To become good kings, we need validation and initiation. We need a kind and loving voice that tells us who we are and who we are to become. For with many of us, another voice has gotten there first. So we also need to see what the enemy has done to us to fashion our false self within us, and we need to shed that false self. Wounding experiences speak lies to a man’s heart, and decades of listening to the voices of shame, guilt, fear, and loss take their toll.
Thankfully, the enemy isn’t the only voice in our life. God is the master communicator, and he speaks to us today as surely as he did to the ancients who wrote the Scriptures. The Bible, God’s written revelation and the foundation and plumb line for our faith, reveals a God of ongoing dialogue, not a God who went mute after giving us a collection of divinely inspired writings.
In Hearing God, Dallas Willard wrote:
The ideal for hearing from God is finally determined by who God is, what kind of beings we are and what a personal relationship between our- selves and God should be like. Our failure to hear God has its deepest roots in a failure to understand, accept and grow into a conversational relationship with God, the sort of relationship suited to friends who are mature per- sonalities in a shared enterprise, no matter how different they may be in other respects. . . . “The sheep follow him because they know his voice” (John 10:4). . . .
In our attempts to understand how God speaks to us and guides us we must, above all, hold on to the fact that learning how to hear God is to be sought only as a part of a certain kind of life, a life of loving fellowship with the King and his other subjects within the kingdom of the heavens.
