Listening to God

And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him. (Hebrews 11:6)

 
Step one to hearing God is to stop talking!

Being silent and patiently listening for God to speak is a hard step for me. There are always people in need that I want to pray for because I am worried or concerned. Most people carry a mental list of things that they think God should do, either in their life or in the lives of others.

God gave me a verse:

Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. (Mathew 6:8)

I have to trust Him as the God of the universe to know the needs of the moment and the desires of my heart. Although God certainly answers prayers, my life and, more importantly, my relationship with Him, was never changed by my many words or requests. In fact, praying through my desires and my concerns only seems to result in falling into a stale prayer rut, in which my prayers go unanswered by God and my daily life routine continues separate from a personal relationship with Him.

It finally occurred to me that I had no real spiritual direction in my life and no idea what to even pray for. Thus was born my desire to start seriously listening to God. Instead of praying my way through my A-to-Z list of issues of the day, I would, with all earnestness and in the first moment of my time with God, acknowledge that He knows the prayer requests and the things I was most anxious about probably even better than I did and I would simply moved on to listening to Him. Sometimes we have to step away from our lists of hopes/dreams/concerns even for a moment in order to see clearly. Maybe in the clarity that follows we can see that we are going in a direction we never meant to follow.

However, you will never hear God If you don't truly believe. The bible says that those who come to God "Must believe that He is, and is a rewarder of those who seek Him". If real, life changing belief in the supernatural, living God is a problem for you, like it was for me, then you must start by acknowledging that. We are dealing intimately with a being who is beyond our comprehension in every way. ""My ways are higher than your ways and My thoughts are higher than your thoughts"(Isaiah 55:9). And yet He wants us to come before Him and seek Him and He actually desires to interact with us and give to us. 

 
Actively listening to God, no matter how much time it takes, is among the best living use of your time. I guarantee that when we reach Heaven and stand before God, the time we spent actively listening and seeking Him will not be the moments we regret. God will and does speak to His children. I think one of the hindrances of hearing God is that we are afraid of the silence. We are not entirely sure no matter how long we listen that He is actually real and that He will actually speak to us. This is a form of unbelief and it needs to be dealt with. If you do believe and you actively listen and wait on God, then you WILL hear Him and it WILL change your life. It will have a greater affect you than a thousand sermons. It will transform you from the inside out and it will alter the direction of your life in ways you never imagined. It will also directly affect everyone you ever come into contact with.

The REALITY of God is not a nice addition to Christianity, it is its definition, all else is secondary and subordinate. According to the bible, knowledge of God is the DEFINITION of eternal life. If we rely on going to church and good deeds and never deal with the reality of the living God we are taking a very real risk with our immortal soul.

Listening to God is a form of meditation and that makes many Christians uncomfortable. I see no way around it. We must open our mind and spirit up to God and actively listen to Him. If this is our intention then I believe we are doing what we ought to be doing. In fact, I would say if we cannot trust the Holy Spirit inside us as our guide then we have no business claiming to be Christians. We need to listen to God. We need to hear Him intimately and personally in our lives. We need to hear God more than we need to do or say anything else.

A good thing to do while you are actively listening to God is to worship Him. One of my favorite ways of worshipping God is to think about Rev. 4:2-11 which are verses about God on His throne, and I picture myself in my mind as not worshipping Him alone in my room, but as joining in with the myriads already worshipping Him. This puts me in a very good frame of mind to hear Him if He is speaking to me or just to spend time with Him for the sake of worshipping and loving Him.

Truthfully, I am really bad at listening. Anybody reading this who knows me is probably laughing out loud over the thought of me in any sort of a conversation NOT talking. It is something I have tried to work on in recent years with varying results. The effort of not talking in a conversation for me is such an alien concept that my attempts feel akin to an out of body experience! I can confidently tell you however, that my attempts to listen to God have been met with patient, loving, intimate, and life changing interaction that I would trade for NOTHING else in my Christian life. It gives me a PERSONAL, REAL testimony of a LIVING GOD and that knowledge transforms you from the inside out and affects every person you will ever have contact with. When you do hear from God and get to know Him better you will develop a better understanding of Him and His ways and what things you should be praying about.

But, He has given us the freedom to ignore Him! Those who truly find Him find life. Other than superficial or behavioral changes, how has your life changed since becoming a Christian? Do you feel like you are actually living at all? Authentic, intimate interaction with God is the only catalyst of change in the Christian life and the true beginning of your journey. How well do you know God? Can you boast of your experiential knowledge of God? How intimate are the two of you? Christ says "apart from Me you can do nothing". The extent that we honestly believe this is the extent we will seek out an authentic experience with God, because if we believe, we have no other choice. True Christianity is nothing if not an opportunity for a new start, a new life, but if we are closed off, nothing will ever change, we will continue to fall into the same patterns and make the same mistakes and continue to mark time while missing out on EXTROADINARY opportunities we could not have imagined. 
 
