Hearing God
For the past seven weeks, the Men’s Bible Study group has been focusing on a series of New Testament prayers. The study has been a blessing to the men in terms of how we communicate with God in prayer. When discussing communicating with God through prayer, the focus tends to be the words that emanate from us to God. For example, the use of adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication (ACTS) – the acronym based on the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13; Luke 11: 2-4) is often used as a model. However, when asked how God speaks to us, or the ways in which we hear God, there seems to be a level of uncertainty with some individuals. I recently started reading Pete Greig’s book titled” How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People. What follows are brief excerpts of a very fascinating look at the various ways we can hear God that is grounded in the story of the couple (most Bibles use “two of them”) who met the resurrected Jesus on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24: 13-35).
Hearing God’s Word in Jesus
The primary and probably common way we can hear God is through Jesus. While they were talking and discussing together, Jesus himself drew near and went with them (Luke 24:15).
Pete Greig sums it up well in the following:
Jesus is what God sounds like. He is literally the “living Word of God.” Hearing his voice is not so much a skill we must master…[ but more like] a master we must meet. Greig goes on to say that All the other ways in which God communicates — through the Bible, prophecy, dreams, visions, and so on, come through Jesus and point back to him too (pp. xv-xvi).
Hearing God’s Word in the Bible
We also hear God’s word in the Scriptures as evidenced in the following: And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself (Luke 24:27). This is [must have been] a powerful exposition of how all Scripture points to Jesus Christ - what Greig refers to as the christological hermeneutic that can “help you with the tricky business of hearing God’s voice through the Bible and of making sense of its meaning in your life today” (p. xvi).
Hearing God’s Word in Prayer
Another way we can hear God’s voice is through prayer. “Were not our hearts burning within us while he opened the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32). I have been using Lectio Divina, an ancient spiritual practice, as an approach to spiritual listening as part of my daily devotion and have found it very helpful. It involves Pause, Read (Lectio), Reflect (Meditatio), Ask (Oratio), and Yield (Contemplatio), and can be remembered by the acronym PRAY. The focus is on praying using the Scriptures. The Lectio 365 app was recommended to me about five years ago, and I have been using it ever since as part of my daily devotion.
Hearing God Through Dreams and the Unconscious
They recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight (Luke 24:31). Yet another way God communicates with us is “through the unconscious realm of intuition.” Greig notes that “the conscience is an essential yet fallible mouthpiece for the Holy Spirit. In the Men’s Bible Study, some of the men noted how they hear God through sensing - referring to their intuition.
Hearing God Through Community, Creation, and Culture
Finally we can hear God through community, creation (general revelation), and culture. In the Old Testament, God spoke to his people in a host of ways, including the Hebrew Bible, prophets/prophecies, visions, dreams, (Super)natural events. His word ultimately became flesh - “not in a book but in a body, not just mystically in heaven but materially among us (John 1:14).
The hearing of God’s word compels us to act. In the Emmaus story, the couple ….rose that same hour and returned [made the seven-mile journey] to Jerusalem. And they found the eleven…… Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread (Luke 24: 33, 35).
Denny Barnett