How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

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Having addressed God's silence in God on Mute, and then How to Pray in his previous bestseller, Pete Greig is back to bring wisdom and guidance to one of the most pressing and perplexing aspects of universal Christian experience - How to Hear God. The primary mark of true discipleship (especially perhaps in a bewilderingtime such as this) is a posture of attentiveness towards his word. These were exactly the kinds of phenomena Elijah had anticipated as hallmarks of God’s presence, and yet after each one a very surprising thing is said: “The L ORD was not in the wind ….

Greig makes it quite clear that the Bible is the language of God’s heart, and therefore if we wish to hear what he is saying, we have to be immersed in the Scriptures. Expand your Bible reading experience using our valuable library of more than 50 top resources by becoming a member of Bible Gateway Plus. The four main steps of lectio divina, the author made highly popular in ‘ How to Pray’, by using the simple acronym, P. Greig's main readership is likely to be young adults in the Charismatic Evangelical wing of the Church. Turning to God’s Whisper, Greig tackles the thorny issue of people’s presumptions about what God sounds like and their expectations of how he should speak.Both these islands were centers of Christian faith and evangelization in the 7th and 8th centuries AD.

The Bible says that hearing the voice of our Creator is both central and natural to our existence as humans. In largely focusing on Lectio as a means of "Hearing God" in scripture there was a tendency to dismiss other means of reading the Bible devotionally, particularly reading larger sections that give us a greater sense of the narrative, and which would have been, in the absence of personal Bibles and chapter and verse, to original way in which scripture would literally have been "heard" rather than the atomised, bite-sized approach that has been the norm of too many evangelical Bible notes, and into which Lectio can easily descend. Just stop and think about the fact that, if you believe that he made the universe with a few words, what might happen if you hear him say something to you? Maybe it's the particular season of my life that made it so moving, but I think this book is both beautifully ordinary and transformational. Some people, and I’ve been doing interviews like this, if they’re really, really into the Bible, they sometimes get really nervous that I talk about God speaking in prophecy.

Greig says that hearing God should be a normal Christian experience, not the sole province of wild-eyed mystics. Firstly, he took them through an extensive Bible study “beginning with Moses and all the prophets” ( Luke 24:27).

And so when we learn to hear God in all of life, we begin to walk and talk through life like Adam and Eve with God in the garden of Eden.Pete Greig is the bewildered founder of the 24-7 Prayer movement and the Senior Pastor of Emmaus Rd church. Far too many followers of Jesus have never been discipled on or encouraged around how to discern the distinctive voice of God, and this book helps them commit intentionally to spiritual practices and disciplines to discern and respond to the voice of God. As Pete points out, for followers of Jesus, “hearing [God’s] voice is therefore the most natural thing in the world…but whenever God’s word is confused, abused, or ignored, it can become one of the most perplexing and painful things too.

I love that analogy that you give of the window frame and the picture frame, moving beyond seeing Scripture just objectively, but how do you receive it personally and make it that conversation? While I would not say this is a comprehensive exploration on the topic, it delivers exactly what the title suggests: a simple guide. Fellow Author, Shane Claiborne, comments similarly, saying that “this book draws from the well of wisdom that has nourished the faithful for centuries.The prophetic gift enables us to strengthen, encourage, and comfort other people with God’s Word which is “living and active“ ( Hebrews 4:12). The main sections of this book are on hearing God speak in the person of Jesus, in the Bible, in prayer, in prophecy, in whispers and dreams, and (to cover all other bases) in community, creation, and culture. The real aim of this book isn’t just to teach people how to hear God in religious contexts, like prayer and Bible study, important as those things are.