If we have embraced Jesus as our Lord and Savior, and believed that His Holy Spirit has become alive and active within us, shouldn’t we be able to hear His voice clearly? How does this all work? Joyce Huggett poses in her book, Listening to God, raises some of the questions that can stir in us as we set out to hear God’s voice more clearly:
“How does God communicate himself to me? How does he disclose who he is after I have revealed myself to him? Do I have to wait hours, days, weeks or even years to see what God will do with and about my openness to him? Or is there a more immediate and direct response?…Can God put a new idea directly and immediately into my mind? Can he give me a new perspective in which to view my life with its successes and failures, agonies and ecstasies? Can God put new desires into my heart, new strength into my will? Can he touch and calm my turbulent emotions? Can he actually whisper words to the listening ears of my soul through the inner faculty of imagination? Can God stimulate certain memories stored within the human brain at the time these memories are needed?”
God can indeed whisper to us via His Spirit in our hearts, minds, imaginations, memories, and even dreams. His ways are endless really, which means we must learn the way of detecting and discerning when and how He is speaking.
There are many practices that can aid a person in experiencing the delight of reciprocity with God but I am going to focus on one today and that is: listening in the silence. In other words, we must make space for God, quieting ourselves and our environment so we can hear and detect His holy and intimate whisper.
Madame Guyon (1600’s) argues one must learn to come to the Lord with a “quiet mind” being completely still before Him (Ps, 46:10), and it is in this stillness that the Lord Himself can act. Contrary to popular belief, Guyon enthusiastically remarked that “silence is rich, full and alive!”
Moreover, Bonhoeffer (1954) also believed in the importance of regular times of silence, “as a child is quiet when he enters his father’s room.”
Modern devotional writer Foster (1998) argues silence is for a purpose, “not in order to be away from people, but in order to hear the divine whisper better.”. Silence then is not simply refraining from talking, but it must involve a heart listening to God.
Jesus lived this out, combining his busy life of ministry with times of retreating to be alone with His Father.
- Luke 5:16, “But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.”
- Luke 6:12, “One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God.”
- Matt 14:13, “When Jesus heard what had happened, he withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place. Hearing of this, the crowds followed him on foot from the towns.”
- Matt 26:36-46, “Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.”
- Mark 1:35-37, “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. 36 Simon and his companions went to look for him,37 and when they found him, they exclaimed: “Everyone is looking for you!”
If Jesus knew the importance of withdrawing from the noise to hear His Father, how much more us! But that is not all of it. In part IV, we will consider a 4-part process that will help us tune out the noise and chatter of the world and tune into the voice of God.