Hearing God is both mystical and essential. Hearing God is to be sought only as a part of a certain kind of life: a life of holiness and deep intimacy with your Heavenly Father. We must not only desire to hear His voice, but to remain in His presence. “Those possessed of a genuine love have God’s life in them and are well acquainted with Him. Those who are not have no knowledge of Him, for God is love.” 1 John 4:7-8
We want to please those we love, not because we want to avoid conflict or curry favor, but in order to share life with them. When a small child is with its mother or father, he or she is able to accomplish things that they could never do alone. In the union of souls, in the constant rest and delight in one another, it is not right for one person to tell the other what to do. God our Father should not have to explain His plan, He loves it when we comply out of love and devotion.
Too often we consider the Divine as a harsh Taskmaster. In the parable of the talents in Matthew 25:14-30, the one talent man never invested his talent out of fear. The misguided servant was unable to enter his master’s mind or life, and would not open himself up to the generosity of his lord. He actually abused his lord by taking him to be interested only in getting his own back, while the lord…was really interested with sharing his life and goods with others.
Christians also play Bible roulette, randomly pointing and following verses in an effort to hear God speak concerning His will. Instead of walking closely with God, they are superstitious and desire a shortcut to find God’s plan. King Saul desperately sought the counsel of the witch of Endor to “resurrect” the spirit of Samuel the prophet in order to divine God’s will in 1 Samuel 28.
A second truth essential to successfully discerning God’s intentions concerns how we relate our experience to Biblical teaching and to the lives of God’s people. For example, Paul decries accounts of being divine in his interactions with the Greek philosophers on Mars Hill:
“…when the crowds saw what Paul had done, they shouted…’the gods have come down to us in human form!’…And the crowds wanted to offer sacrifice….But when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard of it, they…rushed out into the crowd, shouting, ‘Friends, why are you doing this? We are mortals just like you.’ Acts 14:11-15 NIV
The humanity of Paul, John, Elijah and Jesus Himself teaches us a vital lesson: Our humanity will not by itself prevent us from knowing and interacting with God just as they did. As we study these great men and women of faith, we must imagine ourselves in their shoes and pray for the faith and knowledge that would help us to recognize that these extraordinary events could really happen to us.
The third precept that we must keep ever before us is that when God speaks to us, it does not prove that we are righteous or even right. It does not even prove that we have correctly understood what he said. The message and messenger’s infallibility does not insure the infallibility of our reception. We must remain humble before our Heavenly Father. A.T. Pierson in his biography of George Mueller, wrote these words about the importance of humility in discerning God’s voice:
“Here is a double emphasis upon meekness as a condition of such guidance and teaching. Meekness is a real preference for God’s will. Where this holy habit of mind exists, the whole being becomes so open to impression that, without any outward sign or token, there is an inward recognition and choice of the will of God. God guides, not by a visible sign, but by swaying the judgment. To wait before Him, weighing candidly in the scales every consideration for or against a proposed course, and in readiness to see which way the preponderance lies, is a frame of mind and heart in which one is fitted to be guided, and God touches the scales and makes the balance to sway as He will. But our hands must be off the scales, otherwise we need expect no interposition of His in our favor.”
One of my favorite quotes is “Lord, when we are wrong, make us willing to change, and when we are right, make us easy to live with!”
Willard, Dallas. Hearing God. Madison, Wisconsin: Intervarsity Press, 1999, pp. 31-40.
Pierson, A.T. George Mueller of Bristol and His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God. New York: Baker and Taylor, 1899, pp. 185-186.
