By Jonathan Granovsky

Who among us would like to hear the voice of God today? As disciples of Jesus, I expect we all share in the hunger and thirst to hear the word of God (Amos 8:11). We also know that God still speaks to us as His sons and daughters today, even if we might disagree regarding how. Does God speak to us only through His written Word? Or are there other ways He speaks to us? Despite the importance of that discussion, I would like to focus instead on what we can do in our lives to improve our communication with God.

What can we do to be people who hear the voice of God in their lives?

There are several aspects that answer the question, but I want to focus on one aspect that has resonated with me in recent weeks.

We need to assume the posture of a servant

If we briefly review some stories of God’s people from the Scriptures who encountered God and heard His voice, we will notice a recurring word and motif – the word servant.

When Yahweh appeared to Abraham at the oaks of Mamre, we are told that when Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw three men standing over him, he ran to call them from the tent door, bowed to the ground and said:

“O Lord, if I have found favor in your sight, do not pass by your servant” (Genesis 18:1-3).

Just before the conquest of Jericho, we are told that when Joshua lifted up his eyes and saw the Lord’s host, he fell on his face to the ground, bowed down and said to him:

“What does my lord say to his servant?” (Joshua 5:13-15).

The third time God called Samuel, Eli understood that it was the voice of God calling the boy, so he said to Samuel:

“Go, lie down, and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant hears” (1 Samuel 3:4-9).

And it’s not for nothing that Moses is described as the servant of the Lord in the Torah—Moses had a special and different relationship with God, and heard His voice in a remarkable way:

“With him I speak mouth to mouth, clearly, and not in riddles, and he beholds the form of the Lord. Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?” (1 Samuel 12:6-8).

Similarly, the apostle Saul often calls himself a servant. In his letters, he describes himself as a servant of Messiah, or of God (Rom. 1:1; Gal. 1:10; Phil. 1:1; Titus 1:1), this is the same Paul who heard God’s voice directly and received amazing revelations (2 Corinthians 12:1–7). Yet he describes himself as a servant, a slave of God.

And it is not by chance that Jesus the Messiah, the Servant of God prophesied about by Isaiah, heard the voice of God from heaven several times and in ways that were also witnessed by other people (Matthew 4:17; 17:1–9; John 12:28–30).

In short, if we too want to be people who hear the voice of God in our lives, we must choose to be servants of God. That’s what our identity will be:

“We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.” (Luke 117:10)

To hear the voice of God, we need to die to ourselves and obey God

The obvious question now is: How do we actually become servants of God?

We don’t just want to say with our mouths: “We are His servants,” but how do we get to a place where our lives actually reflect our new identity?

A good start is to act just like Joshua and Samuel: To bow down on our physical knees with the door closed in our quiet time with God and cry out: “Speak, O Lord, for your servant is listening.” But of course we need to expand and add to this if we want to become servants of God, when we know that at the moment we are not.

Here are some questions for thought and prayer that can help us take steps of faith toward servitude:

A servant is one who submits, one who is willing to empty themselves of their own agenda. A servant empties himself and lays aside his own agenda in order to serve and please his master. This is exactly the call of Jesus to all his disciples:

“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).

What does it mean to deny ourselves? We can think of Peter denying Jesus those three times before the cock crowed as Jesus was taken off to be executed. He insisted, “I do not know the man!” As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wittily observed, the same principle applies when denying ourselves: “The disciple must say to himself the same words Peter said of Christ when he denied him: “I know not this man.””

It’s to be dead to ourselves.

We do well to ask God in prayer: Are there things we are still holding on to today? What might prevent us from hearing Jesus?

Where are we looking and what voice are we obeying?

A servant is one who obeys.

As Paul wrote in Romans 6:16, “Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?” 

The question for us is: Whom, or what, are we obeying today? The standards of our culture? Our personal expectations of ourselves? Our sinful drives? Our ego? Feelings of jealousy? Lies? Fears? Worries? Money? Pride? Or the Still Small Voice of God?

A servant is also one who looks to the Lord.

Behold, as the eyes of servants
    look to the hand of their master,
as the eyes of a maidservant
    to the hand of her mistress,
so our eyes look to the Lord our God,
    till he has mercy upon us.
(Psalm 123:2)

Whom do we look to? For most of us, screen time is an issue. What are we looking at for hours each day? Are we seeking to look good at our jobs, looking for the approval of our colleagues? Are we looking at our schedule and our busy things-to-do list? Where does our mind go when we are alone? Watch your train of thought when you’re all by yourself. What are you focusing on, and what commands are you obeying? Are we like slaves, with eyes glued to their phone in our hands? Or are we carefully paying attention to God as our Master? Attentive to our Master’s hand? If we want to be servants who hear the voice of God, we do well to structure our personal lives (and work) so that our Master has room to speak… and so that we have quality time to listen.

May we also put on our new identity as servants, so that when we stand before our Master, we can hear His voice saying to us:

“Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.” (Matthew 25:23)

This was a devotional given to the ONE FOR ISRAEL staff team by Jonathan Granovsky

Photo by Kimia Zarifi on Unsplash