The question is not, “Is God speaking?” The real question is, “Are we listening?”
This is part 2 of “Listening Prayer” and the final message in our Daily Bread series.
We’ve been looking at Jesus’ model prayer from Matthew 6, but last week we left that text and instead of focusing on the elements that we would most often identify as prayer, such as confession, worship, or intercession, we started talking about listening for God’s response when we pray.
Prayer not only consists of talking to God, but also listening for His response. Why is this important? Why bother to pray if we don’t make the effort to listen for a response, and second, if the goal of our faith is to be conformed to the image of Christ, in other words, to be more like Jesus, then we need to understand:
Our lives can only reproduce what we hear from our Heavenly Father.
When we pray, we need to share our hearts with God and listen for God’s response.
The primary way we hear God’s voice is through His Word, the Bible. We talked about this last week. If you want to hear more about that you can go to the website and click on Message Library or you can sign up for my blog, go to chrishankel.com to sign up and I will send you the transcript from my message every single week.
God primarily speaks to us, through the Holy Spirit, by using His word. Let’s explore a few other ways that God speaks to us.
Another way is through our desires and our dreams.
Our Desires and Dreams
Look at what King David writes in Psalm 37
Ps 37:4 (CSB)—Take delight in the LORD, and he will give you your heart’s desires.
Phil 2:13 (CSB)—For it is God who is working in you both to will and to work according to his good purpose.
Which is it? Is it God working out His plan through you or is it God working out a plan that brings you your heart’s desires? Which one is it? To many people, those may seem to be competing interests. Is it God’s will or my will? Is it God’s plan or my plan?
When he was asked how to discern God’s will, Augustine answered,
“Love God with all your heart and do whatever you want.”
—Augustine
In other words, if you’re loving God passionately—wanting to please, obey, and honor Him continually—you can do what you want because His plan will automatically be your desire.
When we love God passionately, His desires become our hearts’ desires. He places desires and dreams in us to pursue so that we will accomplish His good purpose and enjoy His goodness.
In Genesis 1, each time God finishes creating something, He stands back and says it is good.
The Hebrew word for good is:
טוֹב — ṭôḇ = pleasing, good, joy unspeakable, or pure delight
God’s reaction to His creation is pure delight, and He wants nothing less for his human family.
Some desires and dreams are sinful and need to be cut out of our lives. These are the desires that grow out of our old nature, things the Bible calls sin. When we give our lives to Jesus, sin no longer has power over us, so now we can turn our backs on sin.
But, when those dreams and desires are in line with God’s character and God’s desires, shown to us in His word, they are one way for God to speak into our lives. So, pay attention to your desires and dreams.
Another way God speaks to us is through our circumstances.
Our Circumstances
Prov 16:9 (CSB)—A person’s heart plans his way, but the LORD determines his steps.
God can use the circumstances in our lives to speak to us to show us the answers to the things we are praying about.
22 years ago, we were interviewing for this position at New Hope. What New Hope didn’t know at the time is that we were also interviewing for another position at a church in the Tri-Cities. We were at about the same place in the interview process with both churches. There came a point where both churches wanted us to be the candidate they would present to their leadership teams.
We like both churches and were honestly debating what God wanted for us. So we prayed, and the next day, the church in the Tri-Cities called and said, “Would you be willing to push pause and wait a couple of months before we bring you on?” We felt like the circumstances at that point were orchestrated by God to point us in the right direction. We said no to the church in the Tri-Cities and yes to New Hope.
In hindsight, I see what God was doing there. I didn’t know it then, but the church in the Tri-Cities was on a very liberal, progressive path. Despite being the largest church in the Tri-Cities at the time, it has now come to a place where they may have to close their doors because they can no longer sustain the ministry with the number of people that attend.
God used our circumstances to answer our prayer.
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Next, everyone needs a tribe. Everyone needs people in their life who will help point them to Jesus. That is why one of our four values here at New Hope is Community.
Community Slide
One of the reasons we need those people is that God will speak to us through them. God uses our people to speak to us.
Our People
Honestly, I don’t always trust myself to hear God’s voice correctly. That is why I need God’s word as a guide but I also need wise counsel from people I trust who have been there and done that; people who have my best interests in mind and who I know will speak the truth in love. I need people who have permission to tell me when I am only hearing what I want to hear and not what I need to hear.
Heb 10:24-25 (CSB)—And let us consider one another in order to provoke love and good works, not neglecting to gather together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging each other, and all the more as you see the day approaching.
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Sometimes God speaks to us by simply giving us an impression or prompting.
His Promptings
Sometimes the Holy Spirit simply gives us a mental impression or speaks in an inner voice rather than an audible one.
- In Lk. 2:27, Simeon was “moved by the Spirit” to go into the temple where Joseph and Mary were dedicating Jesus to God.
- In Lk 4:1, Jesus was “led by the Spirit” into the desert to be tempted by the devil.
