One thing that I have noticed as of late is how bad that people can be at listening to someone. I am guilty of this to, when someone is talking for a while it is easy to tune out and make affirming sounds like, "uh huh", so that they feel that they are being listened to even though I may have no idea what they are saying. Why is that? I am hearing them but not listening.
It is easy to use listen and hear interchangably, but they mean two completely different things. Hearing is knowing that you are being talked at. You can hear a noise, a voice, etc. But listening is trying understand what that voice or noise is saying.
One of our biggest difficulties as Christians is trying to decypher the hearing and the listening to God aspect. People will tell me, "you know, I don't think God is out there. I ask him to tell me something and I do not hear him. He must not exist." My follow up question is usually to ask him what he is listening for. They usually do not know... which is okay, because if you don't know what to listen for, you will not know when God is talking to you.
If you are one of those people who are reading this and agreeing that you cannot hear God, I may not have the best answers, but I can do my best to help. Here are a few ways that I know that God is speaking to me...
1. Among all the chaotic noise in my life, there is a soft sobering message that comes to me. I struggle with ADHD, which means that there is a constant flow of traffic going through my brain at any given moment... imagine having a bunch of televisions and radios playing all the time... thats my mind. But among all of that, I can usually make out God's voice since it is not demanding or oppressive.
2. Have you ever had an "ahha" moment? A lot of the time that is God talking to you. If something is very out of the ordinary but makes complete sense to you, then it may be God. I am not saying go do something sinful, but instead, here is an example. I accidently bought the wrong strings for my bass, and I was going to return them. Instead, I felt like God told me to give them to a specific person. It was weird, but it made sense. When I offered him my strings, I found out that the guy that I gave them to did not change his strings in 2 years since he did not have the money for them. So I totally blessed this guy because I obeyed what God said.
There are more examples, but I am about to leave for church. I just wanted to encourage you to spend time trying to listen to God, and not just be happy with hearing him and knowing that he is out there.
Something that I tell all the people that I teach is that the only way to get to know the shepherds voice is to spend time near the shepherd. This is how sheep know their master, and this is how we know our God. We start by hearing him, and knowing that he is there. As we spend time with him, we listen to him because we know his voice and trust his words. When we trust his words, that is when we can comprehend him and what he does and we have a deeper understanding of who he is. As Christian leaders, we must do this with both God and others. It takes work, but I believe that you can do it!
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