HEARING GOD WHEN WE PRAY

As I feared, I wasn’t able to complete what I wanted to write on prayer in our last Insight so there will be one more in this series on Christian spirituality. I don’t want to end without saying something on the somewhat controversial subject of listening to God in prayer.

This topic raises a variety of reactions from people today. Some believe it to belong to the essence of prayer. Then there are others – myself included – who treat claims of “hearing from God” with deep caution if not scepticism. The idea that we have our private hotline to God that enables us to received direct messages form him doesn’t sit well with us. It calls into question the sufficiency and completeness of God’s revelation in Scripture.

However, the question can rightly be asked, “Is the intimate fellowship we enjoy with God in prayer – that sense of meeting with him – simply a one-way experience? Are we the only ones who speak, or can we also expect, as God meets with us, to hear from him in some way?”

As dangerous as it might be to venture an opinion on this issue I will go ahead and say that I believe we can expect God to meet with us and converse with us as we meet with him (James 4:8). The question is how he does so.

It is at this point that we need to make a crucial distinction between what some older theologians called immediate and mediate means of communication. Immediate communication is where God speaks to us directly from outside us and without the use of means. This is the nature of his speech to prophets and apostles. Sometimes he spoke to them through visions and dreams, sometimes through an audible voice, and sometimes through a personal appearance in human form. In all these cases the common factor is God speaking from outside the person. The recipient of his word is essentially passive, merely registering in his (or her) consciousness what God is saying.

There is another way that God can also communicate with us, however, a way more adapted to his indwelling presence through the Spirit. This is what is called a mediate approach – where God uses the means of his written word and our own thoughts, reasoning, desires and memory. Even as we think and pray, or analyze and study, the Spirit of the Lord can assist and lead us so that we end up having our minds and hearts filled with God’s truth in a way that leaves us with the impression that God has been speaking to us.

Martin Luther had this to say on listening to God in this way: “It often happens that I lose myself… [literally, ‘that my thoughts go for a walk’] in one petition of the Lord’s Prayer, and then I let all the other six petitions go. When such rich, good thoughts come, one should listen to them in silence and by no means suppress them. For here the Holy Spirit himself is preaching and one word of his sermons is better than thousands of our own prayers… If the Holy Spirit should come and begin to preach to your heart, giving you rich and enlightened thoughts… be quiet and listen to him who can talk better than you…” (Praying – Finding Our Way From Duty to Delight, J.I. Packer and Carolyn Nystrom, p. 288).

Here the critical thing is that God is present and speaking, but doing so through our minds and using his truth. This is another side to the Spirit’s work of illumination within our minds and hearts. As such, it provides us with the immeasurable blessing of truly conversing with God in prayer.

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