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Is He Really Listening?
Recent Article Published At The Gospel Coalition
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Is God Really Listening?
(photo credit: Samuel Martins via Unsplash)
“This is the confidence which we have before him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.” (1 John 5:14)
AIRPLANE MODE
"Ladies and gentlemen, the Captain has turned on the Fasten Seat Belt sign. If you haven’t already done so, please stow your carry-on luggage underneath the seat in front of you or in an overhead bin. Please take your seat and fasten your seat belt. And also make sure your seat back and folding trays are in their full upright position.
If you are seated next to an emergency exit, please read carefully the special instructions card located by your seat. If you do not wish to perform the functions described in the event of an emergency, please ask a flight attendant to reseat you.
We remind you that this is a non-smoking flight. Smoking is prohibited on the entire aircraft, including the lavatories. Tampering with, disabling or destroying the lavatory smoke detectors is prohibited by law.
Oh, and one more thing. Please ensure that all electronic devices are turned off or switched to airplane mode for the duration of the flight.
On behalf of the Captain and the entire crew, we thank you for flying West Side airlines.
If you travel often, you’ve heard it a hundred times. You’ve switched that phone over and wondered, “what in the world is airplane mode”?
Airplane mode disables all wireless and cellular signals coming from your phone. It quits the noise and stops the outside voices clamoring for your attention. It forces you to be still.
Why would they make you do this? The concern is that a phone’s radio transmissions could get in the way of the plane’s communication and navigation systems that planes use during the flight.
Prayer is like that. Going to God in prayer is meant to disable all the signals coming from our culture, and even quiet the noise in our heads. It stops the outside voices clamoring for our attention and forces us to be still. Because we are not actually in control of our lives—and God wishes to communicate with us and even navigate our way in the world.
You know, sometimes we tell ourselves “I’m not here on this plane to be told anything. I tell you where I want to go. You do it. Flying is a one-way communication; besides that, let me do what I want.” And when we say that, we miss the important reminders from the flight deck about safety; we don’t hear that the refreshment cart is coming when we had planned to take a nap. We don’t know the lavatory is open or closed, according to our need. We don’t know what is happening when the plane starts to get rocky. Because we didn’t come to listen.
And we do the same with prayer. Stop me if you heard this one: “Prayer is where we talk to God. Bible reading is where God talks to us.” I hope both of those are more than that. As we read the Bible, we should engage in conversation. As we read the Psalms out loud, do we not talk to God? We can use the same analogy the other way. When we pray, we may come to God with all of our stuff. “Ok, God, I’m here to unload.” But you can do that to a brick wall. Why come to God at all with it? You know why. Because so often in prayer, when we are really deep in prayer, we stop. We hear ourselves and we say, “wait. That is too selfish. That’s not what I really mean to say. While I’m thinking about it, I need your help in other areas. Oh, and I want to bless you for who you are.” When we follow the pattern given by the Lord–adoration and thanksgiving, then petition–we slowly but surely undergo a change. We come to prayer full of angst; we leave with peace. We come with rage; we leave with solace. We come with hurt; we leave with love. Do not for a second think that all we did was talk. Oh no–we also received. Prayer, like Scripture reading, like watching nature, like enjoying your children–are opportunities for worship; and that is always a two-way street. What we want to say to God is only part of prayer. What God wants to do in us, form in us, and, yes, even say to us–-that is part of prayer too.
Oh, we still sometimes fuss on the airplane, don’t we? Think of the questions we ask (even if not out loud):
Do you really think the systems aboard this 400,000 pound Boeing 747 are in danger of my wifi-connection? Can you even imagine a call to the Captain from ground control: “I’m sorry, Boeing, you won’t be able to land, we are unable to see you on the monitor until the passenger in 17A finishes his phone call”?
We do the same thing with prayer, you know. Philip Yancey lists four of the main questions we ask ourselves:
-Why should I pray if God already knows everything? I mean, what’s the point?
-If I really don’t even know what to pray for or how to pray as we ought to (as the Bible says), then why do it at all?
-How can I trust God when I have so many unanswered prayers in my history?
-Is God even really listening at all?
GOD IS LISTENING
This morning, I want to convince you that God is listening. I could quote to you the reassuring passage in 1 John 5:14: “This is the confidence which we have before him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.” But to be convinced of this, first you have to believe that God wants to hear us.
For many people, the language about God that we most remember in Scripture is the scary stuff. The language of his high and mightiness; the language about how God is so much bigger than we are (what theologians call his “transcendence”).
We see this language in the book of Job, spoken out of a whirlwind by none other than God himself: “Who is this that darkens my counsel without knowledge?” (Job 38:2). In other words, “Who do you think you are? How dare you bring your puny words to my courtroom. Are you here to interrogate me? Are you here to question me? Are you here to make requests of me?!”