- In Acts 20:22, Paul was “compelled by the Spirit” to go to Jerusalem.
I will admit that I have not always been very good at heeding His promptings and I know that I have ignored more than I have paid attention to. The result is that I have missed some opportunities.
Sometimes it is simply a prompting to call someone I haven’t talked with in a while or even like last week when Brandon Artz came to my office and asked if we should do a Vigil and prayer for the Kirk family after his assisnation. I knew, in my spirit, that it was something we should do. I immediately said, yes, and I’m glad I did. Even though it was short notice and our time together was relatively short, it was significant for a lot of people. I’m glad we didn’t miss the opportunity.
I’ve had many moments like that when God has prompted me and that prompt was at a strategic time. In his book, Whisper, Mark Batterson likens paying attention to God’s promptings to shooting an arrow from a bow towards a target that is a long distance away. You have to account for the drop of the arrow, and the wind speed, and perhaps some other factors. Failure to pay attention to these things will cause you to miss the target.
Hitting the target, hearing God’s voice requires us to pay attention to several things, including His promptings.
But, is every prompting from the Holy Spirit? Is every “feeling” you have from God?
Look at what the Apostle John says:
1 Jn 4:1-3 (CSB)—Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see if they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming; even now it is already in the world.
Specifically, John is talking about false prophets, but the principle is the same. Test the advice you get, test the impressions you get, test the desires and the dreams you have. Don’t ignore them but test them. How do they measure up to what God says in His word? This is the first test. Also, none of these ways God speaks to us, other than His word, operates in a vaccum. They work together.
If you have an impression that you think is from the Holy Spirit and you share it with your people and they tell you that you should take two tums and go home and re-evaluate what you think you heard, pay attention to that.
And again, if you think God is speaking, compare it to His word. He will never contradict himself.
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Another way God speaks to us in through our pain.
Our Pain
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains.
—C.S. Lewis
That does not mean that God brings pain into our lives; it simply reminds us that often, in our most raw, vulnerable, stripped-down moments, we hear God’s voice the clearest.
So often we are going through life and we are vaguely aware that God is trying to say something to us, but instead of leaning in we just go along our merry way, until… something really hard happens. Then we lean in and that’s when we go, “Oh, I hear you now.”
In the middle of the Mongol Derby, Olivia had a particularly hard day and was contemplating quitting. God had brought this verse in 2 Cor. to her mind, where Paul says that God’s power is perfected in our weakness. Before she left for Mongolia, everyone in the family wrote her a note to open during the race. That day, she opened my note to her. I don’t remember exactly what I said, it was some dad things about how proud we were and how we believed in her etc… but I also included this scripture:
2 Cor 12:9 (CSB)—But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in weakness.” Therefore, I will most gladly boast all the more about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may reside in me.
On any normal day of the week, she might read that verse and think, “Of course, yes, Christ’s power is in me. Yup, that’s true.”
But in that moment when she was feeling weak and discouraged, and she felt like her body had given all that it could, in her pain, she heard those words hit a little differently. She heard his voice a little more clearly.
When we experience hard things, maybe instead of asking if God is speaking or why this is happening, we should ask what. God, what are you saying to me in my pain?
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So often, we pray for wisdom, direction, and provision, but never take the time to lean in and pay attention to what God may be saying in response.
If you aren’t willing to listen to everything God has to say, you eventually won’t hear anything He has to say.
—Mark Batterson – Whisper
If you want to hear His comforting voice you also have to listen to his convicting voice. Sometimes it’s the things we want to hear the least that are the things we need to hear the most.
I wonder if some of us are afraid to hear God’s voice.
How many of you think God’s voice is only filled with condemnation and disappointment? Maybe you avoid God’s word because all you hear is what you are failing at. Maybe you are afraid to pay attention to your desires and dreams because you think you will only find disappointment. So you don’t dream.
Condemnation, shame, and fear are not the voice of your Heavenly Father. Sometimes His words are words of conviction, but even those words of conviction are words of love. Sometimes His words sting, but it is a good pain, spoken to His children out of His love.
A number of years ago I broke my right leg and also separated my ankle. I remember being in the hospital and I’m lying on the bed with my foot pointing the wrong direction because it was out of place. The surgeon came in, grabbed my foot and said the famous words, “You’re going to feel some pressure.” Which is code for this is going to hurt like, well, you know what. Then he jerked my foot and put everything back in place. The pain was awful but once the foot was reset it was an incredible relief. That is good pain.
Sometimes, He says, “I know you can do better.” Not out of condemnation, intending to inflict shame but out of His love for you.
John says this about Jesus:
Jn 3:17 (CSB)—For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
If the goal of our faith is to be more like Jesus and if we can only reproduce in our lives what we hear from our Father in Heaven, then the only question is:
How will you lean in this week and listen for God’s voice?
- His Word
- Our Dreams and Desires
- Our Circumstances
- Our People
- His Promptings
- Our Pain
Chris Hankel 
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