Married to God? Hearing God

Teen Spirituality Part #6

How in the world can you hear God talking to you?

Last weekend Beth and I drove 1000 miles in a little over 24 hours.  We left to go to a wedding on Long Island, New York of a friend (and that I was the videographer for) right after school on Friday.  We got to a relative’s place at 1:30 am!  We got up early Saturday to drive two more hours to the wedding.  The reception was done early in the evening so we left around 5pm and got home around 1:30am.  It was a loooot of driving.

If you could video us driving in the dead of night it would be funny.  My wife knows that occasionally I’ll want a Twizzler.  She also knows to offer me healthy food because otherwise I’ll just eat junk.  I also know to frequently ask, when I see a rest stop coming, if she needs to stop.  Beth is convinced she has the smallest bladder in the world!  We also took turns sleeping while the other was driving.  Beth will tell me to just let her sleep for a half hour or something, but I’ve learned to be able to tell when she is really asleep so I give her more time.

The point is this.  We have learned over the course of time to know each other, down to little details.  Many years of talking, interacting, and experiencing life together builds a world of knowledge between two people.  The same is true for you and God.

This is one of the hardest parts about God: we usually don’t hear an ‘out loud’ voice from Him.  Plus, the Bible is full of people who see visions and have visits from angels (I want to point out that, even if you look at those occurrences in the Bible, you will notice they are few and far between.  Sometimes centuries pass between them.  So, we should never assume that this is God’s usual way of communicating). 

To top it off, Christians tend to tell us to just “read the Bible” as the only way to hear from God.  This is helpful, but doesn’t really capture the whole picture.

Instead, to me it comes down to the way all relationships work: over time and experience and intentional learning one finds out how to hear from the person you love.  We’re all different, and I’d suggest that God communicates with us differently too. 

There are many different ways this can happen.  I’ll attempt to explore some of them in upcoming posts.