Attribution

If God speaks, there is no need to quote God as having said it. We give attribution to opinion or unconfirmed reports. Attribution is unnecessary for a statement of fact or truth. If God has spoken, then what he said can only fit the latter category.

That means there is room to question my belief if ever I feel obliged to explain my actions as a calling from God. There is room to question my sincerity if ever I must tell you that I am pursuing some aim because “God led me” to do that thing.

The word of God is effective, says Hebrews 4:12. Its aim is the effect. If I feel I need to explain myself by attribution, does this not reveal that I am unaffected? If I feel the need to append the explanation, “God told me to do this,” then am I not agreeing with my critic that my choice is disagreeably weird? Again, we give attribution to opinions. “God told me this” can be equivalent to saying, It is God’s opinion that I do this—but not necessarily my opinion.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with quoting what God has said. The Bible is full of people doing this. But if I am not first willing to stand on what he says—to be known by him alone—then my claim that I fully believe that I have heard from him is false.

(There is also nothing wrong with not fully believing that he has spoken. Because we can be misled, we are called to test. Being unsure about the source of the leading you’re experiencing is probably the best reason of all to share it with others and hear their reaction. My only point here is that if we ever do become confident that we have heard God speak his will, then talking about it becomes superfluous. The important response at that point is to step into that will and try to live it.)

The Bible’s book of Acts preserves a letter from first-century church leaders by quoting the letter verbatim. In this letter, the leaders give their answer to a dispute the church was facing. They explain their decision by saying, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us…” (Acts 15:28, emphasis mine).

In other words, citing the Holy Spirit was not enough. Making the claim that God had spoken did not absolve these leaders from personally owning and defending the decision. They heard God speak his will, but then they took that will inside of them, made up their minds as to why it was right, and acted upon it as a decision of their own will, too. 

Please Mess Up My Plans

When I come to a moment in which I am about to act on my belief that God counsels me, when I am getting ready to do something I think he is asking me to do, I often pray this way:

God, you know my heart. You know what I am planning. Later today, I intend to do that thing I think you want me to do. But I want to follow your will above all. So just let me do your actual will. If I am proceeding with this plan out of my own pride or impatience instead of waiting on you, then please waylay my intentions. If I am deceived in thinking this is your will, please mess up my plans so I don’t do it after all.

Various things have happened after I’ve prayed this prayer. My plans have indeed been messed up. The urgent matter arises, preventing me from having that difficult conversation that I thought God was leading me to have. Other times, my plans have sped forward. I find people agreeing in some surprising way that lets me quickly achieve a consensus that otherwise I didn’t think I would get.

We rush ahead sometimes because we become convinced that we simply must act. To do this is to worship not God’s power, but our own sense of importance. We are called to test. Trust God enough to tell him that you are willing to step aside, willing to abandon your intentions even at the last moment, if events provide a sign that you have become confused.

After praying this prayer inviting confounding, I would guess that I have not seen confounding roughly half of the time. That is, roughly half the time, my plans have gone through. I stepped into doing what I believed I was led to do.

The other half of the time, something has happened to deflect or distract me. Something happened to close off my opportunity to proceed.

I don’t know how often God has answered my prayer for confounding. Maybe he never has. Maybe all of these outcomes have some other meaning.

But on the other hand, if God has honored my prayer for confounding every single time I have prayed it, then the responses say something about my capacity or aptitude to hear from God on personal matters. My “confounding rate” implies that on roughly half of the occasions when I felt full of confidence that I knew God’s will for what to do and how to proceed, I was mistaken.

Why Test?

Paul wrote in 1 Thessalonians 5:21 to “test all things.” That wording sounds broad, but given that the line immediately prior is a reference to prophecy (5:20), it seems that testing what we think we are hearing from God is the context Paul had in mind. In our listening for whether God might speak, why should we take care to test what we believe we are hearing?

What are the risks of being too credulous about believing that God has spoken?

Here are three possibilities:

1. Evil

Evil still lives. At the very least, it lives in me. People have become shy about the word “evil,” out of a sense that the term is simplistic, but in fact we have allowed a simplistic picture to define the term. A sneering villain provides only a cartoonish portrayal of evil. The more accurate way to understand evil is our fearful obedience to death (think of greed arising from fear of scarcity; think of slander arising from fear of someone else’s success) in place of freely and bravely loving life.

