Lord, Teach Me to Listen

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” — John 1:1 (KJV)

John calls Jesus “the Word.” Why? Tozer says a word is how you express what you think, so calling the Son of God the Word tells us that God is the kind of God who speaks. And not only in the past. “God is speaking. Not God spoke, but God is speaking. He is by His nature continuously articulate.”

This, he says, is how the world exists at all. “The briefest and only satisfying cosmogony is this: 'He spake and it was done.'” (A cosmogony is an account of how the universe began.) “In the beginning He spoke to nothing, and it became something.” All through Genesis 1 the pattern repeats: God said, and it was so.

The Bible is God's written Word, and Tozer treasures it. But it is alive because God is still speaking through it: “It is the present Voice which makes the written Word all-powerful. Otherwise it would lie locked in slumber within the covers of a book.”

He thinks God's voice reaches everyone, even people who have never opened a Bible. In Proverbs, wisdom is pictured as a woman calling out in the streets: “Unto you, O men, I call.” Then he adds a sad line: “The tragedy is that our eternal welfare depends upon our hearing, and we have trained our ears not to hear.”

When God spoke from heaven to Jesus, some bystanders explained it away. “It thundered,” they said. Tozer thinks we do the same. “We are more likely to explain than to adore.” And yet, he says, almost everyone has had moments that are hard to explain: “a sudden sense of loneliness, or a feeling of wonder or awe in the face of the universal vastness.” He suggests those moments may be God trying to get our attention.

He even guesses that every beautiful thing humans have made, music, poetry, art, is a faulty response to that voice. Then he admits it is only his own idea. “It is my own belief (and here I shall not feel bad if no one follows me).” And: “But you can be a good Christian and not accept my thesis.” Blunt as he is, Tozer knows the difference between the Bible and his own opinions.

What he is sure of is this: “The Voice of God is a friendly Voice.” The problem is noise. “Religion has accepted the monstrous heresy that noise, size, activity and bluster make a man dear to God.” But God still says, “Be still, and know that I am God.” So: get still, get alone, open your Bible. First you may sense only “a sound as of a Presence walking in the garden.” Then a voice. Then the words on the page become “warm and intimate and clear as the word of a dear friend.”

He wants us to read the Bible as “not only a book which was once spoken, but a book which is now speaking.” “Come at once to the open Bible expecting it to speak to you.” And he prays, sounding, in 1948, as if he lived today:

“Lord, teach me to listen. The times are noisy and my ears are weary with the thousand raucous sounds which continuously assault them. Give me the spirit of the boy Samuel when he said to Thee, 'Speak, for thy servant heareth.' Let me hear Thee speaking in my heart. Let me get used to the sound of Thy Voice, that its tones may be familiar when the sounds of earth die away and the only sound will be the music of Thy speaking Voice. Amen.”

If Tozer found 1948 noisy, imagine what he would make of a phone that buzzes a hundred times a day. “My ears are weary” might be the most relatable line in the book. And notice who he wants to be like: Samuel, a boy when God first called him.

One thing to do this week: put your phone in another room for ten minutes. Open your Bible to a short passage (1 Samuel 3 is a good one) and read it slowly, “expecting it to speak to you.” Write down one sentence that stood out, and ask God what he means by it.