How to Hear God

‘It is Christ himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God,’ writes C. S. Lewis.

Hearing his voice remains tricky. I’m learning – becoming more discerning – but I still sometimes get it wrong. I’m also nervous because psychiatric wards are full of people hearing voices they attribute to God. And so, for that matter, is the Christian conference circuit. We need to think. We need to be biblical. But most of all we need to stay focused on Jesus.

Peace is a pretty subjective means of making important decisions, especially if you’re as uptight as me.

we often confuse theology with psychology. The fact that God speaks is a matter of theology. It’s about God’s nature. But how we hear God speak is a matter not of theology but of psychology. It’s about how our neural pathways have learned to receive and process data, which varies from person to person. One individual may indeed be flooded with feelings of peace when they propose to their girlfriend while another may be utterly terrified. This probably says more about the way that person is wired than it does about the will of God for their lives.

wrote Frederick Faber almost two hundred years ago. He is slow: we are swift and precipitate. It is because we are but for a time, and He has been for eternity. Thus grace, for the most part, acts slowly. He works little by little.

Lord, I am here before you now, wholeheartedly. Speak as I seek your face. Give me ears to hear what you are saying and a greater willingness to wait. Insofar as I am also here before you now half-heartedly, fuel the fire of my desire. Do whatever it takes to renew in me an all-consuming passion for your name. Lord Jesus, open my eyes to perceive you. Holy Spirit, soften my heart to receive you. Father God, grant me faith to believe that when I pray in this way, you hear and draw near with words of infinite love. Amen.

Why is there such a gulf between what we say we believe about the Bible and what we do in practice? One of the problems seems to be that no one ever teaches us how to read it, with both our heads and our hearts. We pretend that the Bible is easy, obvious and straightforward, when much of it is not. Some people trot out pious phrases like, ‘If it’s in the Bible it’s good enough for me,’ but in doing so they fail to acknowledge how complex it can be. In rabbinic tradition, every word of Scripture is considered to have seventy faces and 600,000 meanings! The simple fact of the matter is that the Bible is very long (about 1,200 pages), very old (written between two and three thousand years ago) and very different in its cultural context from our own. As a result, it’s not always easy to make sense of its meaning and apply its message to the complexities of life in the twenty-first century.

If I understand what the Bible means but never hear what it says to me personally, I have information without revelation. But conversely, if I disregard its original context and ignore the bits I don’t like or don’t understand, I will be in grave danger of abusing God’s Word by confusing it with my own feelings, preferences and prejudices.

Exegesis asks what the author of each book was intending when they first wrote it, and indeed what God was intending when he first inspired it. Exegesis also recognises that different parts of the Bible need to be understood in different ways according to their literary genre.

The Christological hermeneutic means that we read the Old Testament in the light of the New Testament, and the later New Testament epistles in the light of the Gospels.23 So, for example, the apparent brutality of God’s instruction to Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac is reframed completely by the moment, centuries later, when God himself sacrifices his only begotten Son on the cross. Elsewhere, the difficult Old Testament passages in which God apparently commands or condones genocide clearly have to be re-evaluated in the light of Jesus revealing once and for all that the heart of the Father is neither nationalistic nor aggressive, but rather overflowing with love towards all people and nations.24

The deceptively simple act of pausing, even just for a few minutes each day, can be a form of peace-making with our own battle-weary souls. Those rare people who learn to do this – who carry a quality of stillness with them through life – are attractive and authoritative because they are modelling something, whether they know it or not, of God’s own non-anxious presence in the world.

Prayer was never meant to be a monologue: it was meant to be a dialogue. Think of Scripture as God’s part of the script; prayer is our part. Scripture is God’s way of initiating a conversation; prayer is our response. The paradigm shift happens when you realise that the Bible wasn’t meant to be read through; the Bible was meant to be prayed through. And if you pray through it, you will never run out of things to talk about.19

Seek in reading and you will find in meditation; knock in prayer and it will be opened to you in contemplation. (St John of the Cross)

Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

Of course, his logos word (in Christ and in Scripture) remains consistently and wonderfully available, but there are times in all our lives – as there were in Bible times – when God’s rhēma word is ‘rare’. Perhaps this is because he is simply not in a hurry. But also because our Creator understands that we are seasonal beings, living in a seasonal world, and we don’t thrive and mature in a mode of continual harvest.8 Just

The God of the universe is rarely weird. He is the very one who has predetermined and defined that which we consider ‘normal’, so it would be ludicrous if he had to somehow banish himself from his own norms whenever he wanted to communicate with his own creation.

A prophecy can often be the right word at the wrong time. Our tendency is always to assume that prophetic words apply imminently or immediately. But the Bible is full of examples of prophecies that took years or even generations to be fulfilled. It’s often appropriate, therefore, to adopt a ‘wait and see’ approach when you receive a word that doesn’t have an obvious or immediate outworking.

Sometimes when I think God has gone silent, it’s actually that he is speaking differently, in a new dialect more appropriate to the new landscape I am about to enter. If I remain locked in the past by tradition, nostalgia or a stale imagination, I will almost certainly miss the new thing that the ‘Now God’ is forever saying (Exod. 3:14; Isa. 42).

During my retreat I tend to plan a very light structure incorporating six elements: exercise, sleep, meals, reading, journalling and prayer.

Norman Wirzba writes, ‘The extent and depth of our Sabbath commitment is the measure of how far we have progressed in our discipleship and friendship with God.’14

The primary mark of the outpouring of the Spirit on all flesh in these last days, according to Joel, cited by Peter, is not speaking in tongues, shaking or falling to the ground. It is an increase in dreams and visions. If you are filled with the Spirit, you should therefore expect God to speak to you in this way.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who combined being a Jesuit priest with being a scientist, palaeontologist and philosopher, put it like this: ‘By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us and moulds us.’

Any paradigm that systematically divides sacred from secular, locking God in the church and the world in the pub, is a violation of the incarnation and fundamentally sub-Christian. I don’t drive a Christian car, but I do try to drive as a Christian.

Naaman got the word he needed, not the one he wanted. Sometimes you have to choose. What if the thing you want God to say is not the thing you need God to say? Will you still hear and obey?

Most people insist upon hearing the voice of God on their own terms. The thought that he might ask us to immerse ourselves again and again in something as uncool as an uncool church – where the music is sixth rate, and the pastor doesn’t exactly roll out the red carpet, and his teaching is frankly ridiculous, and its members all look like they voted the wrong way – may very well be as offensive to us culturally, intellectually and personally as bathing in the Jordan would have been for Naaman.

Given the choice, would I prefer God to speak to me dramatically and supernaturally, rather than through an ordinary conversation with another person? If so, why? Who might be carrying God’s word for my life at this time? Is there any initiative I need to take? Anyone from whom I should seek advice?

God has willed that we should seek and find his living Word in the testimony of other Christians, in the mouths of human beings. Therefore, Christians need other Christians who speak God’s word to them. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)7

Malachi 3:16, ‘Those who feared the LORD talked with each other, and the LORD listened and heard.’ Isn’t that reassuring? Sometimes God listens in on our conversations and receives them as prayers.

Project. The Creator is still creating the cosmos and the cultures in which we live. He is still actively at work within his world, speaking brilliant new things into existence (babies and films, galaxies and songs). Our universe is still expanding!