About the Bible’s evil one, the being named Satan, the text offers less detail than you might expect. However, one clear statement the Bible makes about this being is that he is a liar—John 8:44. His tool is the lie. As far as we know, this might be the only tool he has for affecting us. The implication is that I am prone to hearing lies. In the fragile part of my inner life in which I harbor my hopes, some of what comes to my mind, including some thoughts that initially seem comfortable or expedient, are not informed by truth. Instead, some of the thoughts competing for my attention are the whispers of a voice that wants me to reject life and lose my way.

2. Idolatry

Idolatry is the practice of revering a created thing as if that thing is somehow a special avenue to the divine. Moses’ people had their golden calf. They believed the false claim of Moses’ brother Aaron that bowing down to this object provided access to God (Exodus 32:4). When we lift up merely human notions and pronouncements as divinely inspired messages, we are doing the same thing.

Paul’s longest teaching about mystical experiences of God covers chapters 12-14 of 1 Corinthians. He begins his argument across these chapters with a warning about idolatry. In 1 Corinthians 12:2, he reminds readers that they were idolaters in the past. In their newfound search for God’s presence and voice, they could be waylaid by this same old tendency.

3. Futility

God created you and me each for a purpose, for some way of living this life, for some expression or experience of love or fruitfulness that is going to have value even beyond this world. Every moment in which we pursue something or are fascinated by something unrelated to this purpose is a moment that ultimately will amount to nothing.

That’s OK. The purposes of our lives are unveiled subtly and slowly, and God gives us far more time than we need. He even redeems some of the time that has been blighted—Joel 2:25. However, enough neglect of the seed of joy within us, enough listening to the wrong voice (often the voice of fear), ultimately leads to a season of life or even an entire lifetime being spent on nothing that lasts.

In the descriptions above, I have listed three dangers of not testing what we hear, but arguably these dangers are all the same. The evil of idolatry leads to futility.

So how do we test? How do we put weight on what we think is God’s will, to see if it will hold?

Other blog posts offer some ways. Look for affirmation in what God is doing. Lean on scripture. Look for what you are hearing to show attributes that are God’s. You might even give the matter back to God and let go.

There is another way that I hope to explore in posts to come. That way is movement—walking. Take a step in the direction he seems to be leading. Test with your own weight.

Why should we take care to test? Look to 2 Corinthians 11:14 for how the devil presents himself (hint: he dresses like an angel of light). Look to Jeremiah 17:9 for what your emotions do to you (hint: they deceive). We test because our own inner feelings are an unreliable guide. We cannot fully trust what we “feel” to be good. An evil choice might initially feel right. An idol can come from someone we feel we ought to trust. And futility is often the result of the way that feels the safest.

Favorite Gospel Songs

1. Helen Baylor, “What Can I Do For You?” About the privilege and the impossibility of somehow being of service to a God who can do everything. Her song is the answer to her question.

2. Billy Joel, “My Life.” About rejecting the false gods who claim to know a better way for you than the way the Spirit is leading.

3. Taylor Swift, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” About the pleas of the previous self, the petty and fearful self who is yet unbroken.

Only the first of these is literally “gospel” music. I doubt the other two singers would label their songs that way. I doubt that these three would all subscribe to these meanings that could be heard in their music.

But here is a hint toward something larger. Art is work that invites the Spirit to collaborate. When the Spirit does collaborate, truth is revealed. That point of collaboration might involve the producer of the work, and it might just as well involve the recipient. As a writer, I have come to appreciate the extent to which the reader is a fully equal silent partner in whatever it is I think I am saying.

Popular works like the few I have just cited enjoy a currency that can be counted in decades. Consider, then, how much deeper is the well of truth contained within scriptures that continue to move people after millennia. Those texts that have come to be recognized as “inspired” in the fullest sense represent the extreme case of this phenomenon of the Spirit filling and completing art.

What did the scripture authors know and when did they know it? I believe a whole lot of the Bible—maybe all of it—was written by people who could not have humanly comprehended the power, sustenance, timelessness, and fuller meaning of what they were being given to write.

Language

What is the Bible? It’s an encounter. It’s food. Yet it’s possible to read the Bible with a hard outer shell, missing its power and missing its sustenance.

I had once read the gospels as literature, as something to criticize. I read them selectively, glossing over challenging passages and deciding according to my own reaction which of the details of the text were probably wrong.

More recently, I let my heart be changed. The decision was a little more nuanced than that, but not much. My heart changed and my mind followed, its reach expanding to take account of the influence of the world that is larger than the one I see. Recognizing Jesus as that world meeting this one, I wanted to understand afresh what he had said and done. I started to read the gospels again.

