"Hearing God" - Book Recommendation and My Story

By Anthony:

(Before I even start this post, I want to note that you are welcome to leave comments to help me or others with this difficult topic, or to ask your own questions).


I recommend you read the book "Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God" by Dallas Willard.  This book is all about developing an intimate conversational relationship with God.  Willard writes a lot at the beginning about how God created us for relationship with him, and the starting point is for us to believe that God can and actually does communicate with us.  Willard talks about many different ways that God communicated to people in the Bible (as well as now), including dreams, visions, an audible voice, etc., but he focuses most of the book on listening to the quiet inner voice of the Holy Spirit who lives within us.  It is his view that God gives precedence to this method of communication with his people for various reasons.  The book is full of advice, warnings, cautions, suggestions, and encouragements all about how to listen to God well.  He talks about how this is a relationship with the Living God so there is no concrete formula he can give for us to do.  Willard doesn't give any easy answers, and yet there is a lot to ponder in the book for anyone wanting to become more intimate in their relationship with God and better at listening to his voice.

There is actually quite a bit I disagree with in the book, and it isn't particularly well written.  My main negative concerns are summarized in this critical book review.  I agree with almost all of this review.  If you know of other more well written books on this topic of hearing God, please let me know.  But I'm recommending you read this book anyway, even with these concerns, because it is an interesting and thought provoking read, and it helped me grow in my relationship with God.

The reason I wanted to read this book is because I've really wrestled with the issue of hearing from God and having intimacy with him ever since my college years.  Let me tell you some of my story before going back to the book.  I had an ongoing spiritual crisis during college, which was strange in that I felt close to God most of the time, and yet had lingering questions and doubts about God's existence and the trustworthiness of Scripture.  This was caused firstly by questions raised in my classes and books I was reading.  They were questions and issues of many diverse kinds and I won't get into them here.  The important thing to know is that God eventually brought me through those intellectual doubts and questions, and I ended up being stronger in faith because of it than I would have been if I refused to face those hard things.

Aside from the many intellectual doubts and questions, there was a personal reason I doubted God's existence and the trustworthiness of Scripture.  But perhaps it was more that I was wrestling with God and questioning him rather than doubting his existence.  In high school I had a passionate loving relationship with God, but slowly I became more and more dissatisfied and frustrated that my experience didn't seem to fit with what I read in the Bible.  I saw God in Scripture doing miracles all the time,  giving people dreams and visions, showing his presence to people, and speaking to people all the time with an audible voice.   Why wasn't he showing himself to me and speaking to me?  I craved more intimate relationship with him, and the Bible said he created me for relationship with him, so why didn't he reveal himself more clearly to me?  Why didn't he speak to me as clearly as a human friend speaks to me?  Why didn't he give me dreams, visions, and miracles?  I believed that God could do these things, and I couldn't think of any reason why he wouldn't do them.  And so it made me wonder whether God doesn't really want such an intimate relationship with us as I had been led to believe.  Or perhaps the people in the Bible were just more special and I shouldn't expect God to work in my life the same way.

I mostly worked through this issue back in college, getting good counsel from family and mentors.  The four points below are the theological ideas that comforted me and helped me overcome that personal struggle back in college.  I'm listing and explaining them as they might be helpful to some of you as well.  Overall, these ideas have been more beneficial in my life than this book.

1. Humanity's fellowship with God used to be perfect but was marred way back in the Garden of Eden.  Adam and Eve used to walk and talk with God but then were cast out from the garden when they rebelled.  We are still feeling the effects of this today.  Yes it is true that now we have been reconciled to God through Jesus Christ, but that reconciliation has not seen its final end.  We have yet to see Jesus, and that is why the Church longs for that day, crying out Marantha! Come Lord Jesus and come quickly!  We long to give Jesus a hug and speak to him face to face.  In the meantime, we can still talk to God whenever we want and can still listen to him, but our communication and fellowship with him is not as intimate as it will be when Jesus comes again.  This is part of the already-but not yet tension in the Kingdom of God.  This idea helps me to wait patiently, knowing that my passionate request that God make my relationship with him more intimate WILL one day be given to me by Him.

2. Maybe God doesn't reveal himself so clearly because he wants us to seek him out.  He wants people who are willing to put a little effort and time into knowing him well and hearing his voice.

3.  The idea of God being our buddy is not quite biblical in the sense that people talk about it often today.  It's very true that God is our friend and has an intimate relationship with us.  But perhaps God's relationship with us doesn't work the exact same way as me talking and listening to my wife.  Maybe he rarely talks to people audibly.  Maybe he is not constantly giving special messages to each of us every day.   Some Christians today act like miracles and visions and hearing God's clear voice are a daily occurrence for them and should be for everyone.  But I re-looked at what the Bible says and realized that most of the miracles and crazy manifestations of God's presence or voice happened to only a few people, and with hundreds of years of mostly silence in between, and these events happened mostly at very important points in the salvation history of this world.  This thought helped me to be less demanding of God in wanting these things in my life.  Realizing that God has always only done these things sparingly showed me that something isn't wrong with my relationship with God.    Furthermore, when we read the New Testament, we don't read explicitly that the apostles were saying every day, "God told me this and that."  It doesn't seem like they were constantly hearing private messages from God, as some Christians make out to be their experience today (though obviously we do read of some occasions that the apostles heard God speak to them or guide them).

