God's Voice

The following is a passage taken from "God is Closer than You Think", by John Ortberg.

There is much about God’s speaking that is mystery to me. One thing I know for sure. There are no formulas. I cannot control God’s communicating with me. I cannot force Him to speak through my piety, sincerity, or hard work. The wind blows where it will, Jesus once said.

One morning I was in my office at my former church and was sweating bullets over a midweek message that refused to be conceived. This was a pain, any male preacher will tell you, compared to which having a physical baby is a walk in a park. (Women preachers who may have an actual baby also know this.) Bill Hybels, the senior pastor, bounced into my office with the happy report that his message for that weekend was already finished. Meanwhile, I had nothing. A little late on, he came back in to tell me that he had a brainstorm for his message the following week, and that was done too. He was beaming. I was so happy for him.

Before the end of the day, Bill stopped by to say that he had a talk to give overseas in a few weeks, and he had a terrific idea for that one as well. And I realized what was going on.

God was giving Bill my messages.

I cannot force God to give me the guidance or help I think I need. There may be a good reason for His remaining silent sometimes. (At the human level, wise parents and good friends often recognize the need for silence, so surely at the divine level, God does as well.) For instance, I have never received clear guidance at any major vocational crossroads of my life. When I was finishing grad school, when I was going to my first church, when I was contemplating marriage, and even not that long ago when I began to think about leaving Chicago to come to Menlo Park – I will tell God that if He’d just send me a postcard with directions, I will gladly obey. But the postcard never came.

This used to frustrate me, but I have come to suspect that there is a good reason for it. God knows me well enough to know that if I have to grapple with these decisions – to think and struggle and examine my motives and assess the future and have conversations with wise friends and take responsibility for choices – I will grow in ways that would never be possible if I simply received a postcard in the mail. And God’s primary concern for me is not my external situation – it’s the kind of person I’m becoming. God’s silence does not mean His absence. He is surely capable of making Himself understood when He has directions to give.

So we cannot force God’s speaking, and it is not wise to try. But there are things we can do to make our minds increasingly receptive to His presence in our thoughts.

Every thought holds the promise of carrying me into God’s presence.

In the painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, God and the man He created are just a hairbreadth apart. How far is that? Closer than you think. God is never more than a single thought away. Even if I haven’t thought of Him for days. Even when I have been immersed in selfishness and sin.

Let’s look at an example of the power of our thoughts to pull us toward or away from God. Cognitive psychologists say every thought carries a little “emotional charge”, pulling us toward or away from some emotion like anger or joy. In one experiment, subjects who completed the sentence “I’m glad I’m not a…” five times ended up feeling more happy than when they started. On the other hand, subjects who completed the sentence “I wish I were a…” the same number of times ended up feeling worse.

In a similar way, I think all our thoughts carry with them a kind of spiritual charge. Paul says in his letter to the church at Rome that when the Holy Spirit is present and at work and in the human mind, He always moves it in the direction of life: “The mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace”. On the other hand, the mind that shuts itself off to the presence of God tends toward destructiveness: “The mind controlled by the sinful nature is death”.

We might think about it this way: There is a ceaseless stream of thoughts running through your mind at lightning speed. Picture each thought as a bead strung across a wire:

-00000000000000000-

You read this book and think about a sentence, then you go to turn a page and notice that you’ve been chewing on your nails, which reminds you of your anxiety about your boss, which prompts a little anger fantasy about what you’d really like to say to him, at which your mind turns back to this book.
This is your mind. You are having a series of thoughts. Sometimes in your mind seems slow and feels like this:

-0——–0———0———0———0

Sometimes when a day goes by, and it feels like your entire brain activity looks like this:

——————0————————

The reality is that your mind is never still. You are having thoughts, observations, perceptions, and ideas at such a staggering rate that you don’t even remember the vast majority of them.

In reality, each thought we have carries with it a little spiritual power, a tug toward or away from God. No thought is purely neutral.

–0—-0—-0—-0—-0—-0—(+/-) (+/-)(+/-) (+/-)(+/-)(+/-)

Every thought is either enabling and strengthening you to be able to cope with reality to live a Kingdom kind of life, or robbing you of that life.

Every thought is – at least to a small extent – God-breathed or God-avoidant; leading to death or leaning towards life.

In time, if we listen carefully, we can learn to recognize His voice. Not infallibly, of course. But the kind of thoughts that come from God are those in line with the fruit of the Spirit; they move us toward love and joy and peace and patience. And we will learn that there are other thoughts that are not likely to be God speaking. For instance, nowhere in the Bible does it say, “And then God worried.” So I can be quite confident that thoughts that move me toward a paralyzed anxiety are not from God.