On Hearing God’s Voice—Part 5

“Come now, let us reason together,” says the LORD.—Isaiah 1:18 (NIV)

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD.—Isaiah 55:8 (NIV)

Most people who are interested in guidance are perplexed as to its relationship with reason, and many of the warnings given to believers are concerned with the need to respect thought.

Nor need we resent the warnings—even though some of them are very naive and appear to be addressed to morons. Reason is one of the highest of the human endowments, and God cannot wish that His priceless gift become atrophied for want of use. More thought—and not less—is clearly the urgent need of the age. It is one of the cardinal misfortunes of the times that people seem content to catch the epidemic opinion, or buy it for a penny in a newspaper, rather than undertake the labour of thinking it out for themselves. Religion is not the handmaid of shoddy thinking. It has discovered no bypass road to all knowledge that shall cut out the need for careful and laboured thought. Guidance is a glorious and precious privilege, which insulates one from worry, but does not deliver one from the moil of mental stress. Reason we must. Are we not called upon to love the Lord our God with all our mind? We cannot think that God can be fittingly served by people who have become intellectually effete.

And yet unaided reason is often a disappointing tool. The hymn-writer calls it a “glimmering ray.” All of us have had the experience of putting our hardest and most patient thought into a thing, and then making a mistake in the end. It is unlikely that we shall ever win a full exemption from that peril while we live on this plane, but if, in the providence of God, our best thought can be helped by some special insight, or our reasoning lifted into a realm where the mystery of our motives is a mystery no more and where we can see with clearness what purposes are really influencing our conduct, then we are more likely to act with true reason and may find that there is no ultimate conflict between the reasonable and the right. Is there any way in which we can reason with God, or submit the fruit of our thought to His judgment that we can see where the Divine approval rests? The saints have always held that there is. They have not claimed for it an utter infallibility, but they are so sure of the difference it makes to the reasoning process that they describe the contrast as a stumbling in the twilight beside a striding forward in sunshine.

[Yet] all human reasoning is honeycombed with uncertainty. We are seldom in possession of all the facts relating to the matter in the past and present, and, as to the future, the wisest among us can only guess. Hence, it should not surprise us if the constraint of guidance is sometimes towards a course for which it is impossible to give a completely valid reason. How can it be otherwise unless we assume that omniscience is a human attribute as well as a divine one?

—From God Does Guide Us by W. E. Sangster

Previously I reflected on how I have heard God’s voice through prayer, reading the Bible, in the fellowship, and in life’s circumstances. Today I conclude this series by reflecting on the fifth of Sangster’s ways of hearing God’s voice—through reason. I will focus on the role of reason in my decision to seek ordained ministry because I think it illustrates nicely Sangster’s two main points about the ways reason can help us to hear God’s voice. Like Sangster, I confess a certain element of mystery to reason. Yet I also think Sangster’s writings can help us better understand the apparent contradiction in the two passages from Isaiah I quote above. How can we reason with God if his thoughts are not like ours?

As I reflect on my call to ministry, I can see both reasonable and unreasonable elements in it. On the one hand, I’ve felt the call for a long time. A quick read of my spiritual autobiography shows that. I have always been interested in matters of the faith and involved in my church, wherever I lived. On the other hand, this call doesn’t make sense. Why would God call someone like me? I am my own worst critic because I know my transgressions and my sin is ever before me (Psalm 51:3). And so as I consider why God would call someone like me, I must scratch my head in bewilderment—it just doesn’t make sense. But at the same time, the call is not unreasonable. It doesn’t call me to do violence to myself or others (perhaps I should wait to see the reaction of folks after my first sermon before making the latter claim! :)). Moreover, God continues to call all sorts of men and women to ministry and so my call is nothing extraordinary because I am of the human race. As such, I had to look to means other than reason to ensure I was hearing God’s voice correctly in this call.

I have reflected on those other ways elsewhere and so I’ll only summarize them for you here. In addition to using my reason, I listened to God’s voice in prayer and heard his voice in circumstances and in the wise counsel of the fellowship—my Christian friends, my discernment committee at St. Matthew’s, my bishop, my wife, etc. In all these things there was a convergence (or as my old stats professor used to say, a triangulation of the data) that helped me confirm the validity of God’s call and so I can move forward with confidence, but always with an ever-listening ear.

As for my motives in pursuing ordained ministry, I believe God helped me see them not necessarily through reason but when I went for my Midwest evaluation, an intensive two-day psychological/vocational assessment process that the diocese requires of all men and women thinking about pursuing the ordained ministry, i.e., God spoke to my motives through circumstances and the fellowship. Both the psychologist and the counselor told me that my motives appeared to be just as I stated them—to use my gifts of teaching to serve God’s people—and that my ego needs were minimal. Knowing my sinful nature, of course, I believe their observations are valid but take them with a grain of salt—I know how quickly things can go wrong with me.

And like Sangster, I have been mistaken when using reason to help me hear God’s voice. I am thinking now of my decision to leave Miami and come to Columbus to take a new job. I was in the process of getting a divorce and my job at Miami appeared to be in jeopardy. A door opened for me here (although I confess I pressed hard to open it, which in hindsight was a fatal mistake—isn’t it almost always?), and I moved to Columbus to take the new job. As I reasoned it out, the job seemed perfect. It represented a career advancement, offered a huge increase in pay, and would allow me to have influence on a statewide basis, perfect for an ego like mine. 🙂 Yet the job turned out to be a disaster. Moving here also cost me dearly in terms of being physically separated from my daughter, a terrible burden I have had to bear since moving here, and one I can only bear with Christ’s help, BTW. And so as I reflect back on that decision, it seems to me that my reason failed me, in part because I also tried to force the issue. Perhaps I used faulty reasoning to begin with or my motives were not right in the first place. But thanks be to God that he took what I consider to be a poor decision and turned it into a good one, at least as it pertains to my call to the ordained ministry. I eventually found work in Westerville (a disaster in its own right) and then found St. Matthew’s and Fr. Ron, two key events in helping me hear God’s voice in my call.

To summarize, then, I try to use my reason as one way of listening for God’s voice. Does the voice sound reasonable? Does it tend to restrain me in ways that are beneficial, at least as far as I can tell? Does it make sense in the context of my life? Yet at other times God’s voice doesn’t always sound reasonable in that he seems to call me to do audacious things—like go into the ordained ministry (and when I say “unreasonable” I do not mean harmful or something that clearly flies in the face of God’s morality, etc.)! At times like this I have to accept the limitations to my reasoning abilities (because I am finite), and accept God’s omniscience, trusting in his great love and intentions for me. In all instances, however, I don’t rely on just one means to hear God’s voice but always try to look for convergence, i.e., in prayer, in the Bible, in circumstances, in reason, and in the fellowship. It has been my experience that this is the best way to confirm the validity of the Voice when I hear it.

What about you? How do you use reason to hear God’s voice? When has it benefited you? When did your reason fail you? Has God ever asked you to do something audacious? If so, what was it and how did you recognize God’s voice in the asking? Do you agree with my idea of convergence? Why or why not? Are there other ways I have not discussed that you use to hear God’s voice? If so, please share them with us so that we can learn from each other and “watch over each other in love.”