The Pursuit of God - Week #6

Chapter Six – The Speaking Voice

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

“A word is a medium by which thoughts are expressed, and the application of the term to the Eternal Son leads us to believe that self-expression is inherent in the Godhead, that God is forever seeking to speak Himself out to His creation…God is speaking. Not God spoke, but God is speaking. He is by His nature continuously articulate…”

In this chapter, Tozer says wonderful things about the voice of God, distinguishing between mere reading of the Bible (words on a page) and hearing living words from God in His Word.

“I believe that much of our religious unbelief is due to a wrong conception of and a wrong feeling for the Scriptures of Truth. (We believe that) a silent God suddenly began to speak in a book and when the book was finished, (He) lapsed back into silence again forever. Now we read the book as the record of what God said when He was for a brief time in a speaking mood. With notions like that in our heads how can we believe? The facts are that God is not silent, has never been silent. It is the nature of God to speak. The second Person of the Holy Trinity is call the Word. The Bible is the inevitable outcome of God’s continuous speech…God’s speaking is in the continuous present…”

God is speaking constantly in many ways, always looking for a response from humans. Proverbs 8 pictures Him (wisdom) pleading for a response that rarely comes.

"The tragedy is that our eternal welfare depends upon our hearting,and we have trained our ears not to hear."

The prayer in all 7 of the letters to the churches in Revelation 2 and 3 – “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches” – is a prayer that I pray often for myself and for God’s people, because this truth of not really having ears to hear what God is saying now is increasingly real to me.

As I’ve grown in God and in life experience and listened to saints of God both from the past and the present, I’ve come to understand that the ability to hear is in direct contrast with the dominating spirit of the age in which we live have lived and been trained in; the spirit of this age is one in which such weak-appearing virtues as listening, responding, waiting, being quiet for a length of time have been despised and in their place the strong-appearing virtues of activity, doing, running, building, organizing, etc., have been prized as valuable.

Having devalued the “weak” virtues, the “strong” virtues have lost their good, because, as C.S. Lewis says, you cannot lose the value of one of these sets of virtues and hope to keep the good of the other set. And so we find ourselves in the midst of a frantic, hyper-active culture both in the world and in the modern Church.

>“Just now we happen to be living in a secular age. Our thought habits are those of the scientist, not those of the worshipper. We are more likely to explain than to adore.”

The above statement of Tozer suggests once again to me that the best way to gain ears to hear what the Spirit is saying is through worship and adoration of the only Uncreated God, Adonai. As I have often said in these postings, the idea of worshipping God appeals to us in theory, but the implications of true worship of the One uncreated Being are huge and are offensive to the flesh. To worship Him is to lose control and free-fall into His love and grace.

Even the practice of stopping everything to adore Him long enough (i.e., not always worshipping on the run) to develop “ears to hear,” is offensive to the western mind that believes we can get anything we want on the run and in a short time. Having “ears to hear” is costly but well worth the price!! And for the modern Christian, the cost for most of us is measured in terms of time, a resource that we have all been given by God. It will cost you time!

I believe we need to start with an honest answer to the question, “Is having ears to hear what the Spirit is saying today important enough to me to pay the price for that?”

“The Voice of God is a friendly Voice. No one need fear to listen to it unless he has already made up his mind to resist it…Whoever will listen will hear the speaking Heaven. This is definitely not the hour when men take kindly to an exhortation to listen, for listening is not today a part of popular religion…”

Tozer says that when a person takes this matter seriously and opens the Word of God, drawing near to Him (which can be as simple as speaking and singing love phrases and statements of desire for Him, reaching out for Him), then very often the progression of hearing from Him is like this:
• First, a sound as of a Presence walking in the garden
• Second, a voice, more intelligible, but still far from clear
• Then the happy moment when the Spirit begins to illuminate the Scriptures
• Finally, life and light come and best of all, the ability to see and rest in and embrace Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord and All.

In conclusion, I’ll add that developing listening ears and hearts happens in worship, then obeying whatever I may have heard God say to me in worship. This will tune my ears into His wave length and the more in tune I am with Him, the more I hear from Him in many different ways. Hearing what the Spirit is saying today through the Word of God is imperative if we are to stay awake and alive to God’s Voice rather than to the screams of the world, the flesh and the devil (and even the well-meaning voices of our friends and family).

“If you would follow on to know the Lord, come at once to the open Bible expecting it to speak to you…It is more than a thing, it is a voice, a word, the very Word (Jesus) of the living God.”

“Lord, teach me to listen. The times are noisy and my ears are weary with the thousand raucous sounds which continuously assault them. Give me the spirit of the boy Samuel when he said to Thee, ‘Speak, for Thy servant heareth.’ Let me hear Thee speaking in my heart. Let me get used to the sound of Thy Voice, that its tones may be familiar when the sounds of earth die away and the only sound will be the music of Thy speaking Voice. Amen.”

May the grace of God rest upon us to adore and listen long enough to develop "ears to hear"; may His power enable us to obey what we hear; may His Spirit come and tenderize us with revelations of His love so that together with God's people we can live in the fullness of His life in these critical days. God bless you!

Next week we'll read chapter 7: The Gaze of the Soul.