Faith Practices: Listen Deeply
A sermon brought forth from John 10:1-5 preached on July 24, 2022
What do you do when all the familiar methods of seeking God come up empty?
Maybe like me, you grew up in a church full of religious activity. Over the last decades, there has been no lack of programs that churches like Tinkling Spring have offered to plug people into their activities. We’ve assumed that a church that keeps its members busy is fruitful. We’re no strangers to the days of the thick Wednesday evening schedule of the LOGOS Program and the long weekday evenings of ministry meetings. Our church calendars have thinned out since those days, but still they keep us busy. We are no strangers to religious activity.
But what happens when all that engagement in religious activity leaves us with a desperate longing in our hearts for God? Have we not been told that tending to church is tending to God?
But what happens when we’ve tried all that and still feel far from God? For decades now, the message in church communities, whether spoken or not, is the more we get involved in church, the more we get involved with God and God with us. We hope that’s true, but too often we confuse those two. We can attend a church for years without ever attending to God. We can spend a lifetime in a church learning about God without ever knowing God.
For this and the next five Sundays, we will explore some of the spiritual disciplines of our faith. The spiritual disciplines train us to take a faith that most merely claim, and workshop it. The spiritual disciplines challenge us to walk away from the “what” of our faith and into full relationship with the “Who” of our faith. These disciplines, if we’re willing to give ourselves to them, will condition and equip us to live fully and freely in the present reality of God. Spiritual director, Ruth Haley Barton, often says that “our desire for God is the truest and most essential us.”
For these next weeks, we will focus on the spiritual disciples of listening, celebrating, prayer, wonder, remembering, and serving. We’ll take these one week at a time. This morning, we begin with listening.
Every spiritual discipline, and certainly those five, begins with listening. Listening is the most important and fundamental of the spiritual disciplines. There is no celebrating, prayer, wonder, remembering, or serving without first listening. How do we listen to God? How do we listen for God?
Last week, Judy preached on the story of Jesus to Mary and Martha’s house, where Martha gave herself to work in the kitchen among the clanging of pans and the hurried work of preparing a meal for who knows how many guests. Jesus knows there’s a time for that kind of work for all of us, but Martha picked the wrong time for it. Jesus tells her so. Mary, He said, chose the one thing that mattered in that moment. She sat at the feet of Jesus and listened.
We too live amid the clang and the clatter. Life is often an assault on the ears. It’s difficult to sort through the roar of our noisy lives. Listening for Jesus’s voice amid all that fills up our ears and our days is not easy. It takes more than ears to listen. Listening involves eagerness. That’s what separates it from mere hearing.
Flocks of sheep congregate on hillsides out in the country or just outside of towns. Shepherds bring their flocks together because there is more protection in numbers. Shepherds don’t mind that their sheep mixed in with those of another flock because whenever it’s time to part ways, a shepherd calls out to his sheep and only those belonging to him come running. The sheep know their shepherd’s voice and respond.
The spiritual discipline of listening has a goal: to know Christ’s voice. Jesus wants us attuned to Him.
Adam McHugh, in his book, The Listening Life1, says that we begin to know what God sounds like when we keep our ears locked into the voice of scripture. He writes,
“Scripture is a tuning fork for adjusting our ears to the tone of God’s voice so that we can identify His true voice over false ones.”
We give ourselves to the spiritual discipline of listening because we’ve heard that God’s voice fills all of creation—that it has from the beginning and still does today, and the reason we can’t hear Him speak is simpler than we imagine: we haven’t spent enough time listening for it, training our ears for it. We do not know His voice.
But listening, McHugh instructs, “is more than straining to hear voices;” listening is how we tend to the condition of our hearts. The spiritual discipline of listening cultivates an openness inside us. That cultivation bears fruit, and the fruit of this listening is that we will become attuned to God’s voice. Listening is soul conditioning.
Listening is a spiritual discipline because it’s not our first instinct. We are built to assert ourselves. So many give into their lesser natures and speak before they ever think to listen. We know how this goes: in conversations, instead of listening, we let the other afford us a break so we can think of what we want to say next. There’s no listening involved; in scenarios like that, we’re only talking at each other. But none of that is listening. We have ears that hear when others talk, but unless we seek to understand the one we’re in conversation with, we’re not listening. There’s a reason we have two ears and only one mouth.
We cultivate the spiritual discipline of listening when we finally put ourselves away—when we listen to understand, and only to understand; and speak to be understood, and only to be understood.
In his masterful work, Life Together2, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes,
“The first service that one owes to others in Christian fellowship consists in listening to them. Just as loving God begins with listening to His Word, so the beginning of love for our brothers and sisters is learning to listen to them. Many people are looking for an ear that will listen. They do not find it among Christians because we are talking where we should be listening.
“But those who can no longer listen to another can no longer listen to God either. And this is the beginning of the death of the spiritual life.”
How would our relationships change—how would we change—if we approached every situation with the intention of listening first? God wants His people attuned to one another.
Sheep aren’t the smartest animals ever, but they know how to protect themselves. When they hear the voice of a stranger they refuse to follow. How do we get to know Christ’s voice? We listen. We read scripture. We condition ourselves within a noisy world by spending time every day getting away and keeping silent, if only for a few moments.
Silence has a sound to it. It’s filled with God. Listen deeply for God’s voice within moments of silence. That’s how we will come to know His voice. When all the familiar methods of seeking God come up empty, put them away and simply tend to God in the silence. Silence is filled with God.
I’d like to share with you one of my regular prayers. “Speak, O Lord. Your servant is listening.”
By praying it, I condition myself to recognize God’s voice. I don’t expect fireworks. I don’t expect anything from God. God doesn’t often work that way. But I do expect that prayer to re-condition me for whatever God is doing. That’s something to keep in mind as you nurture the spiritual discipline of listening: It’s less about what you hear and more about drawing yourself closer to the One who hears you.
I invite you into the spiritual practice of deep listening this week. Try this: carve out time to do nothing but sit still. Do that three times this week.
Bring nothing to your time but your willingness to be found in God’s presence. There’s no need to bring any words or expectations with you. They’ll just get in the way.
And the rest of the week, do as leader and writer Alexandra Bell suggests,
“Speak as if God is listening and listen as if God is speaking.”
Trust that both are true.
All praises to the One who made it all and finds it beautiful! Alleluia! Amen.
McHugh, Adam, The Listening Life, 2015.
Bonhoeffer, Deitrich, Life Together, 1954.