This time, instead of glossing over what I didn't understand, I faced the passages that made me uncomfortable or sad. There was plenty of sadness. There were passages that made little sense, whether at the first, second, or tenth reading. There were passages that I wanted to be richer in possibility than they seemed to be. I prayed about what I didn’t understand, confessing my ignorance in those cases where the ignorance was all I had. Not long after I read Jesus say, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:62), I came to realize that there were things I was holding onto that I ought to discard and be rid of forever. When I read Jesus tell the rich young ruler to “go, sell your belongings and give to the poor” (Matthew 19:21), I was sad for days. I wanted to love this text and be lifted by it, but I knew that I would never sell and give away all I owned.

The reading went slowly like this. I got up early and read for about an hour every morning, jotting ideas in a notebook. Getting through four gospels this way took about six months.

During that time, I was being fed. I was being healed from being malnourished. The sadness was just lowlands in the journeys between peaks. The process involved discovery. I might find an insight in the text so new to my thinking that the joy of possessing it could change the quality of the entire day. The process also involved relief, because here at last was a pursuit that could hold the weight of all the reverence I had always wanted to give to something. From the nourishment of this text, I was growing in a kind of strength. When I speak of the periodic sadness of studying scripture or otherwise pursuing Christ, understand the sadness this way: To grow is to face the pain of transition. To grow is to be remade.

Eventually, something new began to happen. Ideas out of scripture came to mind just as they were needed to address a challenge or question. One moment stands out. Being treated dismissively, I was fully prepared to become angry before I remembered Luke 6:27, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.” Rather than fuming and seeking a way to lay the person low, I focused my attention on what it might look like to forgive, and spent quiet moments on lifting the person up. Ten words of scripture snatched me out of a pit of resentment that might have held me a long time.

The Bible says this will happen. According to John 14:26, the Spirit counsels us in part by recalling to memory what the Lord has said. The Bible thus has this other nature as well. That is, the Bible is a language—a language the Spirit speaks. Rather than a language of phonics and letters, it is a language of attitudes and concepts. Scripture is text in which the mode of thinking of the divine has been reliably captured in sentences that a human mind can hold.

Of course, a person does not need the Bible to turn to God or recognize him. A baby does not need spoken language to recognize the mood of its mother. But you and I are looking for something more: a more finely graded understanding, an understanding that avoids our getting waylaid by the constructs of our own confusion and vanity.

Here, then, is part of the answer. It took me about six months to take hold of it. To obtain a better understanding of the speaker, pursue greater fluency in the language the speaker has chosen.

In Concert

I argued in this post that voice and action are one in God. To seek his voice entails not only listening in prayerful thought, but also listening through engagement with outward circumstances and events—the stuff that God is doing.

Doug, a reader who subscribes to this blog via email, responded with an analogy that fits this idea. He wrote, “When I go to a concert, I may have a hard time hearing from the back row. I could stay there and try to learn how to distinguish between the music and the ambient noise, or I could pay the price for the more expensive seats and sit up front.”

The question therefore becomes: What is the price of moving forward, of purchasing this ticket to the nearer seats?

(And I would add: Beware of scalpers.)

What I’m Doing

I’ve now done ten blog posts in a row on the subject of whether (and how) we can personally listen to God. I realize it might be worth stepping back at this point to explore why I’m writing about this.

If you move from once having seen Jesus Christ as irrelevant, to now seeing him as significant (a move which I have made), then you will encounter the idea among practicing believers that you ought to listen to God. That is: In moments of question or decision, seek his will. The merit of this advice seems incontestable. The problem lies in how to carry it out.

Contemporary Christian writings on the subject of how to listen to God tend to be unsatisfying. Some of these teachings seek to identify a set of procedures for this listening, as though the experience of the divine could be reduced and delineated in this way. Others pay too little attention to the fact that we are vain and self-deceiving creatures—always ready to hear our own preference as glorious if that’s what it takes to rationalize it. As Paul wrote, “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.”

But on the other hand, recoiling entirely from the idea that God speaks to us (something which I have also done) is also unsatisfying. The premise that God speaks individually to the people he created is, among other things, logical. What’s more, for me to deny the premise that God speaks personally would be hypocrisy, because I cannot help but infuse my experience of thinking and being with a search for spiritual meaning. The Creator is near and I can’t help but want to hear him.

