Hearing God’s Voice Requires Listening

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: It’s easy to forget prayer is a two-way conversation with God. Here’s Dannah Gresh.

Dannah Gresh: For many of us our prayers are like nasty boys who ring front door bells and run away before anyone answers.

Nancy: This is Revive Our Hearts for Monday, September 28. I’m Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth.

So often, women write to me frustrated that they don’t know what God wants them to do in a this or that situation. It makes me wonder: have you been listening? God wants to communicate with us as much if not more than we want to talk with Him.

He speaks to us primarily first and foremost through His Word, but also through circumstances, through godly people in our lives, and prayer. But here’s the challenge: Sometimes when we’re pouring our hearts out to God, we forget that prayer is a two-way conversation. 

Well, today my friend and co-host Dannah Gresh is going to remind us how important it is to learn to listen to God when we’re praying. She’s continuing in a series entitled Habakkuk: Remembering God’s Faithfulness When He Seems Silent.

Let’s listen in as we learn about . . . well, listening! Here’s Dannah.

Dannah: The story is told of Franklin Roosevelt. While he was President, he often tired of the long lines of people he would have to receive at the White House, and he felt like the conversations were kind of superficial. In fact, he suspected that nobody was actually listening to him.

So one day he made a plan that he would whisper, “I killed my grandmother!” and just see how people responded. Well, interestingly enough, people said things like, “Marvelous! That’s fantastic! Bravo! Good for you! We’re so proud of you, Mr. President!” Until finally, at the end of the line, the Ambassador from Bolivia said, “I’m sure she had it coming.”

We’re not good listeners, are we? I mean, that’s a pretty believable story. I think in the moment of being in awe of meeting the President, our listening probably gets even worse . . . and it’s not so good to begin with! Listening is difficult for most of us. Fifty percent of our communication is made up of listening, and yet, we’re not very good at it.

We only tend to remember about seventeen- to twenty-five-percent of the things that we hear. And seventy-five-percent of people admit that they get distracted when they’re trying to listen. This is really significant, because research tells us that an inability to listen to one another is one of the major contributors to relationships breaking down, including marriage.

We need to get better at listening! It makes me wonder, How well do we listen to God? Are we good at it? I don’t know about you, but oftentimes I get into a rut in my prayer life where I’m talking to God—or maybe it’s at Him—and I really don’t do a lot of listening.

One of the most interesting quotes I came across as I was studying Habakkuk is from a man named Don Carson. He said,

For many of us, our prayers are like nasty boys who ring front doorbells and run away before anyone answers.

Today, I want to encourage you, don’t play “ding dong ditch” with the God of the universe! Habakkuk teaches us to listen. A lot of communication experts say that the reason we’re not good at listening is because there are lots of courses in communication and speaking, teaching us how to talk, but there aren’t very many places where we’re taught how to listen. 

But Habakkuk is a great tutor in this department. He’s going to teach us today that if we really want to experience breakthrough when we’re in times of pain and we’re asking God a lot of questions, we need to practice listening.

Let’s review where we’ve been.

• In the first session we talked about wrestling with God, and that it’s okay to ask Him our hard questions.
• In the second session we were reminded to look and see where God is at work. A lot of times He’s less concerned about what’s happening around us. The work He wants to do is inside of us, in our hearts.
• In our last session we learned that it’s so important when we’re wrestling with God that we do it by standing on the truth of what we already know to be true about Him, that we embed our questions in truth.

Today we’re going to come to a new point in the conversation between God and Habakkuk. Habakkuk chapter 2, verse 1. Habakkuk says,

I will take my stand at my watchpost and station myself on the tower, and look out to see what he [God] will say to me, and what I will answer concerning my complaint.

Nancy from Habakkuk series: I don’t believe this is a literal watchtower. Most commentators would agree with that. It’s a picture of Habakkuk saying, “I’m going to go to a place that’s quiet and alone and solitary, and look out to try to get God’s perspective on what’s happening.”

It’s picturing an attitude of expectation. Habakkuk is seeing himself as a lookout, as a sentinel on a watchtower. You can just picture this tall tower and the sentinel, the sentry. He stands up in the watchtower, and he looks out.

He wants to get the high view. He doesn’t want to just see what’s happening down here on the ground. He wants to be able to look out to the horizon and see what’s happening and what’s in the big picture.

