Hearing God was instrumental in my understanding of what it means to listen to the voice of God and be led by it. I learned that God still speaks, with a still, small voice and that He uses His voice to guide us into the kind of life that He wants for us: one where we are coming more and more to resemble Christ. His voice in our life is met with a sense of peace and His power, and a certainty that God has spoken. He often speaks through the audible voice of other believers, but his speaking has a certain character to it.

Key Quotes and Ideas

"I fear that many people seek to hear God solely as a device for securing their own safety, comfort and righteousness."

Guidelines for Hearing From God

Our primary goal is not just to hear the voice of God but to be mature people in a loving relationship with him. Only in this way will we hear him rightly.
Pray for the faith and for the experiences that would enable us to believe that such things could happen to us. Only then will be able to recognize, accept and dwell in them when they come.
When God speaks to us, it does not prove that we are righteous or even right. It does not even prove that we have correctly understood what he said. The infallibility of the messenger does not guarantee the infallability of the reception.

"Meekness is a real preference for God's will." pg. 39

"Being right is one of the hardest burdens human beings have to bear, and few succeed in bearing up under it gracefully." pg. 40

"It is simply not within human capacity to care effectively for others in the depths of their life and being or even to be with them in finality–no matter how much we may care about them. …the fact that only God can take away our aloneness by his presence explains why the ultimate suffering and punishment is separation from the presence of God." pg. 43-44

"The promise here is not that God will never allow any evil to come to us but that no matter what befalls us, we are still beyond genuine hard due to the fact that he remains with us and his presence is utterly enough by itself." pg. 45

"God is also with us in a conversational relationship: he speaks with us individually as it is appropriate–which is only to be expected between two persons who know one another, care about each other and are engaged in common enterprises." pg. 51

"These purposeful and conscious communication by words seem to have been quite normal experiences for the early Christians. If we look at the advice on how the meetings of the church were supposed to proceed, as given in 1 Cor. 14, we see it is assumed that numerous people in the congregation are going to have some kind of communication from God which they will be sharing with the others in the group: 1 Cor 14:26" pg. 53

"…union with God… consists chiefly in a conversational relationship with God while we are consistently and deeply engaged as his friend and collaborator in the affairs of the kingdom of the heavens." pg. 56

"Our reverence for and faith in the Bible must not be allowed to blind us to the need for personal divine instruction within the principles of the Bible yet beyond the details of what it explicitly says. …it is Bible-believing Christians who disagree with each other most often and most heatedly. … An exalted view of the Bible does not free us from the responsibility of learning to talk with God and to hear him in the many ways he speaks to humankind." pg. 59

"With respect to many events in our future, God's will is that we should determine what will happen. What a child does when not told what to do is the final indicator of what and who that child is." pg. 61

Why did Jesus not want people to tell everyone of the signs and miracles that he did? Because ultimately, the signs and miracles aren't the thing that convince people. "Our preexisting ideas and assumptions are precisely what determine what we can see, hear or otherwise observe. ... [our ideas] cannot, therefore, be changed by stories and miraculous events alone, since they prevent a correct perception of those very stories and events." pg. 65

"God is always trying in many ways to teach us about himself." pg. 66

Four Common Responses to God's Active Communication

God would not communicate with run of the mill humans
God does not communicate with them in that way
- "the fact that we do not hear does not mean that God is not speaking to us."
- "We are showered with messages that simply go right through or past us. We are not attuned to God's voice."
- "He urged his hearers to make a great effort to hear, assuring them that what they received would be proportional to their desire and effort. (Mk. 4:23-24)"
- "Hearing God–as a reliable, day-to-day reality for people with good sense–is for those who are devoted to the glory of God and the advancement of his kingdom. It is for the disciple of Jesus Christ who has no higher preference than to be like him."
- What are we living for? "When our lives are devoted to the will of God, he has reason to speak to us."
God cannot communicate with us directly
- "naturalism" says all that is real is that which can be measured and simply assumes that scientific knowledge has proven the impossibility of God from interacting with the material universe.
- "the order of events large and small throughout our world strongly suggests to an unbiased observer that there is a providential and personal oversight of our world and our lives." pg. 75
God should not communicate with us directly
- As leaders of a flock of God's sheep, as shepherds, our confidence cannot be in our own ability to forcibly maneuver the sheep. "The biblical shepherd simply call as he calmly walks ahead of the sheep." pg. 81
- "When we lead as shepherds, our confidence is in only one things: the word of the Great Shepherd, coming through us or, otherwise, to his sheep."
- "Ministry of the word is never a one-way street when it is functioning rightly in any group."

