“I’m not Moses. I’m not Jesus. I’m not Mohammad. I’m not some special person who can hear the voice of God.”
Wrong! You know why? Did you notice you didn’t say “listen”, you said “hear”? Hear involves ear. Listen means more than that.
– You can listen with your whole body or some part of it. That’s probably the first thing you did when you were born. You felt things—being handled, pain, cold, warmth, contact, security—much later on you learned a word for the experience: “love”.
Love is still something that best communicates through one’s whole body even though we tend to use words to signal that we’re communicating it. (And, sometimes we only “say” it.)
– You can listen with your eyes. Often a component of a vacation is to spend time “seeing” things of great beauty. Whether a work of human artistry or divine, it needs no words to communicate, even to overwhelm us.
The challenge of our too busy lives is to make time to truly “see”, to contemplate, celebrate, wonder, delight, and give thanks for the beauty of the works of creation that ever surround us. (That includes people, of course.)
– You can listen with your nose. It’s part of the richness of our response to fragrance and bouquet, whether food or drink, flowers or fields, or the perfume of another.
– You can listen with your palate, so to speak: the contentment and delight of a taste of something directly a work of the creator or a further embellishment of it through human ingenuity.
It’s curious that when we really want to celebrate something good or great, when we have something that prompts our gratitude and gladness, we usually listen with all our faculties—and usually it involves a celebration with food and drink!
Thanksgiving day is a great example!
Does the Lord give voice in the usual sense of the term? Does he talk to us directly? Do we hear words? Does he speak?
Possibly, but not frequently or usually.
As we were just reflecting, there are myriad ways to “listen” to the voice of the Lord besides using our ears. But he can and does sometimes use words as well.
In the Bible, there are many incidents of encounters with a mysterious someone which turn out to be direct communications from the Lord. The one encountered is often described as an “angel” (from the Greek word for a “messenger”.)
They’re often considered to be, in effect, apparitions of God.
Usually we associate listening to the voice of the Lord with listening to the voice of others—prophets, apostles, evangelists, preachers, and others whom we consider reliable, god-fearing, and honest.
What is their experience like? How do they listen to the voice of the Lord? We can only presume that it’s something like ours. How do we
listen to the voice of the Lord?
The Lord does communicate with us, and at times in a more direct way then through the created world and other human beings. That’s what we mean by the action of the holy Spirit.
Often in ways hard to explain, there is a growing insight or conviction about something in our minds and hearts that we suspect is of God. Sometimes we find ourselves in situations where our responses to others even surprise us. We may even speak words that we listen to ourselves.
We don’t always get it right, but at times we do hear the voice of the Lord. Ah, but, when we do, do we listen?
15 November 2020