The
most important treasures in the kingdom are predicated upon the
necessity of hearing God. When the Lord gave me this truth, I wanted to
underline every occurrence of this word in my Bible. This is the
wellspring of eternal life; this is the fountainhead of kingdom power
and authority; this is the source of wisdom, understanding, and life
direction!
The Importance of Silent Listening
I
strongly advocate for a prayer life that is comprised mostly of
silence. It’s a great delight to talk to God, but it’s even more
thrilling when He talks to us. Things don’t change when I talk to God;
things change when God talks to me. When I talk, nothing happens; when
He talks, the universe comes into existence. The power of prayer is
found, not in convincing God of my agenda, but in waiting upon Him to
hear His agenda.
I
do not mean to give the impression that hearing God’s voice is my daily
experience in my secret place of prayer. Far from it! Most days I come
way with unfulfilled longings, unrequited initiatives, unanswered
prayers, unrealized aspirations, deferred hopes, and incomplete
understandings.
But
then along comes one of those days—you may know what I mean—when heaven
leans over and God speaks a word directly to my heart. He breathes upon
a portion of scripture and personalizes its meaning precisely to my
felt need. Oh what glorious bliss! That moment is worth all of the
knocking and seeking of the preceding days. I will endure months of
silence if He will but speak one creative word from His mouth to my
spirit.
The Secret Place of Thunder
I
think about when God brought the people of Israel from Egypt, through
the Red Sea, to Mount Sinai. There He appeared to the nation as a
visible fire on the mountain and spoke. Their experience was so awesome
it totally overpowered the Israelites. They asked Moses to go instead
and speak to God by himself on their behalf. The psalmist described
this scene with a most unusual phrase: “I answered you in the secret
place of thunder” (Psalm 81:7). God viewed the convocation with His
people on Mount Sinai as a “secret place” encounter with His people. He
called them aside to a deserted mountain in order to speak with them
and give them His commandments.
God has always designed that the secret place be a place where He answers us and speaks to us.
Sometimes, He even apprehends us by thundering to us with His awesome
voice. There is nothing more glorious than hearing His voice!
God
has always longed to have the kind of intimate relationship with His
people wherein they hear His voice and respond accordingly. I look at
it this way: We close the door to our secret place so that we might
shut out all distracting voices and tune our hearts to the one voice
which we long to hear. “The secret place of thunder”—what an awesome description of the place where we come aside to hear the Lord.
Positioned to Hear
My role, then, in the secret place of prayer is to listen for anything God might want to speak.
If He doesn’t speak to me, my time spent in silent listening is not
futile or in vain. I haven’t missed something or failed to connect. I
realize I can’t tell God what to speak or when to speak it. But I can
position myself in the secret place so that, when He chooses to speak,
I am found listening. Hearing the voice of God is largely a matter of
the will. We must choose to hear Him. We make the choice by setting
aside time to listen quietly.
All
of us want God to hear our prayers. But God said, “‘Therefore it
happened, that just as He proclaimed and they would not hear, so they
called out and I would not listen’” (Zechariah 7:13). In other words,
God said, “When I spoke, you didn’t listen to Me; therefore, when you
speak, I won’t listen to you.” The inference is that when we hear God’s
voice, He in turn listens to our voices.
Stop
everything, come aside, listen, and wait on Him. Wait until He speaks.
He longs to commune with you. Don’t worry about the thoughts that begin
to bombard your mind as you wait on Him. Take a notepad and write down
those “things to do” as they interrupt your listening. Then, you can
put those thoughts out of mind and maintain your focus where you want
it, knowing that you’ll not forget about those details later.
Be
encouraged today by the fact that you’re not the only one who finds
listening a very challenging discipline to master. The best attainments
in God always come the hardest. Be prepared to make the discipline of
attentive listening a lifetime pursuit that will become easier in the
doing of it. Just listen in the secret place of thunder.
God
loves our voices, He hears every word we speak, and it moves Him. But
there are moments where, He longs to captivate our attention. If we
would but quiet ourselves for one moment and listen... Ah! the joy in
hearing Him speak. There is a time to speak and a time for silence.
Talk to your Heavenly Father but then be silent and hear His thunder!
