Most people are not waiting for God to speak. They are waiting to hear something that confirms what they have already decided.
The Hebrew word for "hear" is shema, and it does not separate hearing from obeying. They are the same motion. Biblical hearing is not acoustic or passive. It is a whole-life response: understand, believe, act, move.
Philip demonstrated this when he left a thriving revival in Samaria to stand on a desert road, with no explanation given. He heard. He moved. And on that road he found one man who would carry the gospel into Africa. God rarely gives the full picture. He gives the next step. And the next step is only available to the person who obeyed the last one.
But hearing gets complicated because three voices are speaking into your life at any given moment: the enemy, your own desires, and God. The most dangerous of the three is not the enemy. It is you.
Your own ambition can generate an internal voice that sounds exactly like conviction, that feels exactly like God.
Discernment is not the ability to tell right from wrong. It is the ability to tell right from nearly right. And it is not a gift that arrives fully formed. It is a capacity built over time, by reason of use, by years of bringing decisions before God and tracking what happens.
- Why hearing God is obedience, not passive reception
- How to identify the three voices speaking into your life, and why your own voice is the most dangerous
- What discernment actually is, and how confirmation bias quietly distorts it
- How community is not optional for the hearing life, and what to do when two sincere believers claim opposite words from the same God
- How to cultivate a hearing life, and why seasons of silence are not abandonment
- He is not silent. The question is whether you have become the kind of person who, when you hear, moves.
Some wording on this page was corrected as the episode came in from the podcast feed, where the title or the punctuation did not match the way we write.
The whole message, in words.
Lightly cleaned, so it reads. Nothing was added or taken out.
Most people are not waiting for God to speak. They are waiting to hear something that confirms what they have already decided.
The Hebrew word for "hear" is shema, and it does not separate hearing from obeying. They are the same motion. Biblical hearing is not acoustic or passive. It is a whole-life response: understand, believe, act, move.
Philip demonstrated this when he left a thriving revival in Samaria to stand on a desert road, with no explanation given. He heard. He moved. And on that road he found one man who would carry the gospel into Africa. God rarely gives the full picture. He gives the next step. And the next step is only available to the person who obeyed the last one.
Read the full transcript
But hearing gets complicated because three voices are speaking into your life at any given moment: the enemy, your own desires, and God. The most dangerous of the three is not the enemy. It is you.
Your own ambition can generate an internal voice that sounds exactly like conviction, that feels exactly like God.
Discernment is not the ability to tell right from wrong. It is the ability to tell right from nearly right. And it is not a gift that arrives fully formed. It is a capacity built over time, by reason of use, by years of bringing decisions before God and tracking what happens.
In this episode:
- Why hearing God is obedience, not passive reception
- How to identify the three voices speaking into your life, and why your own voice is the most dangerous
- What discernment actually is, and how confirmation bias quietly distorts it
- How community is not optional for the hearing life, and what to do when two sincere believers claim opposite words from the same God
- How to cultivate a hearing life, and why seasons of silence are not abandonment
He is not silent. The question is whether you have become the kind of person who, when you hear, moves.
Or come and hear it live.
A recording is a good second. Sunday at 10:00 in the tent is the first.