"Listening to God" from the book "How to Pray for Spiritual Growth"

Hello, Companion Mustard Seed Library book readers,

What is nice about this author's writing is that he mixes a good dose of humility with some concrete thinking about prayer so that his ideas seem realistic.

For example, "As I mentioned above, in my own prayer life it took years before I could begin to hear God's guidance clearly. Even now I cannot always do it, for hearing God depends on so many variable factors, over some of which I have no control and over others of which I have control but I make the wrong decisions."

The author suggests in this chapter that the reader deliberately set herself/himself to thinking about the results of prayer. Start small in daily conversational prayer. "Therefore, if we want to hear God's guidance in our healing prayers, we first need to seek His voice in our daily prayer when the situation is relaxed and it is not so important whether we make a mistake or succeed."

"But discerning His voice at first must be a matter of trial and error. We collect ourselves by praying the prayer of quiet, we ask a question, we concentrate in a relaxed and quiet kind of way, we hear a response. We try to notice the "tone" of the voice of the response and remember it. We do what we have heard. If what we have done proves to be right, true, and good, we have heard God's voice within, and when we hear that voice again, we will listen attentively. If it results in something wrong or harmful we have to listen for another voice."

"Often we will know immediately whether the voice we have heard is God's as we compare what is said with Scripture. If the two disagree, the voice we have heard was not from the Lord. Or if the voice tells us to do something totally ridiculous, harmful, or meaningless, we know that the voice is not from Jesus. If the voice tells us to do something that would violate a well-trained conscience, it is not of God."

The above is an interesting exercise and I don't think it is at all irrelevant. Have you ever been in a situation where people were asked to give a testimony of what God has done in their lives the past week or recently and you could only sit there tongue-tied? I have and I think it is because I don't make it a practice to think through the results of prayer and therefore become more verbal about it. More able to share with other people in testimony. Maybe it is because of a fear to pinpoint God--God did this or God did that. Heck, God just does everything and don't try to describe what He has done. Just leave it all loose and free and non-described. But the author of this book here seems to think that becoming more aware specifically of what God has done in answering people's prayers is all more of a part of a person getting in touch with the "true" self and not the "false" self.

One of the questions at the end of the chapter is "Describe a time in which you were praying to hear guidance and were mistaken in what you heard. What were the effects of following that "guidance"?

Now that's a question to ponder and reflect upon.

God bless,
Sharon