When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not-knowing, not-curing, not-healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.
Listen
Leif Hetland
Darlene Cunningham
God is an amazing communicator. The most common phrases in the Bible are “God said” or “the Lord said.” They are used 1,500 times in the Original Testament alone. But He speaks in different ways: through an audible voice, through dreams and visions, through angels, through that still small voice in our hearts, through the words of a godly friend or teacher, through new revelation into the Scriptures. God can speak any way He chooses to – He even spoke through a donkey once! He is looking for listening hearts.
Ruth Haley Barton
If we are able to stay with our frustrations long enough and not give up, we may begin to suspect that the things that most need to be known and solved and figured out in our life are not going to be discovered, solved or figured out at the thinking level anyway. The things we most need to know, solve and figure out will be heard at the listening level, that place within us where God’s Spirit witnesses with our spirit (Rom 8:16).
Eugene H. Peterson
We make a good start when we listen to God speak to us. This requires attentiveness and concentration. God does not speak in competition with other speakers, so he does not raise his voice or hire an advertising agency or public relations firm to work out a strategy to get us to listen. Because he speaks in his own voice, not in imitation of voices that we are more used to, many people never hear him. But he speaks all the same.
A W Tozer
I believe that much of our religious unbelief is due to a wrong conception of and a wrong feeling for the Scriptures of truth. A silent God suddenly began to speak in a book, and when the book was finished, He lapsed back into silence again forever. Now we read the book as the record of what God said when He was briefly in a speaking mood. With notions like that in our heads, how can we believe? The facts are that God is not silent and has never been silent. It is the nature of God to speak. The second person of the Holy Trinity is called the Word.