Charles R Lanham

The Voices of God: Hearing God in the Silence Charles R Lanham 1. izdevums

A common complaint from many is that God never speaks to them. They pray, they argue, they plead, but God never responds. Fortunately their complaint, while common enough couldn?t be further from the truth. The truth is that God responds to every prayer, every request, and every cry or plea for help. The problem is not on God?s end. The problem is one that lies squarely on our own two shoulders, for we have forgotten how to listen for His Voice ? or more precisely His Voices ? and as a result we have lost the ability to hear and discern what He is trying to tell us. He created us in His image and likeness, and bestowed on us free will, a notion that to our great detriment we have all too often taken as an unrestricted license to do all that we desire rather than what is the right and good thing to do, what God desires for us to do. Man?s concupiscence, his inclination to sin, began almost before he took his first breath. Ignoring for the moment the serious damage that sin does to our souls and to our relationship with God we must also consider how it affects our spiritual hearing. Every time we sin we do damage to the spiritual cochlea of our soul. Our ability to hear the tiny whispering sound of the LORD is diminished by the ever increasing, overwhelming noise of sin. The good news is that, unlike the physical damage to our ears which often results in the permanent loss of hearing, we can almost always regain any loss of spiritual hearing. Certainly not without serious effort and persistence but with God?s grace and the will to build a close, personal relationship with Him, anyone, no matter how much the sinner, can once again hear God?s voice.