You Heard the Voice
A little more than 20 years ago, as I was considering quitting my job as an engineer to move overseas as a missionary, I desperately wanted to hear from God. I wanted him to confirm that I was making the right decision. But I struggled to hear this from God directly, so I went to the person I thought could speak to me on God’s behalf. I setup a meeting with my pastor.
My future hung in the balance of his words. I approached this meeting the way some might walk into the living room of a fortune teller. If he would have said “no, don’t go,” I wouldn’t have gone. If he would have said “yes, you should go” then I was ready to go. Thankfully, he pointed me in the right direction without indulging my desire for him to speak on behalf of God. He encouraged me to keep listening for myself without offering to tell me what I should do.
I think this desire to have a leader tell us exactly what God wants us to do is a universal human temptation. Most of us would say, we want God to guide us. The problem is that listening for God’s voice often doesn’t result in the specific instructions we were hoping for. If a leader provides that for us, we go to them instead of wrestling with God. We go to them and say, “what does God want me to do?” and then we hope that the leader will tell us what God says.
I’ve done this in my past, and I’ve experienced people coming to me in this way. I’ve heard people ask questions like this many times. Questions like:
Does God want me to quit my job?
Can I marry this girl?
What should I say to my in-laws?
I resist the urge to tell them what they should do, because that seems to me to miss the point. The point is for every person to learn to listen for themselves.
Each of us faces specific, concrete problems in life, and we’d like to hear God give us specific, concrete guidance. But most of us struggle to know how to get this guidance from God, especially early in our prayer life. So, most people at one point or another will go to a pastor or ministry leader and ask him or her:
“What does God want me to do in this situation?”
That’s the way the Israelites treated Moses. For them, Moses was God’s stand-in. When he spoke, the Israelites considered his words to be God’s words to them. And while it’s true, Moses, the prophet, did bring God’s word to them, the Israelites were also supposed to listen for themselves.
As Moses approached the end of his life, he knew he wouldn’t be able to fulfill that role any longer. He wanted to wean the Israelites from their dependency to him and remind them that they could listen to God for themselves. So, in his final instructions to them, he repeats the same phrase over and over again exhorting them to listen to God themselves. He reminds them:
Then the LORD spoke to you out of the fire. You heard the sound of words but saw no form; there was only a voice. ~Deut. 4:12, NIV
As I read this chapter, I imagine Moses pleading with them: “You heard the voice. You can listen too. You can hear from God even when I’m gone.”
He is reminding them of the most significant moment of hearing God’s voice (Mt. Sinai), but Moses also assumed that the Israelites could always listen for God’s voice. He wasn’t supposed to be the only one who listened. He hoped anyone who wanted God’s guidance could listen for themselves.
Now Moses used to take a tent and pitch it outside the camp some distance away, calling it the “tent of meeting.” Anyone inquiring of the Lord would go to the tent of meeting outside the camp. ~Exodus 33:7, NIV
As Moses approaches the end of his life, he seems insistent that the Israelites remember that they too have the ability to listen. They too have heard God’s voice speak to them. They too can continue to listen for that voice for their own lives.
Why is Moses so insistent about this? Why does he repeatedly press this point at the end of his life?
Because, surprisingly, the Israelites had not wanted to hear God’s voice for themselves. Like me when I went to my pastor for a word from the Lord, the Israelites wanted to know what God says but they didn’t want to do the work of listening for themselves.
“Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.” ~Exodus 20:19, NIV
This verse gets at the tension between our desire to know what God wants but also our resistance to actually listen to God for ourselves. And the primary difference between the two ways of hearing God exists in the way it feels to listen for God’s voice. When we listen to God’s voice, it can feel like we are going to die. We can feel threatened. When God speaks, it can feel like we are losing our life.
Do you experience that? Have you felt that holy fear of the Lord when you’ve been aware of God’s presence and heard his voice to you? God’s voice and God’s presence always bring good fruit like joy, peace, hope and more. However, these come to us at the same time that we also feel a death to our self.
Listening to God’s voice results in a loss of control, which feels like death.
Listening to God’s voice is an encounter with holiness, which can leave us aware of our own sinfulness…not always a nice feeling.
Listening to God’s voice can make us aware that God is leading us to do things that are risky and uncomfortable. There is a vulnerability and a loss of security required when we choose to listen.
This is why listening for ourselves can feel threatening. This is why we can say, “I want to know what God wants me to do” while also resisting the act of actually listening to God for ourselves. At a very primal level, listening to God is threatening to our “self.”
And this is why so many Christians do what the ancient Israelites did. We ask for someone to speak to us on behalf of God instead of engaging in the hard work of listening for ourselves. This just feels safer. We can say, I want God’s help and guidance without really putting our whole self at risk in the way we experience in the Lord’s presence.
Pastors and ministry leaders, we are at our best, when we help people to listen for the voice themselves. We are at our worst, when we indulge their desires because it feeds our own ego. When we do their bidding, climb up on the pedestal and agree to speak on behalf of God we are ultimately discipling people into dependency upon us instead of the voice.
And this is why I value spiritual direction so much. I believe it has a vital place in the spiritual life of all Christians. It’s a place dedicated for listening for the voice. It’s not a place dedicated to listening to the voice of the spiritual director. That’s the worst form of spiritual direction. It’s rather a space set apart for listening to the voice of the Lord. The role of the director is to help the directee to listen and hear the voice of the Spirit, who is in our midst and within us.
When you want God to guide you, where do you go? Do you go to someone who listens for you and tells you what to do? Or, are there people in your life who help you do the hard work of learning to listen to God’s voice for yourself?