Each one of us has been born with an extraordinary superpower: an innate ability to hear the voice of God. Discerning God’s voice is one of the most astounding yet confusing things a human being can ever learn to do. Astounding because, well, what could be more amazing? With four words – “Let there be light” – (just two in Hebrew) God created more than 100 billion galaxies (Genesis 1:3). “The Lord merely spoke, and the heavens were created. He breathed the word, and all the stars were born” (Psalm 33:6, NLT). What on earth might happen if he were to speak a few words to me? Find the 24-7 Prayer Lectio 365 app, a free daily devotional resource that helps you pray the Bible every day. You even forget that it’s about studying the Bible. The Bible has connected you directly with God. That’s contemplation. And that might sound scary, and big, and for super-spiritual people, but it’s actually really, really simple. And in the book, I explain how to do it. And Lectio is much more that approach. It’s less about exegesis and more what is God whispering to me through this? And there are four steps to doing it that I outline in the book. The Latin phrase is Lectio Meditatio. That’s just meditate on what you’ve read.

Exploring the story of Christ's playful, poignant conversation on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection, Pete draws deeply from the insights of a wide range of Christian traditions; weaving together the evangelical emphasis on hearing God in the Bible, and the charismatic commitment to hearing God in the prophetic, with the contemplative understanding of God's "still, small voice" within. One of the many problems with this view is that it disregards the fact that people can, and do, misunderstand and misapply the Bible just as much as any other means of divine communication. It also ignores the fact that the Bible itself teaches us to expect God to speak in ways outside of the Bible! Dispensationalism only really makes sense in the absence of miracles, which leads me to the third problem I had with hearing from God… 3. EXPERIENTIAL 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. Ultimately, the Bible is the language of God’s heart because it communicates with us its very nature. In reading the Bible we receive truth and sound doctrine, but we also encounter the love and life of God himself. It is a “ living book.” Pete Greig: Normal people. Busy, normal, confused people who sometimes wonder if God even exists. Yes. Hearing from God is primarily a discipline that we learn to distil through practice and obedience. 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?’But if this is starting to sound a bit onerous, please don’t worry. As usual, Jesus keeps the whole thing refreshingly earthy, relational and simple: “My sheep listen to my voice”, he says. “I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27). The primary mark of true discipleship (especially perhaps in a bewilderingtime such as this) is a posture of attentiveness towards his word. The word translated as “listen” in the passage from John about sheep and shepherds comes from the Greek akouó, from which we get words like ‘acoustic’ today. We may feel as dumb and defenceless as mere sheep, but our Good Shepherd has promised to lead us through this dangerous terrain if we will listen carefully for the acoustics; the nuance and tone of his voice.

He bases this current book around the wonderful story in Luke 24 of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, regarding it as a masterclass on learning to hear the voice of Jesus. It is about the ‘covert Christ’ drawing near and taking you on ‘a slow journey of deep discovery that will change your life’ (p.xv). There is a very useful introduction to the topic of each of the chapters –‘how to read this book in 5 minutes’– which gives good overview of the journey before we set off.How do we make sense of it? Where was God when we cried out for loved ones dying in overcrowded ICUs? And where is he now for the people of Ukraine? Is our faith relevant when things get tough? Does God have anything to say? Pete Greig: Yeah. And yet it’s one of the things I love most about God, and I think I probably had to unlearn and relearn most. Because you’re right, our assumption is if God speaks to me, it’s going to be a booming voice. It’s going to be unmistakable, angels, dramatic. And yet, mostly he speaks to us quietly and silently. I tell in the book, lots of examples of times that people just miss Jesus completely. They just miss him. There’s the couple on the road to Emmaus. Most people insist of hearing God’s voice on their own terms. Perhaps we need a newfound willingness to take counsel from a brother or sister, as a mark of humility and surrender. Sometimes he waits for us to humble ourselves. I like how he doesn't stop at hearing God physically and 'in your heart'/'the silent whisper' but he paints the whole picture with a thorough exploration of how God speaks in the bible to how He speaks through our concsience to Him speaking through other people all the way to how He speaks through the 'unholy' culture.

