How (Not) to Hear God's Voice

This post continues my reflections on Philip Cary's book Good News for Anxious Christians: 10 Practical Things You Don't Have to Do, which I reviewed in the previous post. In particular, I'm interested in what Cary has to say in the first two chapters, where he talks about hearing God's voice and recognizing the difference between our own intuitions and the Holy Spirit.

Cary describes how a very honest student in one of his college classes was having trouble with the notion of revelation: it's so hard to tell if it's really the voice of God speaking in one's heart, the student explained, and if you can't tell it's God's voice, then how can God reveal anything?


Theologians talk about the difference between general revelation (what anyone can learn using their abilities to observe and reason) and special revelation (the Bible being the primary example). The curious thing about the practice of trying to hear God's voice in one's heart, I'm realizing, is that it doesn't fit well into either category. It's hardly general revelation if it's specific to one person's heart, but many evangelicals would hesitate to claim a dream, vision, angelic visit, new prophetic message, or direct encounter with Jesus, at least the way God's word historically came to us and was recorded as scripture. (Those who clearly hold that divine special revelation continues in the present time might include charismatics, for instance, along with Catholics regarding the Pope's speaking ex cathedra, and the Mormons.)

Cary's basic argument, I would say, comes down to this: it's valuable to listen to your heart, but doing so will only result in self-knowledge, because God speaks to us as a person does — meaning from outside of ourselves. So listen to your heart — indeed, cultivate the wisest voices in your heart — but don't mistake them for God's voice.

Cary suggests that we have many voices in our hearts, and this rings true for me. When I'm trying to make a decision, there's often a voice saying "Hey! Wouldn't this be fun?!", which tries to drown out the voice that says "You know you really should...", and may or may not be in agreement with the one that's pointing out "Well if you do this, here's what people will think of you...." Sometimes I can hear my mom's "voice," or what I think a caring friend or pastor would say, or there's some scripture involved. There's a connection here to the first few chapters of Proverbs, where the father passionately calls his son to store up his instruction, get wisdom above all else, and write love and faithfulness on the tablet of his heart.

Cary argues that we should turn our hearts outward, and let them be shaped by good external voices, including scripture and what we hear in a community of believers (Philippians 4:8 comes to mind). The result of this outward shift in focus, he explains, is that as our hearts are shaped and sanctified, we become wiser, and our internal voices will give us wiser and better intuitions.

On the other hand, if we remain fixated on hearing God's voice within our hearts, we may realize that we're not hearing anything that (if we're honest) really sounds like God at all — something I know I've worried about before. Or we may be like the person who, "in order to listen to herself, to pay heed to the wisest and most perceptive voice in her own heart... has to say it comes from God. She can't admit it's her own voice because that would make it unimportant." Wouldn't that disappoint a father like Solomon?

So what do I think, overall? Well, Cary has some very good arguments about the potential harm in trying to hear God's voice in one's heart, and I believe there's a solid scriptural basis for letting the right kinds of outside voices shape our hearts so they become wiser. As to how the Holy Spirit speaks to us today — Cary has made me suspicious that what I've taken for granted as the truth of the matter could be a relatively recent and perhaps theologically unfounded way of understanding things. It's made it very natural for me to read "heard God's voice in his heart" into verses like Acts 20:22, where Paul says the Spirit compelled him to go to Jerusalem.

What I need, I think, is to carefully study how scripture depicts the leading of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament Church. When the apostles were led by the Spirit, were they typically given dreams and visions? Or did they base their decisions on careful observations of the needs around them, combined with their knowledge of God's general commands? Most importantly, did anyone in scripture ever claim to "hear God's voice in their heart?"

One thing I will say, and I've told my students this: when it comes to learning what God wants from me, if I was putting money on either improving my ability to study and learn from scripture or on developing my ability to hear God's voice in my heart, my money would be on scripture.