So Habakkuk is saying, “I’m going to get up above my circumstances. I want to get God’s perspective on all this.”

Let me just tell you, ladies, it’s in that watchpost position where we find hope. It’s where we find perspective. That’s where we look to the Lord, we wait for Him, we listen to Him. It’s where we stop talking, finally, and we let God talk.

You see that in the Scriptures multiple times with people who had a lot to say to God, as Habakkuk has already had a lot to say to God, and they finally run out of words.

Then they say, “Okay, now I’m ready to listen.” It’s almost as if God is saying, “Let Me know when you’re through talking, and I’ll tell you what I think about this.”

But you have to get your heart to a place where you’re quiet and still and waiting and listening for God to speak. That’s the attitude we need as we go to the Word of God. 

Now, I believe this verse is the turning point of the book as far as Habakkuk’s story is concerned. Habakkuk goes up to his watchtower.

Dannah: Habakkuk decides to close his mouth, climb up in a tower and watch—or listen—to God. And this is a significant shift in the plotline of the story we see unfolding in Habakkuk. If you and I want to hear God’s voice through the pain, through the questions, through the hard things, we need to learn to watch. We need to learn to listen!

And Habakkuk does that, I think, in four specific ways, and I’m getting these just from this one single verse. I believe as we study this passage, we can see Habakkuk waiting in four different ways.

• First, we see him watching hopefully.
• Then we see him watching obediently.
• We see him watching faithfully.
• We see him watching perspectively.

(And if you are the “grammar police,” I am aware that “perspectively” is not actually in the dictionary. I made up the word. Stick with me!) Alright, let’s look at how we can position ourselves so that we can listen to God based on these four ways that Habakkuk watched God.

First of all, he watched hopefully. If you look at this verse, it says, “I will look out to see . . .” Some versions say, “I will wait to see . . .” The word there that was used in the original language, Hebrew, was qa. It’s a form of the word qavah, which means, “to wait.” Don’t we love it when God makes us wait for answers to our prayers and our questions? No, we don’t!

The word actually is rooted in the word qav, which means, “cord.” Now, I think this is important. I absolutely love it when I go on the treasure hunt of finding something in God’s Word that gives me breakthrough, and this was one of those things for me. Let me try to explain it.

Imagine a cord. I don’t have a cord, but I have a little rubber band here, alright? So I’m holding a rubber band, and I’m pulling it; I’m stretching it. You can visualize that with me. And so, the idea behind the word qav is the idea of a cord experiencing tension. You’re waiting; you’re waiting for that tension to break.

So if I start to pull this long and hard . . . (Some of you are already squinting. You’re going, “Don’t make it happen, don’t make it happen!” And yet, you kind of want it to happen!) Well, this is that feeling, that tension that we have when we’re waiting for release, and that is what this word is telling us. 

If I finally pull it hard enough, and I’m waiting in anticipation, it’s over! The fear is over; the questions are over; the “how long is this going to take?” is over. That’s the sense that this word is communicating to us. Now, our English language is so simple, so we don’t get that.

But I think when Habakkuk wrote this word in the Hebrew language, he understood this feeling of tension, this feeling of pain, this feeling of, “I want it to be over, but I’m so terrified of how this is going to end!” Does that feel familiar to you when you’re asking God your hard questions? This sure made sense to my heart. Hope is that tension.

Hope is that tension of being content where God has me right now in this hard place where I’m being stretched and pulled, and yet knowing, “There will be release; God will end this. One way or another, I’m going through this!” Hope, sadly, is about waiting. I wish I had better news for you, but I don’t. We all want hope.

The Bible tells us that when we don’t have hope, our spirit becomes faint! (see Prov. 13:12) But hope is about waiting. Maybe if we started to understand that, we could press into it just a little better. Psalm 39:7 says, “And now, O Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in you.”

That tension is a reminder that we’re not waiting for God to fix our circumstances not necessarily to heal our bodies, though we hope that He will, not necessarily to repair the marriage, although we hope that He will, not necessarily to bring our prodigal child home, although it is the deepest cry of our heart! What we are waiting for is Him alone. If those other things happen, those are great gifts from Him, but our hope is in Him.

We also see that Habakkuk is watching obediently. Now, it doesn’t say that outright in these verses, but he’s using military language when he talks about a “watchpost.” This would have been the highest vantage point in a city, and a soldier would climb into that vantage point so that he could look out and see if there were any enemies coming.