There is tremendous freedom in seeking answers from God instead of pretending we have all of the answers if He'd only do what we asked. We have much to learn if we listen.

Return to spirituality-we must resist a rules-based, work-based, super busy existence for a more spiritual, purposeful, and seeking existence.

It seems many in Christianity  today want to be a leader FOR God and nobody wants to actually be a follower OF God. We don’t have time to stop and wait on God and actually hear His voice.  We make up for it by spending more time doing “good” things to make us feel better.   Then we spend our time  continuously cleaning the outside of our appearances*  to make us acceptable to other Christians who have been led to believe that following a set of agreed upon rules is the definition of “righteousness” and the only way to relate to each other.  The problem today is that a real relationship with God is often considered secondary to being in the pew, being good (obeying  the social norms of your particular congregation in your particular region as this varies greatly and most of the time have very little to do with “sins” in the bible except those cherry-picked for this specific purpose), and helping out at the church.  I believe that the reason these yardsticks are employed as the measure of a “good Christian” is because they are easily verifiable and enforcable  both by church leadership and by other Christians.   The other big problem in using such yardsticks is that we no longer have to employ any spiritual vision to see each other, no spiritual ability to test our leaders or  to look deeper and connect in a non-superficial way in order to understand what’s going on in the world around us- it all becomes just like the world we judge everything by what we see with our eyes. In a church home group not too long ago we were all given a 5 minute questionnaire that would then tell us what our spiritual gifts are.  Are you kidding me? So a five minute Dr. Phil quiz will tell us our spiritual gifts? Let me tell you, we have a Living God, and He is REAL, and He does give His children spiritual gifts but we do NOT discover them  on one size fits all bite sized printable material!!!!  How spiritually lazy have we gotten?  We have given up TRUE SPIRITUALITY and true spiritual gifts (or even the hope of them) for sound bite, one size fits all answers that are thoroughly inadequate  in every way to an authentic relationship with Christ.    When we adopt the world’s business models for churches and substitute bite sized, microwave answers (even biblical ones) for the Living word and direction of God then the world correctly sees that we have zero to offer them and indeed we are left empty and burned out.  . The power of the gospel is not our behavior being 15% better than the world’s, or that we can memorize a tract, the power of the gospel is that there is a Living God who interacts with His children.  The works mentality further serves to distract us from what is important by doing nonstop busy work in order to fill the void that should be filled not by well meaning works but by a much more spiritual mindset, existence, and vision.  The world wants to know one thing from us- is HE real.  It is born into the heart of every human to wonder.  If I were talking  to a girlfriend and said I was dating Brad Pitt, there would be follow up questions. If I then told my friend about Brad- his height, weight, birthday, favorite color, she wouldn’t believe me and rightfully so. She would want real, authentic details of the real person.  We live in a jaded world, our only testimony is a LIVING God.  A works based hybrid is not even an option in post ascension Christianity.  Christ gave up too much in His life and blood to gain access to us and change EVERYTHING. Now the law is written in our hearts, now we worship in Spirit and in Truth, now the Spirit of the Living God resides in us and we are His temple, NOW every day we have access to a spiritual existence that those in the Old Testament, even men of faith only dreamed about and longed for!   The ONLY thing we should boast about now is experiential knowledge of God.  Christ would frustrate today’s Christian leaders just as much as the Pharisees.  Our one size fits all, microwave answers and our business model churches have no relation to the Christ of the Bible who gave very hard answers, spurned many of the biblical rules and pinned all of His hopes on His father, the Living God.  Christ did God’s will not through rote memorization of rules following but through hearing and obeying the Living Word of God.   

 I believe that we will never grow or have an effective testimony until we DE-EMPHASISE the outside appearances and works in order to emphasize the spiritual. *   The spiritual aspects of relating to each other- looking to the inside of the cup and attempting to see each other through spiritual eyes and not in an attempt to make them more like us so that we are one size fits all Christians, we should love and respect each other and celebrate our differences and gifts.  We have abandoned the spiritual aspect of what it means to be successful- we have lost our testimony with the world because even in our churches we judge success by numbers and people and money, and power.  The power struggles in churches today bother me the most, as though God’s will on earth will be squelched if leaders don’t get their way. Such is not the way of faith.