4.  I reminded myself that God has spoken to us in an amazing way through Scripture, and we need to properly value that part of God's communication to us, even as we seek to hear his voice personally.



Now back to the present day. Even with the above theological ideas, I still have always had this nagging feeling that there was more I could be doing to hear God's voice better.  Willard's book "Hearing God" greatly helped.  The main thing it did was to help me become more confident that I am actually hearing God's voice internally though the Holy Spirit living within me.  I have tried to listen to God in the past, and have felt like I have heard at times, but usually have been confused because I kept only hearing my own thoughts and my own voice in my head.  Willard convinced me that God does speak to us right now, primarily through the still small voice of the Holy Spirit.  Willard convinced me that God speaks to us through our very thoughts, and even through our own internal voice.   This means that I don't have to hear some new foreign voice in my head to believe that God is speaking to me.  God can speak to me in what sounds much like the voice of my internal thoughts.  Surely it's still a bit complicated as not every thought in our head is from God; we can have very sinful thoughts that come from our sinful nature.  But God can and does speak to us in our minds and souls.  We just have to practice at distinguishing what is our own internal voice of rambling thoughts, and the authoritative direct voice of the Lord.

Willard also helped me to conclude that I have been seeking the wrong things and ignoring what God has already given to me.  I have been seeking the writing in the sky, the dreams, the visions, and the audible voice.  But the whole time I have had the Holy Spirit living within me.  As I read, I said to myself, "there is nothing new here, of course I knew that God speaks to me this way, and yet I have been mostly ignoring his voice!"  Willard talked about people like me who craved the dreams and visions, and the spectacular.  He talked about how that is a sign of immature faith.  Christians crave those things just because they seem spectacular even though they aren't as helpful or relational as the Holy Spirit inwardly speaking to us.  Dreams and visions are vague and unclear, and not an easy medium of communication.  They often need to be interpreted.  We shouldn't crave the spectacular for its own sake.  We should crave God and his clear voice, and he has given us that in the intimacy of the Holy Spirit living within us.

Another thing Willard talked about which I resonate with is that he said the Bible doesn't give us all that we want and need to hear from God.  It gives us all the truth we need for salvation and God speaks to us through it, but we still crave a conversational relationship with God that goes beyond the written word.  Further, there are things we need to know that the Bible doesn't tell us.  Just as the Church needed the Holy Spirit to tell them to send Paul and Barnabas (Acts 13:2), so also sometimes we need God's guidance about issues in our lives that the Bible doesn't speak to.  Scripture gives us guidelines about who to marry or what company to work at, but what if we desire to know God's will in a particular situation?  Is it crazy to think that we can ask God and wait for an answer?  I don't believe God will always give us a clear yes or no, nor did Willard say that He would, but I think it would be just as foolish to presume that God wouldn't.



Since reading this book I've been practicing being quiet and listening for God to speak to me in the stillness of my mind and soul.  My life with God has definitely become a little more intimate. On some occasions, I have heard God speak to me.  My method is to stop all my own thoughts, focus on being with God, and tell him I am listening.  I resist strongly any attempt to imagine what God might say to me, and instead wait for a thought or phrase to enter my mind.  Often a thought pops in that I would not have conjured up on my own, which I think is some kind of evidence that it is God speaking to me. 

When I first started doing this regularly after reading the book, there was one message from God I heard on three different occasions - "I've been here with you the whole time, it's just that you haven't been listening."  I have also felt God's love and affirmation in powerful ways.  It's powerful to read in Scripture that God loves us.  But it's also powerful to hear God speak to you, "I love you" or "You are my child and I take delight in you and the things you are doing."  Those affirmations of love have strengthened my soul.

Much of the time a thought doesn't come.  And it's not always easy to listen.  I've found asking God "yes" or "no" questions is particularly difficult, as both answers shout in my thoughts constantly.  Listening to God this way is definitely complicated.  I wish God had made it easier and clearer.  Even with this intimate still small voice, it can be very hard to determine what God is saying, or what is coming from our own thoughts, our own sinful nature, or other places.   However, there are some tests we can use to determine if it was really God speaking.  1. We need to compare the message with what the Bible says.  2. We can check with other Christians, to see if they can confirm or agree with the message.  3.  We need to make sure the message fits with God's nature, meaning that it isn't flippant, but clear, authoritative, and loving. 



In summary, the book was far from perfect but was very helpful in getting me to appreciate and listen to the Holy Spirit.  I have a lot yet to learn.  But I do feel like my relationship with God is on a new level of intimacy, something I've craved for a very long time.  I'm treasuring my relationship with him much more deeply and I hope the same can become true for you.