So you’ve got, as it were, the external, objective ways God speaks, and then the more internal subjective ways. I talk about that lovely story of Elijah on the mountain, and God is not in the fire. He’s not in the earthquake. And then God speaks in a still small voice. And so we learn to discern the whisper of God in our lives. In many ways, this is the aim of this whole book: that we become so familiar with the word of God in its most obvious forms—in Scripture, in prophecy, in dreams, and in soul friendships—that we are enabled to hear God speak in all the earth through people and things that are not in any way consciously Christian.” In 1 Corinthians 12 the apostle Paul lists various expressions of prophecy including words of knowledge (in which God shows us things about other people that we had no other way of knowing), words of wisdom (in which God gives us great insight), etc. Elsewhere in Scripture we see God speaking very regularly through dreams and visions.We also hear his voice through the discipline of prayer, which is of course a two-way communication. Greig introduces the reader to the ancient approach known as lectio divina; harnessing the power of imagination and meditation. The four main steps of lectio divina, the author made highly popular in ‘ How to Pray’, by using the simple acronym, P.R.A.Y: Pause, Read ( lectio), Reflect (meditation), Ask ( oratio) and Yield (contemplation).

But you are absolutely right. It’s also blooming hard. It’s really difficult. All of us have been hurt. Probably, maybe times you’ve cried out to God and you needed him to speak and give you an answer. And he doesn’t seem to have answered. Or maybe a preacher abused God’s Word to try and manipulate a political election or force you to do something wrong. Or maybe, well, I had a woman come up to me after church one day. She looked me in the eyes and said, “God has commanded me to marry you.” Nothing could possibly matter more than learning to discern his authentic voice, and yet few things in life are more susceptible to delusion, deception, and downright abuse. In largely focusing on Lectio as a means of "Hearing God" in scripture there was a tendency to dismiss other means of reading the Bible devotionally, particularly reading larger sections that give us a greater sense of the narrative, and which would have been, in the absence of personal Bibles and chapter and verse, to original way in which scripture would literally have been "heard" rather than the atomised, bite-sized approach that has been the norm of too many evangelical Bible notes, and into which Lectio can easily descend.As a book, this is a simple read, but this is not a negative on the book, but rather it corresponds well to readers who may be new to the faith, new to spiritual disciplines – or are emerging form foundational programs such as Alpha. In many ways, this book is an authoritative collective of the wisdom and works of some of the greats of the faith but it includes the insight, commentary and stories from Pete’s experiences and life. Fellow Author, Shane Claiborne, comments similarly, saying that “this book draws from the well of wisdom that has nourished the faithful for centuries.” Though this is not some new deep academic and intellectual read on the desert fathers or the spiritual disciplines, it certainly could be seen as one of the best introductory looks at spiritual disciplines – and it’s well done. For this reason, I see it as a Spirit-focused and spirit-renewed version of Richard Foster’s classic, Celebration of Discipline. I suspect Pete Greig’s work in How to Hear God will now be the book I refer others to first in conversations around spiritual disciplines. One of my main takeaways is this: if I were stranded on a deserted island and all I had was a Bible, that really would be sufficient. However, there are so many other ways that God can speak to us, and I want to grow in my desire for those. I don’t want to miss out on all the creative ways God talks to me. Pete Greig: I use Bible Gateway every single day of my life. Often repeatedly. I cannot tell you how grateful I am for this extraordinary resource. I recently undertook a 330-mile solitary pilgrimage from the Scottish island of Iona to the Northumbrian island of Lindisfarne. Both these islands were centers of Christian faith and evangelization in the 7th and 8th centuries AD. Lindisfarne is particularly famous for the Lindisfarne Gospels. These are breathtakingly beautiful hand-written transcriptions of the Gospels illustrated in bright colors with wonderful designs. They’re one of the most treasured ancient manuscripts in all antiquity. 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. What a wonderful gift God has given us in his Word, and in this technology that enables us to read it (and pray it) so easily.