Special Sunday Edition
Ethan Barton, Pastoral Resident, Tallowood Baptist Church
What in the world does it mean to hear God speaking to us? Do we hear an actual audible voice? Do we see visions? Do we see signs show up in the world around us? Does he speak through the words of other people? Does he impress his thoughts directly onto our minds?
I’ve heard stories of each of those methods being used. God is creative in speaking to us in every imaginable way, even if they’re perhaps not the ways we may want. Personally, I would love for God to show up physically and speak in a way I can’t mistake as anything else, so that I have nothing to doubt—but he just hasn’t done so. (Not to mention, I wouldn’t be able to survive that glorious of an encounter anyway!) Instead, he works subtly, in ways that require me to quiet my mind to hear, and then trust by faith that he is there.
But that’s the hard part; we need to listen for what God is saying and not what we want him to say. To quote Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, “people generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.” It is easy to look for reasons to confirm that our own ideas are good, and almost as easy to convince ourselves that God agrees with them. But oftentimes, that voice isn’t God’s. If we listen for what we want to hear, we’ll probably hear it, and we’ll shut out any voices that say anything to the contrary.
But what if we listen instead for God himself? Sometimes he’s the voice saying things we don’t like, because he has something to teach us about pursuing him and becoming like him! It is often hard to recognize at first that a voice is from God—Samuel is a testament to that—but once we learn to recognize the ways God speaks to us, like Samuel did, our hearts should open to receive him and be taught by him.
Prayer is a two-way conversation: we speak our mind to God, and we surrender ourselves to hear what he is saying back. But God’s ideas are far better than ours. So shouldn’t our prayers involve a lot more listening than speaking? How often do we go to God in prayer with nothing to say, but rather only opening our ears to him? He always has plenty to say to us; if we learn to recognize his voice and receive it eagerly, he will be thrilled to share conversation with those whom he loves. We need only listen.
