Do You Hear What God Says?
November 9, 2008
Listening to the voice of God joins our 3 common commitments at missional order into one way of doing life with God and with others. I am in the middle of reading Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read The Bible (Scot McKnight) and got to thinking about his 3 levels of listening to the voice of God.
Level one is attention grabbing speaking and attention paying listening. We hear the message and we bring our spiritual faculties to attend to it. We hear the voice of God and the voice arrests us.
Level two, Scot calls absorbing the voice. This is the level where the heart takes what it hears and drives it deep, deep, deep into the self. Make no mistake about it, listening by heart is not about self-feeding, or self absorption. It is rather absorbing the voice in a life transforming way but for the sake of others. It’s like Solomon prayed: God, give me a hearing heart. It’s like the famous Behold, I stand at the door and knock and if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, we will have intimate absorption.
The third level of listening is to practice or act on what we hear. It’s like Jesus said if anyone, any community, hears my message and acts on it, he will be a wise builder (Matt 7:24).
Listening to the voice of God helps us personally but the goal of listening cannot stop there. Christian spirituality is not about personally gorging ourselves on spiritual practices or disciplines. Our common commitments at missional order of prayer, formation, and serving God and others demand all three levels of listening. Our order is no self-feeding trough. We are an order that is Other-focused, i.e. loving God and loving others as expressed in missio dei. Our common commitments are the vehicles to get us at constantly experiencing loving God and others.
The multi-level listening to the voice of God is a good way of understanding the goals we have set for ourselves in missional order. It’s a good way of integrating our three common commitments. Sacred Rhythm is our attention getter. Continuous formation (level two listening) occurs as we give ourselves to the Holy Spirit through our praying, reading, serving one another, and our world.
CDP is our common way of listening to the Voice of God or to pay regular, daily, and frequent attention to our lives with God. Once our attention is grabbed we are open to formative and transformative listening. The readings, prayers, and Scriptures CDP provides are not artificially consumed. They are full listening courses ready for absorption. We savor them and properly absorb them into our lives so we can practice what we hear. Let the sacredness of the four times of prayer in the day become brief labs of listening to the Voice that speaks. If we let them, if we take time to be with God through them, we will be transformed, and get to act out our transformation. We will then carry paralyzed friends and dig roofs. We will tally the amount of money we don’t need at the end of the month and give it to the poor, or feed the hungry. We would take time out of our busy schedules to visit widows, minister in jails, and spiritually guide a friend. Our hands, our minds, our wallets, if we listen well, will be extensions of his love and our way of loving God and others.
There is a danger in any order to be about self-improvement and doing it for our own sake in our common commitments. It is also dangerous for our spirituality if we adopt a posture of non-listening. Another danger is to get stuck at the first level and listen informationally rather than formationally. Our order is not the point. The point is to live a life of loving God and loving others as ourselves. We see our common commitments as a way to get at that goal. We will stop at nothing in order to get to do our goal.
Do you see any danger (s) in missional order becoming self-focused versus God and others focused? How have you moved from a spirituality of self-improvement into one of serving and loving God and others?
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A word that came to my mind as I was reading your post (which i think is spot on) is control. At level one, I maintain control. I use what information I am gathering as I want. However, when I move to the second and third levels of listening I am giving control to God. I move from one who acts to the one who is being acted upon. I like ti better when I am in control, which is probably why it is harder for me to engage in the deeper levels of listening.
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Blessings