Love, a Simple Secret for Hearing God (Excerpt from WHISPERS THAT DELIGHT)

Excerpt from WHISPERS THAT DELIGHT–Copyright © 2008 Andrew T. Hawkins

Hearing that God can speak directly to us can feel intimidating because of our seeming inability to tune into his voice. I certainly do not hear him so plainly in everyday experience. However, I find that most of the time my problem comes from not slowing down long enough to listen. As I run through life, my hurried footsteps harden the soil of my heart so that the word cannot penetrate. When we come to scripture with a quiet and receptive heart, and feel the love of God, we easily sense some directive from him. For example, if we are meditating on the story of the four friends bringing the paralytic to Jesus (Mark 2:1-12), we sense that we should go to greater lengths to help one of our friends. When we hear Jesus say to the paralysed man, “Son, your sins are forgiven”, we could feel challenged to receive more completely the forgiveness for a troubling fault. Or, knowing his desire to do good to us, we may sense that we ought to believe God for some difficult situation in our lives as the paralytic believed to be healed.
Speaking of this explicit guidance from God, Carlo Caretto says it arises from our abandonment to God’s love. “Live love, let love invade you. It will never fail to teach you what you must do. Charity, which is God in us, will point to the way ahead. It will say to you ‘Now kneel,’ or ‘Now leave’ . . . . Don’t interrogate heaven repeatedly and uselessly saying, ‘What course of action should I pursue?’ Concentrate on loving instead. And by loving you will find out what is for you. Loving, you will listen to the Voice.”  Love is a Person, not just a lifestyle. Like so many others before him, Caretto puts great confidence in God’s willingness to intervene in history and speak guiding words to us. He infers that we can reach a state of spiritual maturity where, at any given moment, we could be directed by God to know exactly what to do. However, this does not happen by fretful worrying about God’s will, but by simply giving ourselves to love which, it turns out, is God himself (1 John 4:7,8).

Primal Yearning and Prayer (Excerpt from WHISPERS THAT DELIGHT)

Excerpt from WHISPERS THAT DELIGHT–Copyright © 2008 Andrew T. Hawkins

Sometimes we think we must obliterate all other desires and somehow progress to a state of wanting nothing but God. However, things do not normally work that way. We cannot just cut the principle of desire out of our lives nor instantly do away with the lusts we seek to overcome. Walter Hilton states that, “Prayer is nothing else but an ascending or getting up of the desire of the heart into God by withdrawing it from earthly thoughts.” To get the longings of our heart “up into” God, we must start where we are. We do that by allowing ourselves to feel our inner life and bring whatever desires we find into the light. If the desire for companionship overwhelms us, we acknowledge that to God. If we are dominated by a longing to climb the corporate ladder or get the lead part in the play, we present this to God. If the overeating/dieting cycle ensnares us, we try to feel the force of this obsession, conscious that we are in his presence. As in deep massage where the masseuse gets below the surface muscles to those supporting them underneath, so in the stillness of prayer we seek to get below the desire for status, pleasure, or goods to our root need for God. As Goethe says, all human longing is really longing for God.

When we understand God does not want to condemn us nor annihilate our deepest passion, but rather fulfill it, we have courage to lay ourselves open honestly. In addition to sharing our wholesome wants with him, we may freely open the secret places where deep, hidden things lie—raw cravings, inappropriate sexual desires, fantasies of greatness, lust for money and power. We let all our hopes, needs, or lusts rise from our depths like water pumped up from a deep well. They originate ultimately in God though some may be so distorted we can hardly recognize their connection to him. Revenge, for example, though clearly not of God, is a misguided desire for justice. Longing for the world’s praise is quintessentially the God-given desire for glory. Wanting to simply feel good, the basis of so many sinful activities, is the desire for joy which God longs to fulfill in a healthy way. Vanity may be a warped desire for beauty, and greed, a twisted longing for security. Bringing our desires into prayer means bringing in this primordial force, whatever disfigured shape it has taken.

A Warmth that Lifts Up (Excerpt from WHISPERS THAT DELIGHT)

Excerpt from WHISPERS THAT DELIGHT–Copyright © 2008 Andrew T. Hawkins

When we expect to hear God speaking to us about his love, the joy he bestows, the life of grace, the invitation to come to him boldly, we have tuned into the divine frequency. In other words, the goodness of God is an interpretive key for discerning his voice. Now, as we wait in the stillness and solitude, we may look for signs of encouragement welling up from inside. For many years our family lived beside the Niagara Escarpment, a long cliff several hundred feet high that stretches from Niagara Falls many miles north into Ontario before heading south into Wisconsin. Every year thousands of birds of prey are funnelled between Lakes Erie and Ontario up and over the Escarpment on their annual spring migration. Hundreds of people come to watch at strategic points where the birds use thermals to ascend easily over the Escarpment and onward on their journey north. In the listening portion of prayer, we wait like the big birds for the warm breathings of God’s Spirit to lift us up. For where we feel the swell of hope, there we will be justified in looking for God. But “those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint” (Isa. 40:31).

