Listening

Listening for the voice of God in set aside moments of quietness is not always as easy as some might think it should be.  What most of us discover is that it takes repeated trips to the learning tree before we are able to hear what can be discerned as the voice of God.  What makes it difficult is the fact that there is more than one voice which can be heard.  When Jesus went to the wilderness after His baptism, a voice He heard very clearly was the voice of Satan.  He heard it not once, but often.  He was out there trying to get a handle on what the Father in heaven wanted Him to do and it would seem that the evil one kept popping up.

 

It should be no surprise when the same thing happens to us.  When we decide to become intentional about listening for the voice of God, the evil one is likely to use the moment to convince us that his voice is the one we are waiting to hear.  Many a person has gone down the road of doing a good thing for the wrong reason.  Satan seems to be the master at this kind of deception.  Since he is always seeking to undermine what God is doing, we should expect this kind of interference as we begin our own experience of seeking to know the voice of God in our own heart.

 

Satan is such a master at his craft of deception that it is not always easy to know that we are listening to the wrong voice.  As we move into this discipline, we should not rush.  Staying in the quietness and allowing the stillness to take hold of our inner life is not something which lends itself to the habits and demands of our hurried life style.  Until we have practiced this discipline long enough to have some certainty about how God speaks to us, it is always wise to listen past the first sense that the Spirit is speaking a word in our heart.