How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

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Right? Well, yes, multiple levels. First of all, sometimes God will speak to you. And it’s not one else’s business. It’s just in you and God. So just because he speaks to you doesn’t mean that he’s trying to speak through you. By the way, important point for all. Because all too often, anytime you say anything to us, we’re immediately writing down to share in our next sermon. And and sometimes there’s very little space for God just to confide in us anymore, because we hold the microphone too often. So as an aside, but if you don’t have any holy secrets, in your relationship with God, it’s a bit like a marriage where everything that happens in the bedroom is shared publicly, just not healthy or appropriate. So. So that’s thinking number one. Distinction number two is, you know, if we look at the means of communication, for example, one of my great discoveries in this book was how I knew that dreams were obviously a big thing in the Bible. Just how big in the New Testament as well as the Old Testament, in the birth of Christ, dream after dream after group, direct, Apostle Paul, you know, the whole his whole evangelistic apostolic strategy rooted by dream. So I was very challenged, that perhaps since Freud, and Jung and the rise of psychoanalysis, that explains all dreams is just the fruit of the subconscious. I wonder if we in the West have, have completely sort of walked away from that. Stories from the developing world and Muslims, we like that, but we don’t really expect it in our own congregations or our own lives. A dream isn’t, you know, we’re maybe for me, and not someone else? Or maybe someone not. And I think that’s another mistake. We sometimes make the moment say, I had a dream. I probably need to say, Lord, is this for me? Or is this someone else? And if it’s for someone else? Is it so that I can pray for them about that? Or is it for me to share with them? And then if it’s to share with them, is it the right time to share with them? Because we often get timing wrong? Is it something I need to sit on for a while and marinade? Or do I need to use it in a different way? Do I need to go and talk to a third party saying I think God might be saying this to me about that person. So the whole way we steward what God says to us, if it’s for other people, requires as much pastoral eq as most of the other activities that we engage in. And it is exactly like that in our relationship with the Lord. We learn. You know, when I said John 10:27, “My sheep listen to my voice,” the Greek word, there is akouo, from which we get the word acoustic. So it’s like, as we get to know the acoustics of God’s voice, the nuance, the tone of God’s voice, we’re like sheep that follow him and then obey, and we grow in our relationship with him. It’s a beautiful thing. Ministry Leaders Growth Guide– key insights and concepts from this week’s conversation as well as engaging questions for you and your team to consider and process As one who is called to make disciples, how am I helping those I am discipling become people who really know how to hear God’s voice? Rarely in any of our lifetimes have we so acutely needed to hear the Lord’s voice: both his word, so that we as hisChurch might navigate such dangerous days with clarity and courage, but also his whisper, so that we as individuals might know the particular guidance and comfort of his presence day by day. We live in noisy and bewildering times, full of distractions. Things are moving fast all around us. And I believe that now, more than ever, we need to learn how to be still, how to slow down, how to plug ourselves in to hear the voice of God more clearlyamid the clatter and clamour of the world.

Some people, and I’ve been doing interviews like this, if they’re really, really into the Bible, they sometimes get really nervous that I talk about God speaking in prophecy. But the Bible says God speaks in prophecy. And then others are really into all the prophetic stuff, and they’re like a bit disappointed I’m saying, “No, the main way God speaks is through the Bible.” And both are true.Christin Thieme: Yeah, exactly. We’re following up our last episode with you where we talked about how to pray, with now how to hear God. So just a small question to start for you: Why is hearing God’s voice so natural and so hard? Hearing his voice is not so much a skill we must master, as a master we must meet. Jesus is what God sounds like Christin Thieme: Yeah. I love the phrase you write that Jesus wears his charisma lightly. I think that’s a cool way to put it.

Nothing could possibly matter more than learning to discern his authentic voice, and yet few things in life are more susceptible to delusion, deception, and downright abuse.So we have a God who communicates. So that would be a very short book. If the book was the fact that God speaks, it’s just, he does. The issue is psychology. The issue is each of us is wired differently. So how do we receive what God is saying? And sometimes our problem is either that we are expecting to hear God the way someone else does and we’re just wired differently. Or we are expecting to hear God the way he spoke to us in the past, but he’s speaking to us in a new way in our new context. Shareable Social Graphics– Feel free to post them on your church social accounts, your personal accounts, or use them as graphics in your communications Why do you say Christ’s encounter with the people on the road to Emmaus is a master class in learning to hear God’s voice? Learning to recognise the voice of God is one of the most astounding yet confusing things a human being can learn to do And this is why, if you’ve been around Christians for any length of time, you’ll have heard someone say, quite matter-of-factly: “Oh, God told me this,” or “The Lord said that,” as if it’s the most normal thing in the world (which, in a way, it is). But just try using that line with your GP: “Doctor, I’m hearing the voice of Jesus”; or in a court of law: “God told me to do it, your Honour.” They’ll medicate or detain you before you can shout: “Hallelujah!”