"As for me, I never lived, I was half dead, I was a rotting tree, until I reached the place where I wholly, with utter honesty, resolved and then re-resolved that I would find God's will, and I would do that will though every fiber in me said no, and I would win the battle in my thoughts. It was as though some deep artesian well had been struck in my soul… You and I shall soon blow away from our bodies. Money, praise, poverty, opposition, these make no difference, for they will all alike be forgotten in a thousand years, but this spirit which comes to a mind set upon continuous surrender, this spirit is timeless." Frank Laubach pg. 71

"I would sooner be the leader of six free men, whose enthusiastic love is my only power over them, than play the director to a score of enslaved nations. Our system was never intended to promote the glory of priests and pastors, but it is calculated to educate manly Christians, who will not take their faith at second-hand." Charles Spurgeon pg. 83

"there is a subordination within the fellowship of believers, but it is not one that comes from a clever or crude struggle for ascendancy. Rather it stems solely from authority given by experience in the Way and by speaking of what is truly God's word." pg. 84

Chapter 5: The Still Small Voice and Its Rivals

God can and does guide us by addressing us.

The still small voice is the primary way that we hear from God: "the still small voice–or the interior or inner voice, as it is also called–is the preferred and more valuable form of individualized communication for God's purposes." pg. 89 It often takes the form of thoughts that are our thoughts, though these thoughts are not from us.

"…those most adept at the divine-human conversation are often reluctant to speak much about the inner voice. And that is completely as it should be. God's communication with the individual is not for show-and-tell…" pg. 90

"Generally speaking, God does not compete for our attention. In most cases, God will not run over us. We must be open to the possibility of God's addressing us in whatever way he chooses, or else we might walk right past a burning bush." pg. 91

"Something comes into our own energies and capacities and expands them. We are laid of by Something greater than ourselves. We can face things, create things, accomplish things, that in our own strength would have been impossible… The Holy Spirit seems to mix and mingle His power with our own, so that what happens is both a heightening of our own powers, and a gift to us from outside. This is as real and as definite as attaching an appliance to an electrical outlet, though of course such a mechanical analogy is not altogether satisfactory." Samuel Shoemaker pg. 96

The primary objective way that God speaks: through human voice and language "God's speaking in union with the human voice and human language is the primary objective way in which God addresses us… because it most fully engages the faculties of free, intelligent beings who are socially interacting with agape love in the work of God as his colaborers and friends." pg. 96

On God speaking through the human voice - "No means of communication between God and us is more commonly used in the Bible or the history of the church than the voice of the definite, individual human being. In such cases God and the person he uses speak conjointly. It may be that the one spoken to is the one spoken through." pg. 95

The primary subjective way that God speaks: through our own thoughts and feelings "The human spirit or the 'still small voice'–God addresses us through our own spirits–our own thoughts and feelings toward ourselves as as towards events and people around us."

"God uses our self-knowledge or self-awareness, heightened and given a special quality by his presence and direction, to search us out and reveal to us the truth about ourselves and our world." pg. 100

"…we are addressed by him, spoken to by him, through our own thoughts. This is something you can should test by experiment. Those who begin to pray that God will enlighten them as to the nature and meaning of the processes that go on in their own soul will begin to understand." pg. 101

We are transformed by the renewing of our minds (Rom. 12:2) such that our thoughts become his thoughts. "He will help us to learn to distinguish when a thought is ours alone and when it is also his." pg. 102

"…when thoughts recur, always stop prayerfully to consider whether this may be an appearance of the Lord's 'candle' or whether the thoughts may have some other significance."

