen. The more mature believer must respond because clearer discernment is needed in order to help others.

By ending here, the sermon makes its closing point unmistakable: God's voice is not something to admire from a distance. It is meant to bring people forward into obedience.



Conclusion


The central claim of the sermon is not simply that God can speak in many ways. It is that God is already speaking, and the deeper question is whether human beings are willing to turn toward Him again. Pastor Luo's message names the difficulty clearly: the heart is noisy, the self is defensive, and the will prefers control. Spiritual hearing fades not only because truth is absent, but because attention has been yielded elsewhere.

In that sense, learning to hear God's voice is not the pursuit of an elite spiritual experience. It is the recovery of teachability. When the ear reopens, Scripture, community, acts of care, dreams, and the texture of ordinary life can all become places where God leads a person back into His presence and purpose.

The sermon also refuses to let responsibility rest entirely on circumstance. It does not say that hearing will come naturally once pain lessens or life becomes stable. It insists that in grief, confusion, busyness, exhaustion, and stubbornness, people most need to turn back again. What blocks hearing is often not the external condition, but the lack of inner space for God to enter.

For that reason, the message leaves behind not a secret technique, but a simple and searching invitation: do not ask only whether God is speaking. Ask whether the ear is still willing to listen, whether the heart is still willing to open, and whether life is still willing to be led.



Scripture Passages Quoted in the Sermon


Job 33:14-16

Verse 14 For God speaks once, even twice, yet people do not pay attention.

Verse 15 When people lie on their beds in deep sleep, God speaks through dreams and visions in the night.

Verse 16 He opens their ears and impresses His instruction upon their hearts.


Revelation 3:20

Verse 20 Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to that person, and I will dine with him, and he with Me.


Acts 2:17

Verse 17 God says: In the last days I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.


John 11:39-40

Verse 39 Jesus said, Remove the stone. Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to Him, Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days.

Verse 40 Jesus said to her, Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?


Mark 5:28-32

Verse 28 For she said, If I only touch His garment, I will be healed.

Verse 29 Immediately the source of her bleeding dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease.

Verse 30 Immediately Jesus perceived within Himself that power had gone out from Him. He turned around in the crowd and said, Who touched My clothes?

Verse 31 His disciples said to Him, You see the crowd pressing around You, and yet You say, Who touched Me?

Verse 32 And He looked around to see the woman who had done this.