I am grateful for your feedback on the blog posts I’ve done on this theme so far. Most of the feedback has come in email, though the hints in Facebook are noted, too. What I have been trying to do in these posts is feel my way forward through this seemingly vast and vague topic, looking for what I can say on the subject of listening to God that is specific and useful. When I hear from you, it helps me, because your view expands my own view of either the virtues or the shortcomings of what I’ve said so far.

A week ago today, through the agency of a person giving me this very feedback, God spoke. Or so I am inclined to hope. I began the day feeling oddly keyed in, feeling an expectancy as though something was in the air, something to pay attention to. Later, a reader’s comment reached me, revealing to me that I had implied something on this blog (to that person, at least) that I had not meant to say. Across the remainder of the day, the spark of this realization grew to a brushfire in my thinking, suggesting to me that I ought to discard some of the further posts I had planned in favor of a different course to follow in continuing to explore this topic.

Of course, my belief that this was God speaking to me, or God directing my path, could be delusional. I could be ascribing spirituality to the mere emotional experience of coming to a change in my thinking. And yet, I am still going to obey. I am going to see if truth and love are to be found along this way that I was shown. Part of the adventure of seeking to listen to God is the joy of discovering those times when you were, in fact, actually hearing him.

The Slow Voice

Three generations of Old Testament patriarchs received direct messages from God. In various Genesis passages, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob experienced something like personal conversation with him. We want that conversation, too. I do.

But then came the fourth generation, Joseph. His experience was different and new, in that Joseph never experienced a personal appearance and statement from God. If he did, scripture does not record it.

Scripture does record that God was with him—Genesis 39:2. What’s more, Joseph’s implied importance to us seems plain. Out of the 50 chapters in Genesis (a book that covers Adam, Noah, Abraham, and three generations after him), 13 of those chapters deal with the life of Joseph.

Living that life is the way Joseph communed with God. He suffered betrayal and imprisonment, then rose to incredible privilege as the agent of Pharaoh. He practiced a divine gift—dreaming and interpreting dreams—that seemed of no use to himself or anyone else until he met Pharaoh at 30. He proceeded through the events of a life that was by turns desolate, overwhelming, incomprehensible, and exhilarating—simply trying at every turn to hold fast to character and remain true to the calling God gave him.

Significantly, he never even fully understood what that calling was until he looked back on it later, seeing in retrospect God’s working in the events of his life. Genesis 45:8 gives us a glimpse of Joseph looking back on those events this way, working out their meaning.

Out of these Genesis patriarchs, then, whom should our model be? Should we look for the kinds of directly stated personal messages from God that the first three generations received? The line of Abraham was a weak and tenuous shoot in the beginning, needing careful attention from the gardener if it was to take root and thrive. But with Joseph, we see something different, a life now lived with that root beneath it.

I think Joseph did hear from God. He heard from God expansively, through the medium and the process of a life uniquely created for him. It was a life that moved him to the place and position where God wanted him to be, and it was a life in which his understanding was formed for the benefit of us all.

The reason I think Joseph heard from God is because he spoke the line that makes all of the book of Genesis make sense. Why did God allow the serpent into the garden? Why did he allow humans to choose evil when he knew what the result would be? The answer is: God knew even more. He knew not just the result, but also the result of the result. He knows how even the fruit of evil will serve the glory of God in the end. Joseph spoke of this.

Genesis 50:20 comes at the close of the book of Genesis. In this line, Joseph addresses his siblings about their evil toward him decades in the past, but he might have been speaking to the serpent as well. “You planned evil against me,” he said, “but God planned it for good.”

Joseph gathered this insight from the slow voice of God. He heard it from the voice that spoke up to him out of all the events of his life. God was never audible to Joseph, but he was always there. Within the silence, God was speaking to Joseph even more profoundly than he had spoken to any of the generations who came before him.

The Call

She’s fine today, but two weeks ago, my six-year-old took a spill while playing at school and ended up needing stitches. (No worries—the stitches are already out.)

That evening, there was a meeting my wife had planned to attend. When the school nurse contacted her, my wife’s first thought was something along the lines of I need to take care of my daughter and get her comfortable quickly enough that I can still leave for my meeting on time.

But when she saw the wound, and phoned the pediatrician for advice, it became clear that she would need to take the child to the hospital. Her plans for the evening were done.

In recognizing this, was my wife not called?

I think she certainly was. The author of events said to her: Abandon your plans. I have a different plan for you today.

And if we see this as a call, then by definition it was also a voice. This was the voice of God, communicating through events.