 

THE DESIRE TO HEAR FROM BEYOND

I am sometimes asked why I wrote Whispers that Delight. The subject of receiving communication from beyond this world has long fascinated me as it has many others. The television documentary, Chariots of the Gods, captivated my imagination in the early 1970’s. I ran out to buy the now famous book with the same title which claimed to document evidence for extra terrestrial beings. My hopes went sky high, but the fad only lasted a few years for me. The extra terrestrials were silent as the grave. My search to hear took me elsewhere.

After burning through various spiritualities, I eventually came to the Christianity I’d rejected as a teenager. What a surprise to discover that at the very heart of this faith is the claim that Christians, by definition, have heard and do hear communication from an invisible world. What an astounding assertion!

Yet in twenty-three years of being a pastor I have found many people frustrated or guilt-ridden about their inability to communicate with God (pray). We all know that prayer anchors our spirituality and yet having regular dynamic communion with God challenges us to the core. Prayer consists of a two-way conversation and what we have to say is not the most exciting part. Unless we contact God and sense him speaking to us, prayer bores us. What could be duller than closing your eyes and speaking out into the air? Our devotional life ends up on life-support.

And so I wrote the book to give people a well-worn track to run on, that is, one that has worked for centuries, but is just now being rediscovered by the Protestant church. I speak of encountering God through meditating on the Bible. Put simply, it works. Every time I have used this pattern with a small group or class, and very often as I use it in my individual prayer life, good things happen. People are heartened. God speaks.

FINDING AN ANCIENT PATH TO HEARING GOD

You’ve heard it before. Perhaps you know someone who says it way too much—“God told me….” You find their certainty somewhat irritating. You’re left feeling cynical. Yet, you know that God does speak and somehow you’ve even heard him. Jesus’ sheep do hear his voice, but sometimes you feel awfully tentative about how well. If you have sentiments like these, I can empathize. Failure to perceive God’s communication despite my best efforts to do so left me feeling frustrated. As a result, I spent less time in prayer which in turn led to a life lived under a subtle current of condemnation.

A turning point arrived when I digested Richard Foster’s book, Celebration of Discipline. In it I perceived another path which I eagerly investigated. Foster emphasized the value of learning from those who have gone before. As I delved into the devotional masters I discovered the ancient practice of Lectio Divina, a method of scripture meditation.

I have found that quieting myself to slowly ponder God’s word has yielded more profit than any other spiritual discipline. Stillness not only opens our ears to hear God’s voice, it also readies us to obey what we hear. Quieting ourselves long enough to step back and view the motions of our inner lives is the first step in not being dominated by those currents. We can become proactive and decide which desires and emotions we should foster and which should be ignored

Celebration of Discipline, along with Foster’s other writings, also stresses the importance of training in the Christian life. I had come to always expect the miracle moment when my life would be changed forever, when “revival” would come. I spent an incredible amount of energy trying to climb this spiritual mountain and I just wasn’t getting any higher. It was time to come back down and try another way up. For me that way has been the slow, relentless training of meditation and prayer and it feels good. There is no pressure to perform or need to try to be a spiritual giant, only the constant challenge to be aware of God’s presence. Though I fail so often, every time I remember to turn to him present with me, I train my spiritual muscles just a little bit more. And sometimes I sense him!

One further discovery, the most important of all, has come clear as I’ve persevered. It has to do with recognizing heavenly communication. Virtually all Christians long to know God’s voice better. We know he has spoken in the Bible, but we crave more intimate communion with him. As I worked on this daunting subject of hearing the invisible God, the revelation gradually dawned—the goodness of God is an interpretive key for understanding his voice. His whispers delight us for if we hear them, we hear a message of hope and encouragement. Even when his voice creates disturbance within, that disturbance usually arises from a self-centered resistance to his love. Jesus tells us that the Holy Spirit is the great Encourager. God is like the inspiring teacher to whom students send letters thirty years later. He is the coach that the kid from the inner city says saved him from a life of crime. He is the loving dad we want to please more than anyone else in the world.