Exerpt from Chapter 4

Hearts Warmed by God’s Encouragement

Because God speaks spiritual words in the deepest part of our being (our spirit), when we awaken to his voice we often sense it only dimly. Something stirs inside, but we are not quite sure what is going on. People sometimes lament that, while they believe the Bible, it does not tell them whom to marry or what career to choose. They assume that God will speak cognitively to them, that is, clearly and coldly to their rational faculties so they will know exactly what to do. They are waiting for a voice to say, “Marry Jason,” or, “Become an auto mechanic.” But God speaks to our hearts and his voice will probably first be experienced as warm and spiritual rather than cold and cerebral. When God speaks from heaven in response to Jesus’ prayer, we see various levels of cognitive understanding in those who heard (John 12:28-30). They knew something had happened, but some interpreted the sound as thunder; others thought an angel had spoken while still others heard what God said. When he speaks, our conscious mind may have little comprehension, but we feel his word warming our heart and delighting our souls. Paul assures us that even though our minds perceive “through a glass darkly,” we are on the right track when we sense God’s faith, hope, or love (1 Cor.13:12-13 KJV).

Our Lord speaks to people in a wide variety of ways. One may hear through nature, another through music, one while praying for others, and another through spiritual reading. He can speak directly through the Bible (which is by far the most common way), through prophecy, dreams, visions, circumstances, and even in an audible voice. On one occasion he spoke through a donkey. God is a Spirit and we just cannot predict how he will move or what he will say. Like the wind in the trees, we cannot see him, but we can see the effect he produces (John 3:8) and the one thing we can say with certainty is that God’s word greatly encourages those who receive it. Even when his voice creates disturbance within, it usually arises from a self-centred resistance to his love. If we are receptive when God speaks, he puts heart into us.

Encouragement stands out as a major attribute of God in the New Testament. He is described as “the God of steadfastness and encouragement” (Rom. 15:5), the one “who encourages the downcast,” (2 Cor. 7:6 NAB) and “the God of all encouragement” (2 Cor. 1:3 NAB). When Jesus was about to die and return to heaven, he told his disciples he would send them the Holy Spirit. Of all the words he could have used to describe this third person of the Trinity, he chose Parakletos, which is closely related to paraklēsis, the word often translated encouragement in the New Testament. Jesus thus gives an unmistakable message: the Holy Spirit is the great Encourager. God is like the inspiring teacher to whom students send letters thirty years later. He is the coach that the kid from the inner city says saved him from a life of crime. He is the loving dad we want to please more than anyone else in the world.

The word of God, whether spoken directly by him or through another human being, gives a message of hope and optimism. A man named Joses apparently had such a positive effect on the people to whom he spoke that the apostles changed his name to Barnabus which means Son of Encouragement (Acts 4:36). We are not left in any doubt as to the reason behind his ability to uplift others. His encouraging nature stemmed directly from the fact he was “full of the Holy Spirit and faith” (Acts 11:22-24). God is love and if we hear his voice, it builds us up.

We often see precisely this effect in the people to whom Jesus spoke. His encounter with the tax collector Zacchaeus illustrates this point vividly (Luke 19:1-10). Tax collectors were spiritual outcasts in first century Judaism. In fact, the term “tax collector” equated to sinner. Nevertheless, as Zacchaeus sat perched in a sycamore tree, Jesus calls out to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today” (v. 5). In Jewish culture, eating a meal with someone meant sharing one’s life with the person and accepting them into fellowship. Here, as elsewhere, Jesus’ treatment of this despised class turned the Pharisees’ religious world on its head.

Once at Zacchaeus’ home, Jesus eats in the luxury of the ill-gotten possessions and yet utters not a single word of condemnation. Exhilarated by Christ’s acceptance, Zacchaeus makes no mistake in seizing the opportunity being handed him. He enters into Jesus’ great generosity of heart and bursts out with the declaration that he will give half his possessions to the poor and pay back four-fold anyone he has defrauded. Jesus culminates the renovation of this life with the ultimate encouragement—pronouncement of eternal well-being. “Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (v.9,10).

For Whom Do We Listen?

Listening is largely a passive exercise, especially when it comes to hearing someone we cannot see. As we shall consider, we must come to the place of inner quietness. Our own mental activity will cause us to doubt whether we have heard God or merely conjured something from our imagination. Though largely passive, however, listening is not entirely so. Someone has coined the phrase “active listening.” The name I have chosen for this portion of the prayer pattern, attentiveness, suggests an active element in listening. Its root, attend, derives from the Latin word, attendere, to stretch towards. When we attend to something, we stretch ourselves toward it. Listening in prayer is active in that we alone decide to whom we will “stretch ourselves.” When we close our eyes to pray, do we expect to hear a voice of condemnation or the voice of a loving, encouraging Father? Do we look for a cosmic high school principal ready to judge our every move, or Jesus, the one who tells us we are going to make it? The decision is ours to make, not something for which we passively wait. What we decide will determine how readily we look forward to prayer.

Scripture specifically describes Satan as the accuser of God’s people (Rev. 12:10). Unwittingly, we accept his voice in the place of our Lord’s with the inevitable consequence that we do not look forward to prayer. Knowing God’s true nature draws us to him and motivates us to pray more and more. Brother Lawrence enjoyed God’s presence almost continuously. His underlying view of the divine goodness made this “practice of the presence of God” possible. He said he kept himself in the Lord’s presence “by a simple attention, and a general fond regard to God.” He could look with fondness because he was expecting to meet a God who loved him, who was merciful, kind, and patient.

When we expect to hear God speaking to us about his love, the joy he bestows, the life of grace, the invitation to come to him boldly, we have tuned into the divine frequency. In other words, the goodness of God is an interpretive key for discerning his voice. Now, as we wait in the stillness and solitude, we may look for signs of encouragement welling up from inside. For many years our family lived beside the Niagara Escarpment, a long cliff several hundred feet high that stretches from Niagara Falls many miles north into Ontario before heading south into Wisconsin. Every year thousands of birds of prey are funnelled between Lakes Erie and Ontario up and over the Escarpment on their annual spring migration. Hundreds of people come to watch at strategic points where the birds use thermals to ascend easily over the Escarpment and onward on their journey north. In the listening portion of prayer, we wait like the big birds for the warm breathings of God’s Spirit to lift us up. For where we feel the swell of hope, there we will be justified in looking for God. But “those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint” (Isa. 40:31).

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