But when I thought about that, I considered the fact that soldiers are obedient, and Habakkuk is putting that picture in our minds, I think, to remind us that we need to be obedient. Are we obedient when we’re waiting to hear what God has to say?

Are we willing to hear directions from Him, our Commanding Officer, the King of kings? Are we willing to hear what He has to say and do it? Because if we’re not willing to obey Him, why would He answer our prayers in the way that we want them answered?

Really, this is a mutual love relationship, right? The Bible tells us in the book of John that when we love God, we obey Him. And He loves us, and because of that love for us, He does great things in our hearts. He delivers us; He restores us; He revives us. Are we doing our part to be obedient to the Lord?

I have to tell you, this is a really difficult one for me! Does anybody else here struggle with obedience? Like, I want God to speak to me. I want Him to tell me, “What’s the next thing, Lord?” And then when He does speak, I’m like, “Really? Do I have to do that!?”

I remember this specific time in my life. Testifying for the Lord in public places is hard for me. I can do it from a stage, I can do it in a small group when I’m leading a Bible study. But if you ask me to walk up to someone and just be an evangelist and fulfill the Great Commission in the middle of Barnes and Noble, well, then I’m terrified! Can anybody identify with me?

I love my pastor; he has such an anointing of evangelism on his life. The gospel oozes out of his mouth every time he comes into contact with someone new. That is not true of me! When I was in Barnes and Noble once, I was working on a book; the deadline was fast approaching.

I felt the Lord speak to me to testify to the woman who sat down next to me at my table that once was a very private place for me to work on my book. She plopped down with a stack of books, and they were strange books! They were on seances; they were on mystical things. I sensed immediately that she was into a lot of spiritual things—but not the right kind! And the Lord whispered into my heart.

And the thought that came into my heart was, “She needs to know about My love.” Well, I didn’t love her; I didn’t even know her! So I knew that that must be a thought from the Lord.

So I said, “Lord, what do you mean?” I was thinking He must want me to pray for her. And I felt Him say, “Tell her that I love her!” Well, I sat there, and I said the most honest thing I could think. In my heart I said, “Lord! I’m writing a book for your glory right now. I’m a little busy!” And it didn’t go away! The nagging feeling that I needed to speak to her did not go away!

I didn’t even know what I would say to this woman. I didn’t know anything about the books that she was reading. And I’m really sad to say that, that particular day, she left Barnes and Noble, and I did not obey the Lord. I don’t like telling that story.

But you know what? The pain of not being obedient, and how it bothered me for the days to come, informed my heart that the next time the Lord asked me to do that, “I will be obedient!”

Just a few weeks later, Bob and I were on a cruise. Now, we didn’t think long and hard about this cruise; it was a last-minute deal. For four-hundred dollars, each of us could get on a cruise, and we could enjoy an entire week of vacation! Now, we should have been concerned about the price, but we weren’t. We were the only people over the age of twenty-five on the boat, I think. Now, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but we had found our way on to a spring break, essentially, a “booze cruise.”

It was nice, because in the morning, the boat was all ours! All to us! Everybody else was sleeping off “the night before.” But we went on a little snorkeling trip one day, and we got on a tiny little catamaran with a whole bunch of college students (I’m assuming they were college students).

I saw one girl, a beautiful girl, with her head over the edge of the boat looking like she was feeling very unwell. I suspected it wasn’t motion sickness! And again, that Voice! All It said was, “Tell her I love her!”

“Oh, Lord, I know I told You that the next time this happened, I would obey You, but do You see how small this boat is? Everybody will hear this conversation!”

And so I just said, “Lord, I need help! I want to obey You, but I’m terrified! Is there any way You can make this easy?” And at that moment I remembered that I had some motion sickness medication in my little beach bag. I knew she wasn’t motion sick, but it was my easy entry. I got a cup of water, and I got the motion sickness medication, and I walked over to her.

I said, “You don’t look like you feel very well.”

She said, “N-o-o-o,” and looked at me with her green face.

I said, “I have some medicine that might help you!” (That was code for “prayer.”)

And she said, “I would love that!”

I gave her the medicine, and I gave her the cup. Then I said, “I hope this helps, but I really think that what I’m over here to do is to pray for you and to tell you that God loves you.”