But there is a rhyme and reason for this kind of language–for God presenting himself from the “top-down” so to speak. He does this not to scare us, but to assure us. Think of his omnipresence, for example. The fact that we can’t go anywhere without encountering God is not meant to keep us up at night imagining the All-seeing eye is watching us. It is meant to remind us that no matter how far we roam, how low we go, there is no place we can fall that is outside the watching care of God. He can and will find us, for he promised “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Heb 13:5).
Think of his omniscience (his complete knowledge). We shouldn’t hear that and think “well, he knows everything, so why ever share anything” (like he’s a security camera pointed in all directions). No. It is meant to assure us that there is no situation, no conundrum, we can bring to God where he says “oh, that’s a pickle! I have no idea how to help you out with that one!” No–he knows every possible solution, and he knows which one will lead to the best possible outcome, because he knows all things.
So even that line in Job that sounds so rude can be read as a line of complete assurance. When we are so sure that things are the way we perceive them, and thus God is limited by what options we can see and no more, we need to be reminded our demands and our assumptions are nothing compared to what the all-good, all-wise, all-powerful God may be up to.
So let this “high and mighty, transcendent, omniscient” language about God give us assurance about prayer. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus wants to teach his disciples to pray. He wants us to pour out our hearts to God. And he appeals to this very part of the character of God to encourage us to pray. Listen to the words of our Lord Jesus Christ: “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matt 6:8). Does God want to know us, hear us, and respond to us? Yes he does. For God the Father who searches the heart knows us and our needs–even before we ask. His “all-knowingness” encourages us because that means God our Father knows (and wants to know) me!
But trying to change how you feel about the “high and lofty” language is easier when you consider a whole different aspect of our God: what theologians call his “immanence,” but what I like to call his “there-for-us” ness.
We know it. We know it in Jesus. Jesus is “God with us” who became “one of us” and died in our place. He did it, says Hebrews, “to bring many sons to glory.” But it’s not just a New Testament idea. We see it on the first page of the book. God makes every single thing in all creation with his breath; but then he turns to man and woman, and he makes them with his hands AND breathes his own breath into them.
Paul reflects on this when he is standing on Mars Hill. He says “The God who made the world and everything in it–the one who is the Lord of heaven and earth–gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man all nations so they may seek God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for in him we live, and move, and have our being. As some of your own poets have said, we are his children” (Acts 17:28)
And what does it mean to be his children? Well, what do your children mean to you?
Paul reflects on this in Romans 8.
For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. (Rom 8:15-16)
What are we seeing here? That God–the one who made the heavens, who is beyond our comprehension, sees us as his children, wants to know us and hear our deepest desires, and sends his spirit into our hearts to assure us of that.
We see glimpses of this throughout the story of the Bible. We see it when the text says “the word of the Lord came to Jonah.” The God of the universe…spoke…to a man? We see it when Hagar, broke, broken and scared, lays her child down and turns away so she doesn’t have to watch him die, suddenly hears a voice from above, “what troubles you, Hagar? God has heard the boy’s cry” (Gen 21:17). We see it when Ezra says “we were afraid to ask for bodyguards, because we had told the King our God will protect us. But now we are scared. So we fasted and implored our God (to protect us). And he listened to our plea” (Ezra 8:23).
Do you see it? A God who is willing to hear us, who longs to hear us. And he does.
“I call to God, and the Lord will save me. Evening and morning and at noon I utter my complaint and moan, and he hears my voice” (Psalm 55:16-17)
And this brings us back to our reassuring passage with which we began.
This is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him (1 John 5:14-15)
HE LISTENS TO MORE THAN OUR WORDS
I hope our short foray into the nature of God and his love for his children has helped you see that God wants to listen to our prayers–he is deeply interested in our lives, and he seeks to hear us, understand us, and truly know us.
But there is a second element to our question. “Is God really listening, when I know he is so high and lofty? Could he really, truly care for little, old me?” Yes, he truly is and yes he truly does. But a second question we might ask is this: “Is God really listening, when I don’t know what to say or how to say it?” One the one hand, we wonder if God is even listening given who God is (so high above us); but then in our deep insecurity, we wonder if God is even listening given who we are (bumbling and stumbling in our prayers).
I have been so encouraged by this line from Philip Yancey: “Sometimes I wonder if my words may be the least important part of prayer.” There are some tremendous truths packed into that little line. I want to share just two of them as we close this morning.
