Having the orientation to the natural realm that we do, we often talk about God speaking as though His Voice operates like sound waves. His Voice is a spiritual voice, a spiritual essence, almost all the time. He isn’t speaking to natural “ears” but to our spiritual “ears”.
Therefore, the process has a parallel to the natural, but also some differences. Our natural ears do three things so that we can hear sounds. They funnel sound waves into our ears, they recognize the different values of air pressure, and then they turn those changes in air pressure into electrical signals that our brain can understand.
To facilitate hearing in the natural we do things like turn our face toward the place the sound is coming that we want to hear, try or expect to understand the sound, and often manage other sound around us that is interfering with what we are trying to hear. We might do that by turning down our radio or TV, walking in out of the traffic to hear on a phone, or taking an ipod to a quiet place to hear it play.
Make no mistake though. Natural hearing is a mechanical function not a spiritual function and there are important differences.
Spiritual hearing is different because God doesn’t use sound waves when He speaks. We can extrapolate this because when God spoke in the Bible some people heard Him audibly, but not everyone heard Him or heard the same thing.
We read about this in John 12:28-29: “‘Father, glorify Your name.’ Then a voice came from heaven, saying, ‘I have both glorified it and will glorify it again.’ Therefore the people who stood by and heard it said that it had thundered. Others said, ‘An angel has spoken to Him.”[1]
Experientially, we can observe today that same phenomenon. My friend Sherry who is very credible, has known God many years and been around prophetic ministry for decades heard the audible Voice of God one night praying for one of my children. She is unequivocal about what and how she heard Him speak (audibly), but the others present didn’t hear Him audibly.
Spiritual hearing comes to our spirit, not our body. Most often our spirit and body are in the same place of course so it is easy to get into the frame of reference that God is using our body to speak to, but that simply isn’t the case.
There is still the parallel though. When we hear through our ears we should listen and pay attention. When God speaks to our spirit, we should listen and pay attention.
When we have an ear infection, or perhaps our ears have been stopped up with water from swimming, our ears are impaired of hearing.
Similarly, when our spirit is full of “junk”, perhaps anxiety or anger or just a long TO DO list… maybe even a bundle of opinions, our spiritual hearing is impaired. That is because just as sound waves travel our ear canal, spiritual waves flow into our spirit. What we perceive as a spiritual word is often a mixture of what the spiritual essence was, and what it has mixed with in our spirit.
Think of it this way:
Assemble three small glass bowls with a spoon for each. Fill one with water, one with white icing, and one with chocolate icing. Now, add four drops of red food coloring to each bowl and mix them well with the spoon. For you guys who have not spent a lot of time with icing and food coloring, I will tell you what happens.
The white icing becomes a lighter shade of the original color. In other words, pink. How light or dark pink it is will be determined by how much icing was in the bowl. Take the same amount of food coloring (spiritual essence) and mix it with twice as much icing and it will be even lighter.
The chocolate icing will be the least changed of the three. The darkness of the chocolate allows less of the red to show through, and if you double the amount of chocolate you may barely find a tinge of red in the icing.
The water on the other hand will alter the red color the least. If you used a small enough amount of water, the color may match the color of the food coloring. If you use a great deal more water you can eventually dilute the color, however even twice as much water might not make a discernable difference.
The spiritual essence of what God is speaking and communicating to us is just like that food coloring.
If we are mostly full of the Holy Spirit we will receive and perceive the essence of what God is speaking. The spiritual essence of what God is communicating to us will not be diluted by who or what we are.
When we are opaque, even with things we perceive to be good (works of man, religion), and devoting ourselves to God, we still only get a dilution of the essence of what God is speaking to us.
It is a funny thing about Christians that we carry our opinions and offenses thinking that we have sanctified them and so we can keep them. (Not true of course but a topic for another day.) So often because we are the “white icing” and not the chocolate, we think we have arrived.
The chocolate icing here of course is symbolic of darkness. Spiritual essence can be lost in darkness, never even registering in less we are really looking for it.
Metaphorically speaking water represents spiritual things, and the opaque icings represent things of the world, good or bad, light or dark.
Our lesson is that to hear God is a spiritual function, and it happens in our spirit. The more pure our spirit, the more easily we will discern the essence of what God is communicating. Many of the things that make us good natural listeners such as carrying about the person speaking, giving them our attention, not jumping in with our judgments and opinions about what they are saying, are also good habits to help us hear God more.
Nevertheless, hearing God is not the same as hearing people, and important things that will help us to hear God better are distinct because they don’t occur just in the moment, but in every moment.
Remember Luke 12:27, “Consider the lilies, how they grow; they do not toil, they do not spin. And yet I say to you that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”[2]
Today, if you will empty yourself of the cares of the world, release your opinions, judgments, offenses, etc you will find the spiritual essence, the essence of what God is saying to you, to be clearer and stronger within you.
[1] New King James Version®
[2] New King James Version®