And she looked up at me and a tear slipped down her cheek. I don’t know, something in my heart made me think maybe she had a mama at home praying for her. She had a knowing in her eyes. She said, “I really needed to hear that today.” I don’t know what happened the night before, but I think she needed to know that right here, right now, in this place, God still loved her.

I prayed for her, and then the girl next to her said, “Can I have some of that?” I thought she was talking about the medicine, but she was talking about prayer. She wanted me to pray for her, too!

It feels so good to obey the Lord! 

And people did hear me that day, and some of them probably thought I was crazy. But I obeyed Him. I encourage you, don’t feel the pain of not obeying the Lord. It doesn’t feel good!

Habakkuk also watches faithfully. Let’s remember that the book of Habakkuk is about events that will come to pass. Yes, Habakkuk is grieving and asking questions of God about the things that he’s seeing with his physical eyes. But he’s also being given by God’s Spirit things that he sees with his spiritual eyes—events that we will not see unfold until we get to the pages of Daniel.

There will be a coming captivity of God’s people, the nation of Judah. They will be carried off by the Chaldeans—a ruthless, proud, evil, mean-spirited people who will come to power in Babylon. We know this as the Babylonian captivity. Now, we can look back and look through the scriptural accounts and find out that it came to be true. But Habakkuk didn’t know that.

He didn’t know that the crazy things he was seeing in his head and feeling in his heart (I don’t know how it really worked for a prophet), he didn’t know they would come true, and yet he was faithful to write down what God told him.

It’s really interesting to me . . . This is one of the things where I become sort of an archeological geek, when I see that Scripture is affirmed through things we find in archeological digs. Many, many years ago some German archeologists were excavating what would have been Babylon. They found this amazing piece of stone that had ancient letters of antiquity carved into it.

It clearly spelled out some very specific things. It described Nebuchadnezzar’s campaign against Jerusalem. Right there, it had me! I was like, “Ooooh!” Nebuchadnezzar in archeology!”

It’s inscription confirmed a lot of the specific details that we read in Scripture—including the siege of Jerusalem, including the exile of a king named Jehoiakim, who would have been reigning at the time. It even recounted that treasures were stolen from the nation (we see that also written in the Scriptures), and it gave us an exact date for the takeover: March 16, 596 B.C.

Isn’t that amazing? Don’t you love it when what we find in the natural world supports what we find in the supernatural writings of Scripture? It’s amazing! But, what’s more amazing is that we can look back on these events through historical documentation, or that Habakkuk could look forward to them? 

Isn’t it hard for us to look forward to the promises and the things that we know Scriptures tell us will be true? I mean, God is going to make everything right! But maybe we’re too concerned with our own comfort, our own needs, our own wants, our own here-and-now to be as excited as Habakkuk was . . . as compliant as Habakkuk was.

In Hebrews chapter 11, we find that great hall of faith, where men and women who have walked in faithfulness are applauded, and they’re acknowledged. 

 “This is not comfortable for me, Lord, but You are God. I am not. I will climb up into my watchtower and I will watch to see this come to be.”

Let us learn from that. There are still prophecies of Scripture waiting to unfold. Are we handling them faithfully?

The last thing that I see is that Habakkuk watches perspectively. Now, I don’t think he was in a literal watchtower. Maybe he was; I don’t think so. But he is climbing to a place where he has a long view, a vantage point that allows him to see past what is here and now. That is part of watching faithfully.

Habakkuk is saying, “God, whatever’s happening here, right now, I want to be a part of Your big-picture plan. I want to see what is coming down the road. How can this pain that I’m involved in right now be a part of Your plan to restore the world to what You meant for it to be? to make all things new? to make all things right?”

I think that we have to climb into a proverbial watchtower to watch perspectively. For me, what that looks like, I’m a very visual person, so I’m maybe a little obsessive about it. I have to have a beautiful environment when I spend time in the Word. Does anybody else want that?

First of all, it has to be neat, not cluttered. I have this beautiful rocking chair on my porch that I set up just recently, because I thought, This is going to be my neat, uncluttered beautiful vantage point to watch perspectively.

I really like it if a candle is lit. And if that candle happens to match the color of my current Bible study, that is bonus points for Dannah! It makes me very happy!