"The thoughts and feelings in the mind and spirit of one who is surrendered to God should be treated as if God were walking through one's personality with a candle, directing one's attention to things one after another. As we become used to the idea that God is friendly and helpful, that he desires to straighten, inform and correct us for our own good as well as to comfort an encourage, and that he really does love us, then we can begin to pray heartily with the psalmist, "Search me, O God, and know my heart, test me and know my thoughts (Ps. 139:23)." pg. 102

God definitely still speaks today. "The close of the scriptural canon marks the point in the (still ongoing) divine-human conversation where the principles and doctrines that form the substance of Christian faith and practice are adequately stated in human language that nothing more need be said in general. Biblical Christians believe that nothing further will be said by God to extend or contradict those principles. But a biblical Christian is not just someone who holds certain beliefs about the Bible. He or she is also someone who leads the kind of life demonstrated in the Bible: a life of personal, intelligent interaction with God. Anything less than this makes a mockery of the priesthood of the believer." pg. 104

Silence is not an "answer"

"Often God does not give us what we ask for, but I believe that he will always answer, always respond to us in some way. … When a request has been denied, does this then mean that there has been no response?" pg. 105?

"God does take care of his church, and all our efforts as leaders must be directed toward fostering each person's individual adventure with him."

"People must be helped to see that recognizing God's voice is something that they must learn to do through their own personal experience and experimentation." pg. 108

"We must not mistakenly assume that if God speaks to someone, he or she automatically know what is happening and who is talking." pg. 109

"As Bible history proceeds, we notice that in the process of divine communication the greater the maturity of the listener, the greater the clarity of the message and the lesser the role played by dreams, visions and other strange phenomena and altered states." pg. 110

"I am merely trying to be helpful in pointing out the kind of life with God into which we should expect to grow–a life in which one hears from God amid within frequent times of conversational prayer." pg. 111

"But once we are earnestly seeking God and get beyond the need to have big things happening to reassure us that somehow we are all right–and possibly that others are not–then we begin to understand and rejoice that, as Jesus so clearly lived and taught, the life of the kingdom is 'righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.' Rom. 14:17." pg. 115

"Great faith, like great strength in general, is revealed by the ease of its workings." pg. 118

On the power of words

'Death and life is in the power of the tongue' (Prov. 18:21)
'a soft tongue can break bones' (Prov. 25:15)
'a gentle tongue is a tree of life, but perverseness in it breaks the spirit' (Prov. 15:4)
'a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire.' (Jas 3:5)
'For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.' (Matt 12:37)

"A kingdom works by the communication of thoughts and intentions through words or other symbols, for a kingdom is a network of personal relationships." pg. 122

"As God spoke, the object concerned came into existence–whether in an instant or over a more or less extended period of time does not matter–in the same way that your hand moves in response to your thought and intention. That is the creative power of the word of God. What we call natural laws, then, must be regarded as God's thoughts and intentions as to how the world should run." pg. 125

"We should be in a position to speak, to say on behalf of God and in the name of Christ how things are meant to be." pg. 134

"The suggestion that we should possibly be healing the sick, casting out demons, or raising the dead by our participation in the word and power of God may leave us baffled, angry, rebellious and guilt-ridden." pg. 135

When we don't embrace the gifts of the spirit, we often "recoil into a life of mere mental assent to the truth about Jesus and some degree of effort to our local church." pg. 136

"When we consider a life of participation in God's kingdom rule, we are not looking at anything that we must make happen. The extent of our obligation is to be honestly willing and eager to be made able." pg. 136

The Bible and the Word of God

"The Bible is one of the results of God's speaking. It is the unique written Word of God. It is inerrant in its original form and infallible in all its forms for the purpose of guiding us into a life-saving relationship with God in his kingdom. It is infallible in this way precisely because God never leaves it alone.

The inerrancy of the original texts is rendered effective for the purposes of redemption only as that text, through its present-day derivatives, is constantly held within the eternal living Word. Inerrancy by itself is not a sufficient theory of biblical inspiration because as everyone knows, the Bible in our hands is not the original text. Inerrancy of the originals also does not guarantee sane and sound, much less error-free, interpretations. Our dependence as we read the Bible today must be on God, who now speaks to us in conjunction with it and with our best efforts to understand it.

In light of our discussions so far it is clear that while the Bible is the written Word of God, the word of God is not simply the Bible. The way we know that this is so is, above all, by paying attention to that the Bible says.

…the word is much greater than the Bible, though inclusive of it. The Bible is the Word of God in its unique written form. But the Bible is not Jesus Christ, who is the living Word. The Bible was not born of a virgin, crucified, resurrected and elevated to the right hand of the Father.

Neither is the Bible the word of God that is settled eternally in the heavens, as the psalmist says (Ps 119:89), expressing itself in the order of nature (Ps 19:1-4). The Bible is not the word of God that, in the book of Acts, expanded and grew and multiplied (Acts 12:24). It is not the word that Jesus spoke of as being sown by the active speaking of the ministry (Mt 13). But all of these are God's words, as is also his speaking that we hear when we individually hear God.

