Dallas Willard has written some amazing stuff. He's best known for his book, The Divine Conspiracy, which won Christianity Today's Best Book of the Year award back in 1998. He's a professor of philosophy at USC with a dry sense of humor and a nice conversational style of writing.Hearing God is not a book full of gimmicks. What Willard does is help you understand the sort of life necessary to hear God. God is interested in speaking with you. The problem is, most of us have our ears and hearts tightly shut.
Professor Willard gives good, biblical, practical steps in learning how to open our ears and hearts and recognize all the ways God is constantly speaking to us.
He covers how God speaks through impressions of the Spirit, circumstances, the still small voice and many other ways. He is thoroughly orthodox in his use of Scriptures and how the Bible should always be a benchmark for measuring if we have, in fact, heard from God.
There is a fun section in which he shares his knowledge in learning how to discern the tone and quality of God's voice. Here's a quote from page 190:
"The voice of God speaking in our souls also bears in it a characteristic spirit. It is a spirit of exalted peacefulness and confidence, of joy, of sweet reasonableness, and of will for the good. It is, in short, 'the spirit of Jesus.' By that we refer to the overall tone and internal dynamics of his personal life.
Those who saw him truly saw the Father, who shared the same 'Spirit.' And it is this Spirit that marks the voice of God in our hearts. Because his voice bears authority within itself, it does not need to be loud or hysterical."
In other words, if the voice in your head is shrill and nagging, or loud and overbearing, or desperate and whiney....it ain't God. And just like dogs learn to recognize their master's voice, we can, with practice, learn to recognize our Master's as well.
It's been ten years since I read this book and it's probably time for me to reread it.
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2 comments:
Thanks Pastor...your description of this book and its subject is extremely interesting. I will be looking for this one.
I think "why and how" God actually does speak to each of us is an incredible thing to explore. Describing it as "the spirit of Jesus and it is this Spirit that marks the voice of God in our hearts" is just a gorgeous way to see and feel it.
I was recently struggling with something I have been working on in my own life and wanted it before God. It involved questions of direction. I began it as an actual conversation with God in my heart telling him specifics about it and my questions. I didnt hear anything profound or voices or such things. However, things unfolded right in front of me shortly thereafter where the answer to my questions and His response to my dialogue with Him played out right before my eyes with two other people coming into my life directly related to what I was asking about. No voices, no grand explosions, burning bushes or anything like that..just two lives that were searching for the same thing and God put us in front of each other at the right moment.
Being attentive to how God speaks through circumstances can be very rewarding. Willards spends a bit of time writing about how to be better at it. I'm glad the book looks interesting to you. I think you'll get a lot out of it.
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