Simple, Basic Instructions to Hear God in Your Life

I am the Lord your God: hear my voice. (Ps. 81:11,9)

There are a few steps we must follow if we want to learn to hear the voice of God—most of them very basic, very simple—and yet often we don’t follow these basic, simple steps, because the instructions we’re given seem to us too basic and simple. It may even seem like we have “already tried that.” So let’s look at these steps a little more closely, and see if we can fine-tune our hearing.

The first step in being able to hear God’s voice is that we must enter into His presence. How? By giving God praise and thanks. Thanking God for the good things He gives us is a rare practice these days; most of the time we forget just how desperate we were to obtain the thing we received just five minutes before it was ours. What happens once things go the way we’d hoped? Off we go our merry way, forgetting that things could have easily gone in the opposite direction. Like the nine lepers whom Jesus cured, we take what He gives us without a word of appreciation.

In this digital age, many kids today are no longer taught the long-lost art of mailing thank you notes (they don’t even know how to properly address an envelope!). And it is a shame. Because as much as a thank you note can put a smile on the recipient’s face, that thank you note has the much more important purpose of teaching children to be grateful. Instructing children to say “thank you” is not just about ingraining in them polite manners. It is training them to enter into the presence of God.

Now the thing about “thank you” is that while a contingent of us are poorly educated in the art of showing appreciation for gifts, many of us are not. When something joyful or exciting happens, the first words out of our lips are, “Thank you, Jesus!” And certainly, Jesus is both happy at our giddiness, as well as pleased by our joy. He rejoices with us! But when good things happen to us, this is generally not the time when we bemoan not being able to hear God’s voice. During the times when it seems God has answered our prayers exactly as we were hoping He would, our faith, if anything, gets a “boost.”

It is during the times of trial that we call into question our ability to hear Him. And herein lies the crux of why the “basic” and the “simple” are not so obvious anymore. In order to trust, we must learn to thank God not just for the things we like, but also for the things we don’t. Who would want to do that? Absolutely no one. Which is precisely why that kind of gratitude is such a powerful act of trust. Saying “thank you” for the things we don’t like is the same as telling God we have certain confidence that He is taking care of us, that He has a plan, and that He would never allow us our suffering unless He intended to draw a greater good out of it. If thanking Jesus for the things we like enters us into His presence, then thanking Him for the things we don’t sits us right up on His lap.

But then what? After all, when we’re suffering, that is when it is hardest to pray. We can’t think, we can’t read, we can’t speak. It seems that all we can do is to just sit. Which is painful, but also brilliant.

Be still and know that I am God. (Ps. 46:10)

“Sitting there” and “doing nothing” is precisely what brings us to step two: silencing our exterior so that our interior can receive His word. Prayer is nothing more than a communication of hearts, and in the speech of the Spirit, no words are necessary, nor can they adequately encompass what the Father has to say to us. The only word the Lord has to communicate to us, in the end, is love, and it is suffering that gives our hearts to stretch and expand in the capacity to love like nothing else.

Gratitude and prayer are two ways we learn to listen to the voice of God, but there is also another very basic, very simple, very obvious way to hear His voice . . . so simple and obvious, in fact, that it seems like it wouldn’t “work.” The family Bible often collected dust on our nightstands, with the mistaken belief that all that’s in there is a compilation of legends and stories written by an ancient people long ago. What purpose is there in re-reading stories we have already heard countless times before at Mass? The point is this: “the word of God is living and effective . . . and able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart” (Heb 4:12). In other words, Scripture does not just tell us the story of what happened then; it tells us what is happening now.

The historical account of what happened in the past is the part that may seem to us as though we’ve heard it “countless times before,” but the story of what is happening now is ever fresh and ever current, and so every time we read the very same words, our Father in heaven will teach us something new. The account of Jesus’ life will then come alive for us; we will pick up details we could have sworn we’d never heard before; and it will teach us something about how to handle our own personal difficulties, how to live our lives now. We will find that Scripture really is the only reading we ever need, as it was for St. Therese of Lisieux.

Finally, once we have learned to listen to the voice of God by entering into His presence with praise and thanks, seeking Him in the silence of our hearts, and hearing His tangible word in the Scriptures . . . after a while, we just kind of know what our Papa sounds like. We recognize His voice, just like sheep who recognize the voice of their shepherd. Our Shepherd has one utterly distinguishing characteristic to His voice: it restores peace to our hearts, even when His words may be hard for us to hear.

The Shepherd’s voice encourages us and uplifts us, even in the midst of troubling circumstances. And when we can learn to recognize His voice in prayer and the Scriptures, we begin to learn to recognize it in everything: in the books we read, in the programs we watch, in the friends—and the strangers—who speak to us. We learn to distinguish who is His messenger by the measure of peace with which their words fill us, ones which remind us that everything that befalls us in life is under the providential care of the Father, and will therefore work for good in the end.

Author’s Note: Excerpt from The Safe Haven: Scriptural Reflections for the Heart and Home (Liturgical Season of Lent). To purchase, visit Amazon or The Catholic Company, where all other volumes currently in print are also available.  

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