On walking with our God in a way in which we listen and hear Him regularly:

“He who has ear to hear, let him hear” (Jesus, Matthew 11:15).

“Knowing that Jesus is truly Emmanuel, God with us, and learning to hear His voice are vital to becoming spiritually mature. Listening to God – which is a key part of practicing His presence – is not a method, but a walk with a person. There is always an ongoing dialogue in this walk, as the Scriptures and our experience plainly show.

To listen in prayer is to look up to Him with the intuitive thinking organ the Bible calls the heart. Through the eyes and the ears of the heart we see and hear God; through it we apprehend the transcendent – that which is beyond the merely physical or material. The Scriptures graciously invite us to look up and see the invisible.

The Bible is full of these examples. We look to god and are radiant as the Psalmist and Isaiah tell us (Psalm 34:5, Isaiah 60:5). Ezekiel (as well as Isaiah) looked and saw the glory of the Lord fill His temple (Ezekiel 44:4). Ezra tells us that “The gracious hand of our God is on everyone who looks to Him” (8:22). Sometimes the impartations are such that everyone around is affected, such as when “…Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. “Look,” he said, “I see heaven opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:55-56).

More to the point of listening prayer, if less dramatic, is the wonderful word of Habakkuk: “I will look to see what He will say to me” (2:1). In order to hear we look up and out of ourselves to the source of all being – the Uncreated, the Objective Real.

To listen in prayer is to receive wisdom from above. God gives transcendent wisdom and knowledge to those who love and wait on Him.”

End of quotation from Leanne Payne. Beginning of my thoughts:

(Excuse me while I grab a box of soap. There.)

I know that there are those who say that God only speaks (reveals) through the Bible, that now that we have the word of God in writing our God no longer speaks directly to His children. How they come to that position is a mystery to me, for the scriptures to which they claim to look are replete with evidence of our God speaking to His people. In the Old Testament He spoke conversationally to Cain, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, Gideon, David, all the prophets and psalmists, and finally to John the Baptist, Simeon, and Anna. All through the Old Testament record, our God was speaking to His people as He is moving forward His plan to redeem them and return them to intimacy with Himself. The Old Testament speaks often of this intimacy as “knowing” our God, using the Hebrew term for the deepest of intimacy.

In the New Testament Jesus states that His sheep will hear His voice and follow Him, and that when they need it, His followers will be told what they are to say by the Holy Spirit (John 10). We read the promises of Jesus that He and the Father will make their abode in us, that we will be joined into union with them, and that the Holy Spirit will guide us into all truth (John 14-16). He also was clear, as was Paul, that knowing our God – again implying deepest intimacy – is the essence of our new life in Christ (John 17, Philippians 3). This knowing of our God is the core of our life in Christ, and is built upon our conversational communion with Him by His indwelling Holy Spirit. After all, how can two beings experience intimacy without conversation?

And how can it be that the writers of the books of the Bible write the words of their God by His inspiration if He is not revealing those words directly to them? Furthermore, why would our God be speaking so often in the old covenant era as He is moving forward with restoring our intimate union with Him, the deepest intimacy that foreshadows eternity with Himself, and then when that restoration is accomplished, He abruptly stops revealing – what we call “God speaking” is His revealing His words to us directly – to His redeemed?

Furthermore, we expect that those who “speak for God”- writers, speakers, pastors, and teachers – are speaking that which the Holy Spirit gives them to bring forward. If one does not expect the Spirit to speak to these people, then why would you want to listen to them? Is not the spiritual gift of prophecy the forthtelling of what God reveals? Yes, there are many who misrepresent that gift, but the gift is still in use by the Holy Spirit today. The messages from Him are delivered directly to the person, which is exactly how hearing God works.

Listening prayer, as Payne talks about it, is simply conversational communion with our God by His Holy Spirit in us. It is the verbal expression of the abiding life of John 15, in which life and communion flow both ways like it does between the branch and the vine. We teach that prayer is conversing with God, but many add the admonishment that one had better not spend time listening to Him in that conversation. True listening prayer has no Eastern mysticism in it, as some purport it to have (although there may be some who claim that their worldly spiritual practices are the same as true listening prayer, which they are not). True listening prayer is simply the communion between two beings who love each other and share life together. It is speaking with our God, not simply to Him (or more like it, at Him). Two-way communion is built upon two-way communication.

I suspect that those who seek to follow their God without listening for His revelation and guidance, His comfort and correction, His affirmation and affection are experiencing little if any of these. Religion can exist without conversational communion with our God. Sadly, the absence of conversational communion is what all religiosity is meant to produce.

Image via Author, unnamed lake, Wallowa Mountains, Oregon

Rant via the author, too.