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.

The writer Evelyn Underhill says that we can approach the Bible as either a picture or a window.2 Sometimes God’s Word is there simply to be studied with admiration and fascination, like a great work of art. But if we only ever do this, we are committing idolatry—worshiping the Bible itself. God has given us the Bible to point us beyond the Bible. That’s why it’s essential (I can’t say this strongly enough) that we learn how to approach the Bible as a window frame as well as a picture frame, not just looking at it but also through it to the world, and the Word, beyond.

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.”

The deceptively simple act of pausing, even just for a few minutes each day, can be a form of peace-making with our own battle-weary souls. Those rare people who learn to do this—who carry a quality of stillness with them through life—are attractive and authoritative because they are modeling something, whether they know it or not, of God’s own nonanxious presence in the world.

There are three particular keys that help me to slow down and savor the sweetness of Scripture, to meditate on its meaning and hear God’s voice through the text: embracing interruption, exercising intuition, and engaging imagination.

Some of us fail to pay attention to the wider culture because we live in a parallel religious universe, having been taught that the outside world is inherently dangerous. (Did you see that film The Village? Probably not.) We only attend Christian concerts, we only read Christian books, and so on. It’s as though Jesus came to earth solely to save us for the sake of an all-consuming hobby. In the rhyme sometimes attributed to nineteenth-century cardinal John Henry Newman, “I sought to hear the voice of God And climbed the topmost steeple, But God declared: Go down again—I dwell among the people.”