How to Hear God Quotes

“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.”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“the more we say yes to Jesus, the more familiar and precious his voice becomes until ultimately, at the end of the road, at the end of the day, at the end of our lives, we look back as the sun sets and whisper in wonder and joy, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked?”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“To truly encounter Jesus is to be knocked sideways, astonished, overwhelmed. Mild interest means you have not yet met him. —Simon Ponsonby”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“God is not in a hurry”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“huge downpour of tears.”30 And it was at that precise moment a child’s singsong voice came drifting across the garden. “Take it and read it, Take it and read it.” Taking this as a word from God, Augustine”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“If I look at it now online, does anything seem familiar? Is there anything I “recognize” in his features”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“There are such astoundingly beautiful hymns to Jesus freely available to each one of us, written by many of the greatest musicians of all time, from Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion to Aretha Franklin’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” and Chance the Rapper’s mix of “How Great (is our God).”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“he is also—as we see in these stories—inclined to speak to those who show themselves truly hungry.”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“my people used to sit outside their temples for a long time meditating and preparing themselves before entering. Then they would virtually creep to the altar to offer their petitions and afterwards would again sit a long time outside, this time to “breathe life” into their prayers. The Christians, when they came, just got up, uttered a few sentences, said AMEN and were done. For that reason my people called them haoles, ‘without breath,’ or those who failed to breathe life into their prayers.”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“The idea here was that when you made a good decision, you would be flooded with a sense of well-being, but when you made a bad one, you would lose that peace altogether. For me this was never a good test. In fact, most of the best decisions I’ve ever made have been accompanied by feelings of blind terror.”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“These days, the argument goes, we have God’s Word in the Bible, which is far more reliable than all that other whacko stuff.”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“I aspire to discern his voice only insofar as it brings me closer to Jesus. My passion is still, in the words of Paul, “to know Christ” (Phil. 3:10). In spite of many failures, my focus remains, in the words of Hebrews, “Jesus the author and perfecter of our faith” (Heb. 12:2 ASV).”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“But most of all we need to stay focused on Jesus.”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“Jesus really is the hope of the world.”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“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.”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“the writer of Hebrews makes a similar point: “In the past God spoke . . . at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Heb. 1:1–2, italics mine).”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“The simple fact of the matter is that for every person who encounters Christ dramatically on the Damascus road with blinding lights and a booming voice, hundreds more meet him slowly and quietly, incognito on the Emmaus road, through friendship, Scripture, and conversation.”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“In fewer than twenty verses, the Lord communicates in at least five different ways: conversationally “as they talked and discussed these things with each other”; exegetically when he explained “all the Scriptures concerning himself”; sacra-mentally when he “took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them”; prophetically when “their eyes were opened”; and inwardly when he spoke directly to their hearts, which were “burning . . . while he talked.”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“most people in our supposedly secular Western societies still interact with God.”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“Hearing God is essential to the very purpose for which you and I were made. Without it everything falls apart. But when we learn to love God’s Word—to listen and obey—everything aligns.”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“Before we can love God with all our hearts and souls and strength, we must learn to listen. This, then, is the prerequisite that unlocks the purpose of life itself.”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“the road to Emmaus is a master class for anyone seeking to learn to hear his voice, not just because it models so many of the ways in which God speaks, but because the couple so consistently and reassuringly get it wrong.”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“Orthodox theologian Brad Jersak describes a time of exhaustion in his own life, on the verge of burnout, when he learned to attend to his soul in ways that would surely have resonated with Teresa of Ávila, St. John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, and the apostle Paul. It began with a strange fantasy—a dark cave with a crackling fire—that Brad started visiting regularly in prayer. Day after day he would simply imagine himself in this space, sitting silently with Jesus, sheltering from a storm outside, not even knowing if this counted as prayer. And then one day he “noticed” a surprising thing: the ark of the covenant had also materialized in the cave. This continued for weeks. All verbal prayer had given way to this internal, quiet vision. . . . I began to wonder if this was fruitful, if it was even prayer at all. Perhaps I should have started writing prayer lists again? But I had no heart for that. Even my forays into reading psalms ended with my forehead pasted in the pages of my Bible. All I”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“Norman Wirzba writes, “The extent and depth of our Sabbath commitment is the measure of how far we have progressed in our discipleship and friendship with God.”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“Emily Dickinson, he “tells it slant.” Tell all the Truth but tell it slant— Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind—”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“by stopping to be still in the ways described above, prior to opening my Bible, I can prime my heart to hear from God in a focused way with far fewer distractions.”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“There’s little point in lectio divina without the Holy Spirit’s help.”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“If we hurry into the holy without preparing our hearts, we will see things not as they are but as we are.”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“Rob’s story reminds me that how we listen is sometimes (always?) more important than what is said. Maybe that’s why Jesus was forever asking people if they had ears to hear what he was saying. And I suspect it’s also why the very first word of the great Benedictine Rule, which has guided monastic communities for 1,500 years, is this one little word: listen. Fifteen centuries of successful community built on the power of mere listening.”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

“The ultimate challenge of a Jesus-centered hermeneutic is that it makes love the lens through which we must henceforth read, interpret, and apply all Scripture. “The whole Bible does nothing but tell of God’s love,” says Augustine of Hippo.”
― Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People