Living It: Can YOU Hear God? (Part 1)
Unpacking the Spiritual Hindrances to Hearing God
Consider This:
We think hearing God
comes from good theology.
But actually, good theology
comes from hearing God.
If someone asked you, “Can you hear God,” how would you respond?
And in considering your response, are you aware of any confusion, failure, regret or unworthiness over not being able to hear him clearly—or hear him at all?
If so, this is an opportunity to change.
Hidden Irony
The question about God’s people hearing him isn’t new. Western Christianity has wrestled with it for centuries, as far back as the Protestant Reformation (and beyond). Unfortunately, the topic has now devolved into a binary theological argument and interpretive debate.
It’s become so technical and abstracted from reality that it feels more like opposing attorneys arguing for what can be proven, rather than God’s people seeking truth.
Not to oversimplify this, but:
The Cessationist perspective proposes that God now speaks only through the Scriptures.
The Continuationist perspective proposes that God’s activity of speaking to his followers has continued from the patterns observed in the biblical record.
Interestingly, there’s an irony in these two positions we often overlook: We’ve focused the debate around how God speaks, not how we hear. So there’s a key truth that both perspectives miss:
However God speaks,
we still need to be able to hear him—
and we’re in deep yogurt if we can’t.
This is a great concern for the Western church. Because we, like the recipients of the letter to the Hebrews, “have become dull of hearing” (Heb. 5.11 ESV).1
We ARE Hearers
In my last article, I defined “hearing God” as participating in ongoing communication with the Holy Spirit. (Here’s the article, if you want to review this in more detail …)
My point in using this definition is to refocus something that has been peripheralized in the theological debate: Our identity—how we perceive ourselves. If we doubt that we can hear God, then we deny the nature of our ontological design. We are questioning part of what it means to be human.
Hearing God should be as natural and organic as breathing. It’s an experience common to God’s people throughout the Bible. But it’s not a common experience for Western believers. And many doubt that it’s possible to hear God consistently and accurately—whether we would admit it out loud or not.
So why this disconnect? Why doesn’t our experience align with our identity?
One reason is that we’ve gradually adopted the world’s thinking habits and beliefs over the course of our history, and appropriated them for use in a Christian context. It was probably unintentional. But once it started, it became too tempting to resist.
These thinking habits drove us to pursue accurate theology, assuming it is the vehicle for hearing God. But in reality, hearing God is what forms truly biblical theology.
If we don’t hear God well,
our theology will be useless
for transforming us into
the image of Christ.
How We Can Move Forward
We should go back to the clear and common-sense understanding that hearing God—from an identity of dependence—is a part of being human. To not hear God is to miss out on the fullness of life he intends for us.
In my last article, I laid out two primary reasons we don’t hear God:
We’re not ready to hear him.
We don’t know how to hear him.
I want to unpack those realities in two Living It articles. This is Part 1: being ready to hear God.
Note: This is a paid-subscriber follow-up to Can We Hear God. Upgrade to a paid subscription if you want to have access to this article (and future articles like it).