The answer to this problem is to first STOP and then WAIT on God in order to go in the right direction.  Follow Him whose thoughts are higher than ours and whose ways are a mystery to us.  I believe for many in the churches today that is a big problem, because I think that in the silence of their heart they do not believe that He is real.  I think in their minds they are constantly having   to “cover” for Him in what they believe is His absence.  They feel if they truly stop and wait for His word, His spirit, His movement, that it will never come, or they are simply not sure and are afraid to take the chance.  Beloved,  this is the best place to be.  You have a chance at a new life.  Stop and wait and see if He is real. If He is, then  I promise your entire  life will be changed forever, not just some of your behavior.  If He is not real then you are wasting your time anyway and you should go and experience life differently than just repression for repression’s sake.

Stopping and waiting (finding God and His will and then following instead of doing it our own way) will be part 2 of the Return to Spirituality blog.  It is the difference between experiencing  the spiritual,  the divine, and the miraculous and continuing with our business as usual.

*Mathew 25:27-28: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.  Even so you too outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness”.

Waking up to a new life

 I had a dream years ago unlike any other I’ve ever had:

I was walking alone on a dusty mountain at night. Walking slowly, deep in thought, I rounded a corner.  Right in front of me was a giant Being in robes directly facing me. I fell down backwards in astonishment and fear. While I lay on the ground, the Being pulled a horn of some type out of Its robe and began to blow on it making a sound not unlike a voice. Laying there in surprise, I did not recognize the sound but I seemed to instantly know what it meant. Without a word, I jumped up and ran past the Being, picking up speed as I went.  As I ran with a purpose, the sun began to rise and give shape to the barren landscape around me.  I realized I was nearing an impossible cliff.  Excited by the new visual information, I ran even faster. The next thing I knew, time seemed to slow as I reached the edge of the cliff.  I could see my bare foot making contact with the ground for the last time as I launched wildly, purposefully into the void.

What I will never, ever forget about the dream, and what has stayed with me the longest, is the fact that the fear and dread I expected never materialized. I was completely overwhelmed by feelings of freedom, excitement, possibility, a type of life I never knew existed.  Thrilling feelings long buried or drowned out by fear and the dread were awakened.  God showed me I had no idea what the "life" part of living was, but the tantalizing possibility really was out there. Christianity for me has always been frustrating and desperately meaningless when I forget that it is the very real interaction with the True and Living God. Then I remember that nothing is more wild, unpredictable, freeing, or intimate than a real relationship with God. 

If you have never encountered the Living God, if you have never had the thrilling, real feeling of being in way, way over your head before a Being before whom you are laid absolutely bare, then I highly recommend it!  Believe me, when you are dealing with a Being who knows you intimately and whose thoughts and ways we cannot conceive of, your life will be different than you planned in a many different ways, all of them good.  I was never happier in my life than when God took me someplace new (metaphorically). On my own, I seem to be only capable of getting myself into deeper ruts that continuously make me unhappy.  When  I again turn to Him and give Him all of my problems, then the wind of the Spirit points me in a new direction.  Invariably, the new direction is one which I would have never chosen myself, yet satisfies me far more than I deserve.  He is real, and His interactions with His children are real.

For many years I used to think Christianity meant closing as many of the doors around you as possible and living contentedly in your tiny, safe space. The closer I get to God, though, the more surprising my interactions with Him become.  Lately, the way He works is: He kicks open doors I never knew existed and encourages me to try different directions, often having to give me a push. The astonishingly intimate aspect of the Christian life comes when you quit demanding that God jump in at "key" moments and realize He is far more interested in the "in between" moments.  This life is not the "safe" life I left behind, it is exciting and scary and new.  Instead of the old life filled with fear and guilt and repression, this life is God- next to me, whispering to me, daring me to do new things I would never have dreamed, pushing me past my comfort zone in a gentle, intimate, and yes at times humorous way.  He is never impatient and frustrated with me, as I get sometimes with my own children.  The simplest act of obedience to Him is met with a sense of joy and purpose which nothing else in this world compares to.

Jesus said in John 14:12  "I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father".  He didn't say that because we are the least bit competent, He knew better. He said that because He knew He was dealing with children with faith much smaller than mustard seeds, but His will is great, and His will will be done, even in our weakness.  Success is connecting with God and participating in even the smallest way in His will, not choosing really great things to do FOR Him.  Jesus said in John 15:5  "“I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing."  Apart from Christ I have to guess at what good things to do, and if I never stop and interact with Him I will only end up where I decide.  Life will be boring, predictable, a chore.  Stopping and seeking Him and yes, even waiting on Him is time well spent.  Think about it, of all the nice things we can do FOR God, and as precious and small our time is here on the earth I GUARANTEE when we get to heaven the time we spend seeking for and waiting on God will NOT be time that we regret.