How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

by Pete Greig

Many years ago a mentor said to me, “Learning to hear God’s voice is the most important task of a disciple of Jesus.” More recently, another mentor said, “The primary posture of a disciple of Jesus is sitting at his feet and listening.” Same truth.

Jesus is what God sounds like. He’s literally the “living Word of God.” Hearing his voice is not so much a skill we must master, therefore, as a master we must meet.

When it comes to hearing God, the Bible is the language of his heart. Nothing he says in any other way in any other context will ever override, undermine, or contradict what he has said in the Scriptures.

Jesus is what God sounds like. He’s literally the “living Word of God.”

Learning to hear God’s voice—his word and his whisper—is the single most important thing you will ever learn to do.

His friends will be known, he says in this verse, by just two things: their ability to recognize his voice and their readiness to follow.

Human beings are hardwired to worship. You have been meticulously made with an extraordinary ability to walk and talk with God.

“It is Christ himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God,” wrote C. S. Lewis. “The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to him.”

Any revelation that claims to be from God, therefore, but does not sound like Jesus, and fails to push us deeper into relationship with Jesus, is fundamentally not Christian, no matter how supernatural it seems, how profound it sounds, and how many Bible verses come wrapped around its delivery.

When it comes to hearing God, the Bible is the language of his heart. Nothing he says in any other way or in any other context will ever override, undermine, or contradict what he has said in the Scriptures. That’s why Jesus doesn’t just show up on the road to Emmaus and say, “Hi, it’s me!” Instead, he takes considerable time to deliver a lengthy biblical exposition in which he reinterprets God’s Word radically, in the light of his own life, death, and resurrection.

the Bible remains the primary arbiter of truth for Christians—whether we feel it or not—and the main way in which we hear God speak. This must surely be one of the reasons why Jesus is so discreet on the road to Emmaus. He knows that an extraordinary experience and a personal encounter are insufficient unless accompanied by a biblical explanation.

A survey of forty thousand people aged between eight and eighty discovered that reading the Bible has a profound effect on both our mental health and our spiritual growth, but only if it is done at least four times a week. Once or twice a week provides a negligible benefit, and three times results in only a slight improvement. But among those who study the Bible at least four times a week, there is a dramatic inflection point, a sharp uplift in their mental and spiritual well-being. In fact, these regular Bible readers are 30 percent less likely to feel lonely, 32 percent less prone to anger issues, 60 percent less likely to report feelings of spiritual stagnation, and 228 percent more likely to be active in sharing their faith.

More than 1,500 years ago, in the Babylonian Talmud, Rabbi Shmuel ben Nachmani said, “We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.”