…The Bible is a finite, written record of the saving truth spoken by the infinite, loving God, and it reliably fixes the boundaries of everything he will ever say to humankind. It fixes those boundaries in principle, though it does not provide the detailed communications that God may have with individual believers today.

…We can refer any person to [the Bible] with the assurance that if they will approach it openly, honestly, intelligently and persistently, God will meet them through its pages and speak peace to their souls.

The Word of God in the larger sense portrayed in the Bible is therefore available to every person through the Bible, the written Word of God. All may hear the living Word by coming to the Bible humbly and persistently, with burning desire to find God and live in peace with him.

…the Bible may prove a deadly snare… because of this we are warned in the Bible that we can even destroy ourselves by Bible study: specifically by studying Paul's epistles (2 Pet. 3:16).

Our only protection from our own pride, fear, ignorance, and impatience as we study the Bible is fellowship with the living Word, the Lord himself." pg. 141-143

"Solutions to the problems of humanity are by no means easy or simple. But what we know of human nature seems clearly to indicate that insight on how to live can be provided effectively only by those who are prepared to lead the way by example. Only by showing how to live can we teach how to live. It is by our example–more precisely, by the kind of life (aeon zoe) that is in us and makes us examples of God's indwelling–that we reveal the basis for the communication of God's redeeming word and Spirit to an ever larger circle of human beings." pg. 146

"How do we understand the process that we undergo to be transformed into children of light? … Through the action of the word of God upon us, throughout us and with us that we come to have the mind of Christ and thus to live fully in the kingdom of God. … What is it to live fully? Life is power to act and respond in specific kinds of relations. We begin to live fully when we begin again to be alive to God, to be able to respond toward him and to act within the realm of the Spirit." pg. 147-148

"in the progress of God's redemptive work communication advances into communion and communion into union. When the progression is complete we can truly say, 'It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me' (Gal 2:20) and 'For me, living is Christ' (Phil 1:21)." pg. 155

"It was through his words that he literally, not figuratively, imparted himself while he lived and taught among the people of his day. On the foundation of his words to his followers, the powerful events of Calvary, the resurrection and Pentecost brought forth a communion and then a union later described by Paul as the great mystery of the ages, 'Christ in you, the hope of glory' (Col 1:27)." pg. 156

"Our identification (or union) with the one life or the other (with Christ or with the life of sin) is not a fact to be discovered by subtle examination of theological treatises or of our soul-life and state of mind. It is a set of the will. Is it my will to be in the old, dead life of sin? Or is it my will to be in the resurrection life of Christ, which has entered into me through the impact of God's word." pg. 160

Praying the Scriptures - Lectio Divina

"William Law comments, 'Therefore the Scriptures should only be read in an attitude of prayer, trusting to the inward working of the Holy Spirit to make their truths a living reality within us." pg. 161

"When we come to the Scriptures as a part of our conscious strategy to cooperate with God for the full redemption of our life, we should…

Desire that his revealed will should be true for us.
Begin with those parts of Scripture with which we have some familiarity.
Do not try to read a great deal at once.
- "It is better in one year to have ten good verse transferred into the substance of our lives than to have every word of the Bible flash before our eyes."
Come to your chosen passage as to a place where you will have a holy meeting with God.

The general train of development will be…

1. *Information* first
2. A *longing* for it to be so
3. *Affirmation* that it must be so
4. *Invocation* to God to make it so
5. *Appropriation* by God's grace that it *is* so

"This last stage must not be forced or, especially, faked. The ability for it will be given as you watch for God to move in your life."

"When there is an inner agreement between our minds and the truth expressed in the passages we read, we know that we have part of the mind of Christ in us as our own." pg. 164

Recognizing the Voice of God

"…the only answer to the question 'How do we know whether this is from God?' is 'By experience.'" pg. 167

"because of the dangers of proof-texting, only the Bible as a whole can be treated as the written Word of God." pg. 167

"In any case, we must certainly go beyond, though never around, the words of the Bible to find out what God is speaking to us. As we have already seen, the teachings of the Bible, no matter how thoroughly studied and firmly believed, can never by themselves constitute our personal walk with God. They have to be applied to us as individuals and to our individualized circumstances, or they remain no part of our lives." pg. 167

On the Three Lights

"The circumstances of our daily life are to us an infallible indication of God's will, when they concur with the inward promptings of the spirit and with the Word of God. So long as they are stationary, wait. When you must act, they will open, and a way will be made through oceans and rivers, wastes and rocks." -Frederick B. Meyer

Many people insist on using the three lights: circumstances, impressions of the Spirit, and passages from the Bible. Practically, the three lights are difficult because they are interdependent. If you use only one or even two of the three lights, you can still be led astray. How do you wait for all three to appear? But how do we know whether we have an "impression from the Holy Spirit" as opposed to our own thoughts or feelings?

