There is one huge barrier that keeps most of us from hearing the voice of God, it is what Henry King called, “the seeming unreality of the spiritual life” or we could say “the overwhelming presence of the visible world.”
The visible world daily bombards us with its things, and its events. These circumstances of life push and pull (and sometimes hammer and beat) away at our lives. Very few people wake up as thirsty for God as they are for Starbucks.
The spiritual voice of God does not shout, but rather He whispers at us. He appears on the edges of the events of our lives. God is hovering always, longing for our attention. God’s little intrusions into our human lives are so gentle that they are far too easily dismissed or explained away. We are obsessed and ruled by the visible decay and death around us that we cannot seem to grasp the life of the spirit (Roman 8:6).
Hence, we are hindered from hearing because we too quickly and easily explain away the very movements of God towards us. God wants to be wanted! He wants to be wanted enough that we are ready, predisposed, to find him present with us.
Unfortunately we live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. Only a very hardy individualist or social rebel – or one desperate for another life – therefore stands the chance of discovering the substantive reality of the spiritual life of God, and hear His voice. Hence, very few people develop competent prayer lives. This is chiefly because they are prepared to explain away as coincidences the answers that come to the prayers that they do make.
If we are to “hear God” we must chose to be a spiritual person and to live a spiritual life. We will be required to “bet our life” that the visible world, while real, is not reality itself. Today we live in a culture that overwhelmingly gives primary, if not exclusive, importance to the visible. We cannot make spirituality “work” without having a significant degree of confidence in and commitment to the truth that the visible world is always under the hand of the unseen God.
This is the challenge that I face every day when I wake up. It walks with me through the events of each day. Will I, like Moses, “endure as seeing him who is invisible?” Will I listen for God then obey? Right now where I am, moment to moment, I sweat it out with my brother Paul: “My visible self may be perishing, but inwardly I am renewed day by day… it is working for me, to produce in me His glory, thus I refuse to look at the visible, but rather focus on the unseen.” (2 Cor. 4:16-18 paraphrase)
God has always used and invaded the visible. He has always provided visible points of contact for His people. Consider all the visible elements that He instructed Moses to build. Those elaborate provisions provided a visible means through which Moses might be able to hear God’s voice. The tabernacle, the sacrificial equipment, the rituals and so forth provided a point for constant interaction in the visible world with the invisible God. They were called to worship morning and evening, at the very door of the tent of meeting, “I will meet with you, to speak with you there” (Ex. 29:42). Here they, “heard the sounds of the words, but saw no form…”(Deut. 4:10-14). Here they stood, only one step away from the visible to unseen reality of God’s Kingdom.
The Voice of heaven becomes visible in and through the life of Jesus Christ. After His resurrection He appears to his disciples in visible form a few times in order to allow them to grow accustom to hearing him without seeing him. Thus it was “through the Holy Spirit” that he gave instructions to his apostles (Acts 1:2). He made Himself visible to them just enough to give them confidence that it was he who was speaking in their hearts. This prepared them to continue listening and conversing with him after he no longer appeared to them visibly.
Remember for a moment those two heartbroken students who were on the road to Emmaus. He caught up with them in a visible form that they did not recognize. He spoke with them from the Scriptures and explained what had happened to their Jesus. Then when they sat at supper with him, suddenly “their eyes were opened, and they recognized him, and he vanished from their sight” (Luke 24:31). They asked one another, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32).
They realized that his words had always affected their hearts, their inward life, in a very peculiar way. No one else spoke the words or the way that He did. They realized that they should have recognized Him by the affect that His words had on their hearts. This was not the first time that they had discussed “holy heartburn” that was produced by Jesus’ words.
We are called to live on the road, on a journey, with intermittent moments of “HOLY HEARTBURN.”
Our healing, our health is directly related if not proportionate to our hearing of God’s word. If we are to walk in health, it begins with our hearts being warmed by the very VOICE of the One who came to “heal the broken-hearted.”
Today, be listening, be expecting to hear the voice that will warm your heart, and make you whole!!!
