How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

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Nothing could possibly matter more than learning to discern the authentic voice of God, but few things in life are more susceptible to delusion, deception and downright abuse. When life falls apart and we need God's comfort; in moments of cultural turmoil when we need God's clarity; facing formidable decisions when we need God's guidance; desiring a deeper faith when we need God to say something, anything, to turn the monologue we call prayer into a genuine conversation.

When it comes to hearing God, the Bible is the language of his heart. Nothing he says in any other way, or in any other context will ever override, undermine or contradict what he has said in the scriptures. 2. Prayer Find the 24-7 Prayer Lectio 365 app, a free daily devotional resource that helps you pray the Bible every day.Pete Greig: The Bible is not meant to be just “read;” it’s meant to be prayed. In many ways it’s a conversation starter for our prayer lives. One of the great ancient tools that can help us to pray the Bible is the Lectio Divina. In this approach we read small sections of the Bible slowly and we may even repeat them several times. We become attentive to any particular word or phrase that the Holy Spirit seems to be illuminating. And then we turn those words and phrases into prayerful interaction with the Lord. We harness our imaginations to bring the Word to life in our own experience. This is not coming to the Bible as a textbook for sound doctrine (important as that is), but rather coming to it as an invitation for meditation and revelation through conversation with God.

This matters because we often confuse theology with psychology. The fact that God speaks is a matter of theology. It’s about God’s nature. In Genesis 1, he creates the universe by his word, and in John 1 we are introduced to Jesus as the Word of God. Our God is the great communicator. But the way in which we hear him speak is a matter not of theology but of psychology. It’s about how our neural pathways have learned to receive and process data, and this varies from person to person. But if this is starting to sound a bit onerous, please don’t worry. As usual, Jesus keeps the whole thing refreshingly earthy, relational and simple: “My sheep listen to my voice”, he says. “I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27). The Revd Mike Starkey is Head of Church Growth for Manchester diocese and author of the Stepping Stones for Growth course. Pete Greig: I remember someone saying to me once, “God is humble.” And it freaked me out and I thought that can’t be right. And they went, “He is.” He’s not the guy at the party on the dance floor under the glitter ball with the white suit. He’s the guy kind of quietly unloading the dishwasher in the corner. It’s like blink and you’ll miss him. Hearing his voice is not so much a skill we must master, as a master we must meet. Jesus is what God sounds likeSo 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. Eventually, he drew a deep breath and cleared his throat. ‘ Zee Anglais,’ he said, ‘are zee worst speakers of ma language in zee world…’. He paused to let his words sink in. ‘And you, mon ami, are zee worst Englishman I ‘av ever heard speaking ma language.’ The British education system had, it turned out, prepared me with commendable zeal and focus over three long years for quite extensive discussions about stationery and affordable dairy products, but had somehow left me woefully deficient in the realms of alternative medicine, tectonic plates and, well, actually almost anything else.

God is not silent. However, often we are too busy to hear his voice. How to Hear God is a biblically based, historically illustrated look at the various ways in which God speaks. In reading and reflecting on its message, I have become a better listener. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants a more intimate relationship with God.' Gary D. Chapman In Bible times, dreams were one of the most consistent and powerful ways in which God communicated. This is particularly worth noting because it’s perhaps one of the least respected and least practised ways of listening to God in the West today. The fact is that almost every major character in the Bible received highly significant dreams or visions from God. Some were symbolic, others were warnings, and many were a means of specific guidance. The primary mark of the outpouring of the Spirit on all flesh in these last days, according to Joel and cited by Peter, is not speaking in tongues, shaking or falling to the ground but an increase in dreams and visions. If you are filled with the Spirit, you should therefore expect God to speak to you in this way. 5. Community, creation and culture Greig has once again produced an engaging book on an important element of Christian discipleship, drawing on sources from across the denominational/theological/historical spectrum. The section on Lectio was particularly helpful, indeed I started to read this because of the parallel "Lectio Course" which we studied as a church group throughout Lent. Pete Greig: Yes. But I don’t think I’ve always recognized the voice of God. Right? This is less about theology than psychology. See, the theology is open and shut. God speaks. Like Genesis 1: He speaks, boom, creation happens. John 1: God comes as Jesus, the Living Word. A lot of people say God has told them something, but then you hear what it is, and it sounds more like a message from the devil. Other folks who don't even believe in God seem to have a word of truth for today. Well, here is a book by someone you can trust. Pete Greig has been a friend for years, and he is one of the wisest people I know when it comes to prayer. This book draws from the well of wisdom that has nourished the faithful for centuries. It is filled with voices of saints who have been not only people of prayer but people who get up off their knees and put feet on those prayers. This incredible book is a call to prayer and a call to action . . . which is exactly what our world needs right now.' Shane ClaiborneAnd as a preacher, I’ll say it’s much more to do with how we listen than how God speaks. When we’re hungry, when we’re desperate, when we’re attuned to God’s voice, we receive with faith. I think that’s what it means to have ears to hear. Jesus is saying, “Hey, don’t just listen with your physical ears, but listen with your spiritual ears.” Having listened to God’s Word in the scriptures and his whisper in the silence, I also try to keep my eyes and ears open to anything he may be saying through the world he’s made. The great theologian Karl Barth argued that we need ‘the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.’ And Jesus urged us to read ‘the signs of the times.’ (Matthew 16:3) The facts are our friends.

Many people struggle to hear God because they have been taught to listen for his voice in ways that are difficult for them to process. Certain personality types may also find it more challenging. Introverts understandably advocate their own preference for stillness and solitude, but it is equally possible and no less spiritual to discern the voice of God through external interaction, or through visual formats. Christin Thieme: Yeah. I love that analogy that you give of the window frame and the picture frame, moving beyond seeing Scripture just objectively, but how do you receive it personally and make it that conversation? So there’s lots of really practical tools in the book, and that is a great one to start with. In the section on Lectio there was a tendency towards individualistic discipleship, which ironically was counterbalanced for me in doing the Lectio Course as a group exercise. He does return to the need to hear God in each other later, but there might be a tendency to see this as a separate thing altogether.In largely focusing on Lectio as a means of "Hearing God" in scripture there was a tendency to dismiss other means of reading the Bible devotionally, particularly reading larger sections that give us a greater sense of the narrative, and which would have been, in the absence of personal Bibles and chapter and verse, to original way in which scripture would literally have been "heard" rather than the atomised, bite-sized approach that has been the norm of too many evangelical Bible notes, and into which Lectio can easily descend.