"A life lived by listening to God speaking is not one that excludes our own judgment. Listening to God does not make our own decision-making process unnecessary." pg. 173

"While neither one light taken individually nor all of them taken together simply give us God's word, each or all together may be and usually are the occasion of God's directive word coming to us. This is the way it usually works in practice." pg. 173

Recognizing God's Voice

We recognize the voice of God by certain factors of that voice: quality, spirit and content.

Quality is the tone and style of speech.

The quality of God's voice is found in the weight of authority that is attached to it.

"A certain steady and calm force with which communications from God impact our soul, our innermost being, incline us toward assent and even toward active compliance… frequently before the content of the communication is fully grasped." pg. 175

"The first time you receive guidance you will know the difference. You can mistake rhinestones for diamonds, but you can never mistake a diamond for a rhinestone." - Adele Rogers St. John
Spirit is the attitudes and personal characteristics.

A spirit of peacefulness and confidence, of joy, of sweet reasonableness and of goodwill are attached to God's speaking. It is simply the spirit of Jesus, the "tone and internal dynamic of his personal life as a whole."

"The sweet, calm spirit of God's voice carries over to the lives of thos who speak with his voice: 'But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.' (Jas 3:17)" pg. 177-178
Content is the most conclusive mark of who is speaking - the information relayed.

"The content of a word that is truly from God will always conform to and be consistent with the truths about God's nature and kingdom that are made clear in the Bible. Any content that does not conform to biblical content is not a word from God. Period!" pg. 178

Look to the principles of Scripture, not the incidentals. Be careful not to apply incidentals as a Word of God into your life. For instance, "in Mark 10, Jesus tells the truly fine young man who had come to him that he must sell all he has and give the proceeds to the poor. This too, contrary to what many have thought, is incidental to people generally for Jesus did not ask this of everyone he met." pg. 179

"Any voice that promises total exemption from suffering and failure is most certainly not God's voice. In recent years innumerable spokespeople for God have offered ways we can use God and his Bible as guarantees of health, success, and wealth. The Bible is treated as a how-to book, a manual for the successful life in the way of the Western world, which if followed will ensure that only good things happen and no ill befalls you.

But if we consider those who stand throughout history as the best practitioners of the Way, we will find that they went through great difficulties, often living their entire lives and dying amidst these trials. 'Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord rescues them from them all.' (Ps. 34:19)." pg. 180-181

Satan's voice will frequently come to us through our thoughts and impressions, just as God's voice does. But we will be able to recognize God's voice within our thoughts by it's quality, spirit and content.

"Knowing the voice of God, having a practical understanding of that voice in our minds and hearts, is not a luxury for the people of God, not something to be allocated to those who enjoy special spiritual high points. Let us consider 4 aspects of the importance of this understanding of God's voice:

"What we do or do not understand, in any area of our lives, determines what we can or cannot believe and therefore governs our practice and action with an iron hand." pg. 193

"Faith is not opposed to knowledge; it is opposed to sight." pg. 194

"The infallibility of the speaker–as is the case when God is the speaker-does not and need not guarantee the infallibility of the hearer." pg. 196

"The doleful reality is that very few human beings really do concretely desire to hear what God has to say to them. This is a test that we should all apply to ourselves as we go in search of God's word: do we seek it only under uncomfortable circumstances? Our answer may reveal that our failure to hear his voice when we want to is only due to the fact that we do not in general want to hear it, that we want it only when we think we want it. Usually those who want a word from God when they are in trouble cannot find it. Or at least they have no assurance that they have found it." pg. 197

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Hearing God by Dallas Willard

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Hearing God by Dallas Willard

Summary

Key Quotes and Ideas

Chapter 5: The Still Small Voice and Its Rivals