That title sounds a bit like a supermarket tabloid headline, doesn’t it? Many people I’ve talked to are interested in hearing from God and interested in having a supernatural encounter with God but do not testify to such an experience happening in their reading of Scripture. One author who has tried to address this unfulfilled longing is Robert Mulholland, a professor who has spent his life studying how people interact with the Lord. Here are some tips and insights from his book, Shaped By The Word:
“You are the ‘victim’ of a lifelong, educationally enhanced learning mode that establishes you as the controlling power (reader) who seeks to master a body of information (text) that can be used by you (technique, method, model) to advance your own purposes,” (p. 19). Yet, in reading the Bible we want to do the opposite—we want God to be the controlling power who communicates back to us in ways consistent with God’s loving purposes and plan.
So instead, when reading the Bible he recommends: 1. “Listen for God to speak to you in and through, around and within, over and behind and out front of everything that you read. Keep asking yourself, ‘What is God seeking to say to me in all of this?” 2. Respond to what you read” with your heart and spirit,” rather than only your intellect and reason. 3. Constantly pause to hear from God, reading to know and understand God better. 4. As you’re reading, examine yourself to see how you relate to the characters in the Bible, listening for God’s communication to you, and thoughtfully “act on what God communicates.”
Many of us deeply long for God to communicate to us but overlook one of the main tools of God’s communication because we treat that mode of communication like we would any other book. Hopefully as we attempt Mulholland’s other suggested method (which is congruent with many of the ancient Christian teachers and missionaries) we will have more frequent and more personal communication from the Lord!
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