Listen (eBook)

Chapter 1

Listen With Your Ears

Different Views on Prayer

To many of us, the idea of praying—hearing from God, listening to God, and talking to God—is foreign. It’s confusing, and maybe we’d rather just stay away from it because we don’t get it. There are misunderstandings around the idea of prayer. Maybe you don’t know where to begin, and so you just don’t.

Maybe you wonder if there are fancy words you should use, or if you have to have some beads, or you don’t know if you should cross it up or exactly what order you go in—and if you don’t go in the right order, does that negate the entire prayer? Do you have to start a prayer a certain way or end a prayer a certain way?

Perhaps you’re suspicious that God hears other people but not you. He seems to listen—at least to some people—because you hear stories and you want to believe they are true, because God is loving. But how do I know he loves me…and listens to me?

Personal, Not Private

Prayer is personal, but it’s not private. Some of us think that prayer is just between me and God. Yes, if we don’t talk about our relationship with God with other people, we can start to question whether it’s real or just in our imagination—we can debate with ourselves whether or not God really speaks to us at all. Did God really say that? Was that a thing? Was that just bad sushi? Am I just imagining from the thing that I watched last night, or did God really say something to me this morning?

Prayer is personal, but it’s not private. We need each other to share our experiences, shape our thinking, and to encourage one another.

The connectedness of our prayers is powerful and mysterious. Have you ever asked yourself…

“Can my prayer actually impact something that’s going on in the other side of the world?”

“Do I believe that I can whisper to God and that somehow, in some crazy mysterious way that we can’t comprehend, it actually matters somewhere else and to someone else?”

“Can I actually have a conversation with the God of the universe? Is that real? Is that even fathomable? I stuttered just talking to that guy; how can I talk with the God of the universe?”

“Is it possible that the God of all of this—the one who keeps life in existence, my heart beating, and my lungs breathing—might have something to say to me?”

Well, if He does, I would imagine that it’s probably beneficial to listen.

John 10:3-4 says this about Jesus, “He calls his own sheep by name and leads them. He goes on ahead of them and his sheep follow him because they know his voice.”

Friend, you too can know the voice of God. You—not the Pope, not the super-spiritual, not your great-grandmother.

You can.

You can actually know the voice of your God. It might seem strange. You might feel like you don't know if you want to, but maybe it’s because prayer has been abused in your past in some way. Maybe people spoke on behalf of God and told you crazy stuff and now you don’t want anything to do with that kind of business. Put that aside and sit in the reality that there is a God who created you and loves you and you can know His voice.

Grandma Henry

The idea of prayer was strange to me when I was a kid. I remember my great-grandmother— Grandma Henry—my parents referred to her as a prayer warrior. As a kid, I thought that was crazy. In my mind, the only thing she was fighting was gravity.

One day I was in the car with my dad in Victorville, California, and we were driving to her house to pick her up to go to church, my grandfather’s church. We pulled into the driveway and got out of the car to go get her. Every single morning, she made eggs and bacon and every single morning she prayed. I hadn’t witnessed it before this morning, but when I walked up to the door, I heard her shouting. I wondered if we should come back later.

Then, I heard my name and it weirded me out. That is, until I heard her say, “You protect him and you keep him, and you give him a purpose in this life....”

I stood there speechless. Grandma prayed for me.

And then, my dad whispered to me, “You know your great-grandmother, your grandmother, and your mother—they pray for you every single day.”

As a little kid, I didn’t fully understand what that meant, but somewhere inside of me, I knew that it mattered.

My great-grandmother, the prayer warrior.

The Loud Silent Voice

For me, talking to God became more personal when I was 16. I believed in God. I felt I had a true genuine relationship with Him. I was trying to follow Him, but I never sensed that I heard anything from Him.

Then, when I was 16 years old, I was at this camp called Woodleaf, and the guy that was speaking from stage said, “I want everyone to go out and read this passage from the Bible, and I just want you to sit there for an hour and see what happens.”

“Oh, man, that sounds terrible,” I thought. I went out and sat a bench by myself and read.

Nothing happened.

I read the verses again.

Nothing.

I was getting ready to pack it up and go to the pool, and then something happened. I sensed something—like a voice that was loud but silent. For the first time ever in my life, I got the sense that God spoke, and it didn’t have anything to do with what I was reading or what I had been thinking about.

He said, “Caleb, eventually you’re going to be a preacher.”

I wrote it down in my journal. In parentheses I put, “some kind of preacher,” because I couldn’t relate to any of the preachers/pastors that I had seen to that point.

That was the first time and I heard God’s voice, beyond a shadow of a doubt. Not audibly, but I heard it. Sometimes you just know that you know that you know. It never happened to me prior, and it didn’t happen to me for a while after that, but it was a moment that was really, really clear. God just spoke to me and it was a game-changer.

We’re talking about a God who communicates—not just through the Bible…not just through that preacher on the stage…but who actually whispers to me.

Quarter-life Doubts

Then I went through a quarter-life crisis about 10 years ago, and I started to believe that maybe He didn’t speak after all. I found myself at rock bottom. I had gone through a divorce. I thought that the path my life was on was over. I assumed I must have heard God wrong back there, and I started to doubt that what I had heard when I was 16 was real.

“I thought that I had heard God say something uniquely to me, but it must not have been real. It must not have been true. It must not have been the case, or maybe I just messed it up too much,” I doubted.

Maybe you’ve been there. Maybe you’ve been through the pain, letdown, disappointment. Maybe you can relate.

I remember I was swimming in a pool. It was 11:00 o’clock at night. I was just trying to get some exercise and clear my head because it felt like my life was crumbling around me. As I was swimming I heard something. Not audible, but just this thing inside of me—this thing that’s a voice, but not a voice, yet still talks. I believe it was God, and he said, “I’m going to allow you to be stripped of everything, so that when I bless you, you’ll understand that it’s me blessing you and not you blessing you.”

I thought, “Thanks?”

But right in the middle of the worst season of my life—when I didn’t know if I could even hope—God spoke again.

He said a pivotal thing that gave me encouragement for the journey ahead of me.

There have been countless other times—through sermons, through guys on a stage, through reading, through praying with other people, and through hearing other people say things—that I have gotten the sense that God was speaking.

And you will, too.

This Time Next Year

One morning I was reading from Genesis 17 about God speaking to Abraham and Sarah, telling them they would finally have a kid. Even though they were really old. They had no business having kids at that point but God spoke to them and said, “I’m going to give you a kid and you’re going to have all kinds of ancestors and you’re going to be a great nation.”

They respond like you and I would, “Yeah right. We can’t get pregnant at this age. How is this possible?”

Then God said, “By this time next year, you’re going to have a son.”

As I read the words, “By this time next year…” I had a sense that God was saying to me, “By this time next year, the church you lead is going to have a new home.”

Our church, Mariners Church in Huntington Beach, CA, has grown rapidly in the past three years, and we’ve desperately been looking for a new place to meet. But Huntington Beach is an expensive, built-out beach town with extremely limited options for a growing church. We had tried a hundred different options but nothing had panned out. And, at the moment I heard what I believed to be words from God, we had no obvious prospects.

I’ve never before heard from God on a timetable. I have not known him to be specific like that, but I knew what I heard—or sensed. And now it was time to put my...