How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People

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Pete Greig: Nothing God says in any other way, in any other context, will ever override, undermine, or contradict what he has said in the Scriptures. We weigh prophecy against Scripture, but the Bible itself teaches us that prophecy is a gift of the Holy Spirit for all Christians essential for the building up 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. Pete Greig is the bewildered founder of the 24-7 Prayer movement and the Senior Pastor of Emmaus Rd church. 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 more we say ‘yes’ to Jesus, the more familiar and precious his voice becomes – and in time we will be able to say, like Cleopas, ‘ Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked? This book, How to Hear God, is meant to follow How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People, but I will say that it also stands well unconnected and on its own. It’s worth remembering how precious and rare the Bible was for many centuries so that we can be truly grateful for Bible Gateway that makes it so easily accessible in so many different versions and languages. Pete explores this practice in greater detail in his book, How to Hear God, which is a rich supplementary resource if you want to go deeper. It's not for the people on the stage or the spiritual elite, it's for normal people following Christ.And yet it’s one of the things I love most about God, and I think I probably had to unlearn and relearn most. So it’s massively, this is probably the most important thing you’ll ever learn to do, to listen to God. Exploring the story of Christ's playful, poignant conversation on the road to Emmaus, Pete draws deeply from the insights of a wide range of Christian traditions. Nothing could possibly matter more than learning to discern the authentic voice of God, but few things in life are more susceptible to delusion, deception and downright abuse. The penultimate chapter considers God speaking to his children, not just in religious contexts (including such means as Communion, Solitude and Sabbath), but in the whole of life – not least, Community, Creation and Culture.

In fact, the Bible says that your primary purpose – the reason for which you were born – is to enjoy a real, conversational relationship with an infinitely loving divinity – which is why you almost certainly hear him already, more than you realise. It’s a disconnection that comes, as the Anglican Service of Communion puts it, “through negligence, through weakness, and through our own deliberate fault”. Dispensationalism only really makes sense in the absence of miracles, which leads me to the third problem I had with hearing from God… 3.

The sections on dreams and the unconscious offer practical guidelines which come over as helpful and balanced. This is not coming to the Bible as a textbook for sound doctrine (important as that is), but rather coming to it as an invitation for meditation and revelation through conversation with God. AN ENTHUSIASTIC former parishioner used to recount his conversations with God to me: which sock God told him to put on first; when to turn the light on or off; what route to take while out walking.