Quiet Time – Part 2 – “Listening”

Last week we began a series of posts dealing with “Quiet Time.” We discussed the importance and motivation of our approach in coming to the text with both sharp minds and pliable hearts to meet Jesus.

This week moving forward and zooming in a bit I want to focus on the art of listening. If you’re like me, that can be difficult. Think about it—when is the last time you really sat still and intently listened to someone? It takes a great deal of patience and restraint to allow someone to do the talking while we are on the receiving end. So how can we learn to listen to God when we open up the Bible?

I want to talk about two different kinds of listening that play a role in us discerning God’s voice.

1) Active Listening

2) Passive Listening

What do I mean by these terms? At face value, one of these seems to be preferable to the other, right? Especially if you are a woman! We all want an active listener when we are talking. They are the listeners that make great eye contact and affirm what you are saying by restating facts that you have shared with them. They give gestures that show they are interested in what’s being said. Active listeners tend to be empathetic and relate to the one sharing with them. They can restate the conversation that you just have had in detail. On the other hand we have the passive listeners. The ones who are texting as you are talking, or cutting you off in mid sentence to share a point that they think is important. It is sometimes distracting when you are speaking with a passive listener, because you don’t think they are getting any of the fine details that you are trying to share. In fact, more often than not, if you have them tell you the conversation back to you they get the gist of what you have said, but miss the points that are necessary to fully understand what’s going on. Even though active listeners are great there are often times that the main point is completely missed in a conversation, because they get so hung up on the details. Likewise, passive listening only misses the real meat of a conversation. We need both.

Our reading of the Bible needs to have a regular diet of both flavors of listening to get the full “taste” of Scripture. If not we can become imbalanced in the way we read and lose the ability to hear from God as clearly as we would like. Let me give you an example of passive and active listening: Let’s say that I am beginning a study of the book of James and I am an active listener so the details mean everything. I focus on every word in detail and all of a sudden I come to James 2:24, that tells me that I am not saved by faith alone, but works are required. Immediately I log that away in my brain that I have to do good things in order to be saved in addition to trusting in Jesus. In fact, in Christian history some people have negated the book of James because of this very reason. In the same breath if I approach this same passage in a passive way as I skim read through the book of James I will quickly come to the conclusion that that can’t be right because my general understanding of the Bible tells me that Jesus is the only way. So I choose to skim over it and not think twice about it. I don’t take the time to listen to what’s being said.

In both situations there are great flaws. One zooms in too far and can’t see what is really being said, and the other zooms way out and misses the main point of the text…which is what we want to get in order to be good listeners. However, if we take both an active and passive listening mentality into this passage it begins to make more sense. By having a passive ear to this book I can see that James is writing people to inform them of how those who are already Christians should be living. This is an important backdrop to have as I study the rest of the book. By actively listening to this text I can zoom in on James 2:24 up close and realize that my understanding of this specific passage has to come from the understanding of the general writing in James. By doing this I can clearly see that James is simply saying that real faith produces actions not to earn faith, but as an expression of faith.

When we read in our study we have to develop a habit of reading the Bible with a general and specific understanding. Together they can help us position ourselves to hear from God. It is then that we can begin to have a true listening heart to what Jesus has to say to us. This is one step in becoming a good listener of the Bible.