What happens to me when I get in that place is, I can enter into my quiet time, and it takes me about twenty minutes to start listening to God. I really have a hard time unplugging from my to-do list, unplugging from the laundry. 

I don’t like doing the laundry, but as soon as I sit down to read my Bible, suddenly I need to do it! Anybody else feel me? Okay, so I take time to unwind and begin listening to the Lord. And when I do, the curtains that I wish I had, but I just can’t seem to find the time to buy after four years of remodeling my kitchen, well, I forget about them, and they don’t matter so much.

The bank account, how full or empty it is, I forget about it. The relationships around me that I love so much, they begin to pale just a little bit, so the relationship right in front of me—my love for Jesus—suddenly comes to the forefront.

And now I’m starting to see, “Oh, this little hobby farm that I live on, this is not it . . . as precious as it is to me.”

I get to play a role in a much bigger plan that God is unfolding. I am one character in a story that is beautiful and endless and will last for all time! And I want to play that part faithfully. I believe that, to get that perspective, we have to get in quiet places.

The point is this: Habakkuk is intentionally positioning himself, and we have to, too, on a regular basis. I realize that there are seasons of our lives and times in our lives where we have children or we are extremely busy, and our time with the Lord is in the rushed moments. 

But I encourage you to watch perspectively by setting yourself apart, by getting away from the clutter and getting in the quiet, where you can hear God’s voice, where you can listen. Most days, the perspective we need is for small hardships, but we do need them for big hardships.

And let me remind you that Habakkuk is passing on a baton of faith. He’s passed it to many who have gone before us, and we have a responsibility to continue to pass it on, because one day the hardest days, the most evil days will come! It will be right before Jesus shows up to fix everything! Are we passing on our faith so that those people are ready?

I want to try something. Why don’t we get our “listen” on? I mean, we get our “girl-gab” on pretty easy, right? But what if we just took a moment right now and we sat here in the silence and got quiet right where we are, right where you are, and we just listened to the Lord? Would you close your eyes?

Father, we are prone to talk at You, to say too much and to listen little. We want to make a commitment to follow the example of Habakkuk, to climb up into our watchtowers and be still and know that You are God; to put down our to-do list that we’ve written for You in our prayer journals.

We want to ask You, “Lord, what would You have us do to help with the unfolding of this big, beautiful rescue story You’re writing for the world?”

Would you just sit quietly and listen to the Lord?

Nancy: That’s my co-host, Dannah Gresh. In that recording session, we stopped right there in that room to listen. And you can take the important pause in your day wherever you are. I’ll invite you to do just that . . . in a few moments.

But I want to warn you: Listening can take practice if you’ve not been doing it as a routine part of your prayer life. In Dannah’s new Bible study on Habakkuk, she takes a whole week to guide you through the practice and discipline of being still before God and letting His Spirit search our mind and our heart we’ve read His Word, journaled, or prayed out loud.We’d love to send you a copy of this study so you can practice your listening to God skills. This new Bible study is our way of saying “thank you” when you make a donation to support the ministry of Revive Our Hearts.

Visit ReviveOurHearts.com to make your gift, or call us at 1–800–569–5959. Be sure to ask for Dannah’s Bible study on Habakkuk. 

By the way, starting later this week, we’re going to set aside the whole month of October to cry out earnestly to the Lord. We’ll focus on crying out for our own needs, for our families, for our churches, and for our nation and world. 

These are days of confusion and chaos, and we believe now is the time to cry out to the Lord. 

Our team has prepared a 31-day prayer challenge that will begin this Thursday. I want to urge you to take the challenge and share it with others. You can find out all the details and sign up for the challenge at ReviveOurHearts.com. 

Now, Habakkuk is so appropriate for the difficult times we’re living in when we can be tempted to walk in fear instead of faith. Tomorrow as Dannah continues in her series on Habakkuk, she’ll show us where we should be directing our fear so we can walk by faith. I hope you’ll join us again for Revive Our Hearts.

Now here’s Dannah is back to pray for us. I hope that as this podcast ends, you’ll be able to find a quiet place to sit with the Lord and practice climbing up into your watchtower to see what He will say to you through his Word.

Dannah: Lord, as we listen, will You make us obedient? Will You fill us with hope? Will You find us faithful? And will You give us new perspective? In the precious name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, amen.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth wants to encourage you to listen to God. It’s an outreach of Life Action Ministries.

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