What does it take to hear God’s voice? Does it take money and importance? Actually, the pursuit of hearing God’s voice will ultimately lead to spending less and being less. How’s that? The pursuit of God is more about subtraction than addition.
The Kingdom of Heaven can be likened to a concert. Let’s say you want to hear your favorite vocalists. Let’s call them “the three tenors.” (Not original. I know.) You arrive at the concert hall with high expectations, ready to tune in to the sweet melodies you’ve come to love, but to your dismay, you can’t. You can’t make out those three voices because they are buried in a 200-voice choir of dreadfully tone-deaf lounge singers. You leave the concert hall demanding a refund because you really didn’t get to hear what you wanted to hear.
Those three tenors are the voices of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The powerful, dissonant voices are the static and meaningless noise of the day to day. Do you see the issue? If we want to hear from our Holy God, at some point we must tune out the noise and tune into His voice. God’s Word, silence, private worship, and time are elements that create an atmosphere that allows us to hear what God has to say.
We often fail to hear from God because we have taken our faith and made it into a busy barrage of activity. What if Jesus’ schedule when He was on earth looked like yours does today. Can you imagine the Bible reading like this?
Thus Jesus hurriedly got up realizing what an important day this was going to be. He ran to Galilee and there He created 13 lesson parchments, visited 15 lepers, and had a confrontation therefore with Judas who wasn’t behaving.
Hitherto, Jesus went in haste to the zealots committee where He talked for three hours. He encountered many voice messages from the throngs of Judeans and tried to return all of them with at least a beatitude or warning.
Exhausted, the disciples verily tried to keep up with the Son of God but nay, they could not. They marveled at His time management skills and His strength in persuasive skills. People flocked to Him and stayed with Him, for they knew that if He could accomplish such tasks with great haste, effort, and fluidity then He must know what being an effective person required.
It’s exhausting to read, isn’t it? Jesus came to bring us rest. He lived the kind of life He wants us to pursue. He connected with the Father honestly and dynamically. We, on the other hand, are often so busy doing things for God that we miss entirely the presence of God.
Before you get so caught up in the whirlwind of life—before staring at death’s finality—ask yourself if you are willing to walk daily into the quiet place where God is. Ask yourself if you are willing to mute the dissonant choir in your life and tune fully into the sound of His voice. Ask yourself if you are willing to let His words wreck you and draw you into a lifelong habit of conversation with Him.
This work by Matt Tullos is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International