First, we don’t have to worry about our bumbling and stumbling words–wondering if they adequately communicate the deepest desires of our heart, because God the Spirit who dwells in our heart intercedes for us and communicates what we cannot and when we cannot. This is Romans 8 as well. Would you look at this with me? We saw earlier that the Spirit of God “bears witness with our spirit.” What this means, says Paul, is that the Spirit helps us in our prayers:
Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God (Romans 8:26-27)
The “groanings too deep for words” has sometimes been read as “holy grunts” from the Spirit. But I think it’s more likely that it’s you and I who experience the groaning–we are the ones who don’t know what to say or how to say it, but when all we have is a howl or a wail, God’s Spirit takes that and interprets it to the Father.
Is there any better passage to assure us that God listens to our prayers? Suppose you wonder if the President of the United States would ever take your call. He is so busy, so important, and who am I, anyway? You can just imagine what he would be thinking if his secretary said, “Mr. President, it’s Nathan Guy on line 1 for you.” He’d say “who? Who cares!” But what if the secretary said, “it’s your son on line 1?” He’d take the call.
Don’t you see what Paul is saying here? It’s God’s Spirit that is on line 1, ready to take to the Father the deepest longings of our heart–even the ones we can’t fully articulate.
And the analogy is even closer to home. We’ve already seen the Father listens to us, for he knows our need before we ask. We have seen the Spirit listens to us, for he takes our groanings to the throne room on our behalf, directing our prayers according to the Father’s will. But the Son–Jesus, the Son–God, the Son–also listens to our prayers. For the Bible also says Jesus Christ is our Great High priest at the right hand of the Father. And what is he doing there? Paul tells us right here in Romans 8. Look at verse 34:
Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us (Rom 8:34).
God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit–-indeed, as R. L. Wilson puts it, “all of heaven” is intimately involved in your prayer life, even when you don’t have words.
You want even more encouragement? God listens so intently–he hears your prayers, he hears your groanings and turns them into prayers, and he hears your conversations with others and interprets them as prayers.
In Malachi chapter 3, “those who feared the Lord spoke to one another, and the Lord” listened in. He “listened attentively, and heard it.” And he took down names.
“But,” you say, “I’m a woman or man of few words. What about me?” He doesn’t just listen to your prayers, and he doesn’t just listen to your conversations with others. He listens to your whole life.
In Acts 10, we have a story you’ve heard before: the story of Cornelius. You remember him. Cornelius is the first “gentile conversion story” Luke tells us about. You remember that God called Peter to go and share the good news with Cornelius. But let me share something with you that perhaps you didn’t notice the last time you read that story.
Do you remember what the angel said to Cornelius to reassure him that God listens? The angel said “Cornelius, your prayers and your gifts to the poor have come up (ascended) as a memorial before God.” It doesn’t say “as memorials” (plural), but one “memorial.” That means “Cornelius, what you said to God and what you did for others have combined as one loud and clear message to the Father.”
God hears not just what we say, but also what we do. Oh, I imagine if you grew up with that All-seeing-eye God, that could be a scary line. But I don’t hear it that way. I hear reassurance. Speak to God, he wants to listen. When you all you can do is grunt, God will speak to God and tell him desires too deep for words. When you talk about God and share your concerns with your friends, God listens to that as well, and hears what’s on your heart. And even when not a single word is said, what you do in life–what you do for others–that acts as a prayer as well.
In all these ways, God listens. Through all these ways, as the song goes, “my Jesus knows just what I need. Oh yes he knows just what I need. He satisfies, and every need supplies, yes He knows just what I need.”
Believe it church. “My God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus” (Phil 4:19).
This is a sermon preached on January 7, 2024 at the West Side Church of Christ (Searcy, AR) entitled “Is God Really Listening?” It is the first in a series titled “Airplane Mode.” This lesson is available to watch or listen, and appears on the Life on the West Side podcast (Season 3, Episode 20). Available on all podcast platforms.
Recent Article Published: The Gospel Coalition
I was honored to have the first of three submitted articles published recently in The Gospel Coalition. In this first article, titled “Jesus (Alone) Can Satisfy Your Heart,” I show that the God we see in Jesus Christ addresses the hole in our soul and fulfills our deepest longings. Later this year TGC will publish two more of my articles dealing with the difference Jesus makes and the value of church membership. You can find the first article here, and visit my author page here.
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My name is Nathan Guy, and I serve as the preaching minister for the West Side Church of Christ in Searcy, Arkansas. In my spare time, I teach classes as an adjunct instructor for St. Louis University and Harding University. I also serve on the board for the Center for Christian Studies. I am happily married to Katie and am the proud father of little Grace (who is 2) and baby Henry (who is new). You can find more resources on my website over at nathanguy.com. You can follow me on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (X), Threads, and YouTube.