The exigency of these events made for a call that was immediate and plain. But here’s the thing: Can you and I look for that same voice in the events around each of us? And can we expect that voice to speak not just loud and urgent messages, but also slow and subtle ones?

As a mother “heard” the Creator in external happenings, we might turn the same kind of attention—the same kind of ear—toward listening into the array of encounters and circumstances that we are given. Each of us stands at the center of a sphere of experience that is absolutely unique. If God might issue a loud call through the events of this sphere, he might speak by the same means—he might be speaking right now—to offer loving counsel.

A seemingly innocuous question therefore deserves our solemn consideration as we search for what the Creator might be telling us. That question is: What’s going on?

Both Places

If I believe God speaks to me through epiphanies or insights, through certain thoughts that come to my mind ... then where do my other thoughts come from?

That might feel like an odd question. Once asked, though, it is not easy to dismiss. I have described what I see as the glaring problem with my hope that I can hear God by listening for his will in prayer—that is, the danger that I merely hear my own will instead. Now, here is a second problem that doesn’t glare. Namely: In the same way that the seeming epiphanies come to mind abruptly, so do the seemingly banal thoughts. An everyday thought along the lines of “It’s getting to be time for me to leave for work,” as humdrum as that is, also comes to my mind without my being able to account for its creation.

Of course, God creates it. The creator of everything is also the creator of my experience of self, including the stream of thought that pours into this experience. However, even as he creates all of this thought, I isolate only certain thoughts out of the stream, declaring just these to be instances of God “speaking.”

Why? Upon what do I base the distinction?

Before I even seek to evaluate whether a particular thought carries God’s voice, I fear I have selected that thought for evaluation according to my own mere feeling about the thought’s importance. Searching down this line of inquiry, I find a faulty measuring instrument in play. I find my ego using the expectations of that same ego as an indicator of the Almighty.

“My sheep hear my voice, I know them, and they follow me,” said Jesus in John 10:27. The more I consider the subjects of “hearing” and “following,” the more I realize I also need to unseal the question of what constitutes a “voice.”

In fact, that very line of inquiry goes farther still. God, who creates abrupt thought, also creates every abrupt event that reaches my awareness. Therefore, upon what do I base my expectation that he ought to be speaking within my thinking? Do I assume that the voice of God is able to manifest more “easily” in my inner thoughts than in outer events? If so, then I have made an error. God is God in both places.

And therein lies the hope.

Yes, real hope. Within my prayerful thoughts, in various ways, I am standing (or sitting) on shaky ground. Vanity infiltrates everywhere: the vanity of expecting what God ought to say, plus the vanity of expecting how he ought to say it. In contrast, the experience of external reality is not biased the same way. Certainly, my vanity is working here as well, affecting what I notice and value. But external facts or events will keep their character of being accurate or real as my understanding of them becomes more clear. The solidness in the way that God creates outer reality (versus the fluidity of my thoughts) is an unappreciated blessing in the way that God relates to us. When God does speak—when insight about his will is being revealed—we can trust that what we find in our inner experience of the truth will conform to what we find present or occurring in outer circumstances. The inner evidence of God’s will matches the outer evidence of that will, and vice versa, because these two realms are one in God.

Reflect on that point. In God, there actually is no “inner” and “outer.” Everything is equally intimate to him. As a result, there is no disunion between his action and his voice. To state the matter as I did previously—that God is God in “both places”—is to describe the fissure of my nature rather than the fullness of his. Humans say one thing and do another. God cannot be understood this way. The very voice of God creates. Accordingly, if we are to listen for what God is saying, then we must be mindful of what he is doing. We must be mindful to the very extent of joining in with that doing ourselves.

In short, my listening is futile if I am solely listening passively. Seeking the voice of God in inward meditation has to meet with seeking the voice of God through outward engagement, movement, and endeavor. God is speaking into our hearts and he is speaking out of the happenings of our lives. To listen for him in only one of these realms is to hear him in neither.

And yet, it remains true that we humans do have “inner” and “outer.” We have the distinction, even the estrangement, between these two realms. The fissure that splits our nature divides the realm of mind, hope, and feeling from the realm of action, circumstance, and events. These are separate places for us, and we struggle in separate ways within these spheres.

Is it possible, therefore, that God has provided an access hatch—a means of connecting inner and outer, and moving gracefully between them?

Consider this about the Bible: What began as inspiration—what began as the inner experience of its authors—has now become a solid feature of the outer reality that we can explore in search of God’s voice.