Learning to Listen

If you were to define prayer, how would you do it?  Obviously, prayer is talking to God, but a vital component of prayer is listening to God.  The great need in our life is to learn to discern the voice of God.

One of the great prayers in Jewish life was the Shema.  Many Jews of Jesus’ day, and most likely Jesus Himself, prayed this prayer two or three times a day.

You find it in Deuteronomy 6:4ff,
 
Have you ever noticed how the most common prayer of the Old Testament and the very verse Jesus said was the Greatest Commandment starts?  The most common prayer of the Old Testament starts with the word “hear.”

We so often think of prayer as talking to God, but the Shema starts with “Hear.”  On the Mount of Transfiguration, the Father spoke from the cloud and said, “This is my beloved Son; listen to Him.”  In Luke 8:17 Jesus said, “Take care then how you hear,” or “how you listen.”  

And in John 10:14 Jesus says something amazing, “I am the good shepherd.  I know my own and my own know me.”  How do we know that we know Him?  If you go back to verses 3-5, Jesus says He is the Shepherd and we are the sheep and “The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.  When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice.”

Following Jesus, being His disciple, really comes down to two things in this passage:
So, before I can love God with all I have, I must learn to listen to Him.  Before I can follow Him, I must learn to recognize His voice.  How do I do this?  I must spend time in His Word, but I must also learn to sit quietly before Him and learn to recognize His whisper.

We are surrounded by voices that scream for our attention, but there is only one voice that we have to recognize and when we do it makes all the difference.