The Voice of Jesus

I can vividly remember one of my experiences of these words. I was attending a concert put on by the Vancouver Chamber Choir and the Pacific Baroque Orchestra on December 3, 1999. The concert included the oratorio by Johann Sebastian Bach called Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland (“Now Come, Savior of the Nations”), which contains a wonderful recitative that is sung by the baritone. Derrick Christian was the baritone that evening, and I sat there and heard him sing the words to the Laodicean church, as found in Revelation 3:20: “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.” As he sang, I realized that I longed for nothing so deeply as that I would hear and know the voice of Jesus. These words called to the deepest part of my being.

In other words, we need to learn discernment because it is quite possible, even if we are eager and sincere, to be led by our own misguided desires, motives and inclinations. We must learn to distinguish, for not all “spiritual” experience finds its source in God. Scripture urges us, “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 Jn 4:1). We see the same dual concern in 1 Thessalonians 5 when Paul urged his readers to a radical openness (“do not quench the Spirit,” 1 Thess 5:19) but also urged them to be discerning (“test everything; hold fast to what is good; abstain from every form of evil,” 1 Thess 5:21-22). Yet how do we know that what we are experiencing is truly from God? How do we know that God is present to us and that our experience is the fruit of God’s grace? How do we know it is God and not just self-delusion?

This includes honesty about our history, what we have been and what we have done. But further, it includes accepting what has been wrong about our lives, whether we are to blame or not, whether or not we have been all that we had hoped to be. It also means that we turn from the propensity to indulge in a wistful memory of some better time in the past.3

Thus mature pray-ers are those who are not just attentive to Jesus in prayer; they have over time become women and men who are able to discern the inner witness of the Spirit in the midst of life and work. Whether on the bus or in a committee meeting, whether in a worship service or a sporting event, they are individuals of discernment alert to the ways in which God is present and speaking. But they learn to be discerning people by first developing the capacity to attend to the inner witness of the Spirit in the context of their prayers. Discerning people are pray-ers.

“The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” Our inability to pray is a recognition that we are deeply dependent on the Spirit to guide us in our praying. Indeed it is precisely at this point that we seek to follow and respond to the Spirit. Without a conscious dependence on the Spirit in our prayers, we are always in danger of talking to ourselves rather than to God. The Spirit guides our prayers such that our praying is in obedience to this inner witness. Obedience here is not so much compliance as it is an eager and hearty response—an unqualified yes to the initiative of the Spirit. Too often our inclination in prayer is to propose an agenda for God, but true prayer is first and foremost an act of response to God’s initiative.

Fundamentalism seeks to stay the cultural tide (that is, it puts its energy into fighting the decline toward secularism) or else denies that any significant cultural change has occurred. Perhaps the better alternative would be to recover the dynamic of authentic spiritual experience.

our posture can be one in which we do not expect the culture and society to sustain us. Our point of reference is our experience of divine grace. The great mystics did not go the way of pure negation. They sought God in the world, believing that God is found in all things (to use a wonderful line from Ignatius Loyola). They demonstrated that the true contemplative is a contemplative in action—engaged in generous service in response to the pain of the world.

Many religious leaders and Christian communities unintentionally, and sometimes intentionally, foster the idea that we hear the voice of Jesus only through the community and particularly through the leadership of that community. They are uncomfortable with the idea that the individual Christian, with a mind informed by the Scriptures, can truly know the voice of Jesus in his or her own heart and mind. They believe that it is their responsibility to tell their fellow Christians what they should hear and how they should act. The tragedy is that the community then does not really foster spiritual maturity. It does not enable individual Christians to hear the voice of Jesus and encounter for themselves the living bread and living water. And so their faith becomes a derivative experience rather than a personal response to God.

And consistently what we find is that the community appeals to critical values of community itself, of duty and responsibility, of faithfulness (to the community) as a way to discourage individual consciousness. The community invades the inner life of the individual rather than supporting it.

This discernment is possible only when we sustain the dynamic tensions outlined in this chapter. In turn, the tensions that undergird the discipline of discernment are kept in equilibrium by an unreserved commitment to the priority of holy Scripture. Few things are so central to the Christian perspective on discernment as the relationship between the inner witness of the Spirit and the objective, inscripturated witness of the Holy Spirit, namely, the Bible. As I hope to demonstrate through an exploration of each dimension of this inner witness, we cannot know the voice of Jesus unless we are men and women of Scripture, with our minds and hearts informed by truth. Why?

In the chapters that follow, I hope to provide a grammar for our conversations— something to which we can appeal in our own personal journey of faith, but also something to which we can appeal together. We

As Paul Simon has put it in one of his classic tunes, “Slow down, you move too fast. You’ve got to make the moment last.”1 And we only learn when we slow down to make the moment last. We live in what some have called the “information age,” and there is no doubt that data, information and (one might even say) truth are available like never before. Lack of information is not our problem. But abundant information does not make a person either wise or even necessarily inclined to live in the truth; there has never been a time in which this has been more clearly the case. Still, the challenge is not just for this era. The temptation has always been there to approach learning and study as though it were nothing but the acquisition of information, to seek to become a master of one’s field and to demonstrate one’s accomplishment by the extent of one’s knowledge (often measured by academic degrees). However, the spiritual discipline of meditation calls us to slow down and appreciate that, as often as not, the Spirit is seeking to teach us one thing at a time. We do not receive more light until, as it is said, we learn to walk in the light we have already received. And so, in the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius cautioned retreat directors not to give their retreatants too much material for their reading and meditation, “for, what fills and satisfies the soul consists, not in knowing much, but in our understanding the realities profoundly and savouring them interiorly.”2

I wonder, if Jesus had told this parable in our day, whether he would have added a fifth category to the parable. Maybe he would have taken note that ours is a time in which we are inundated with data and can easily confuse having much information with having much wisdom. He might have said something like this: “And as she went, the sower took a large handful of seed, and it fell in a clump, and so it was that nothing grew and no fruit was born because the seeds crowded each other out!”

sermon. I began to appreciate that we are simply not capable of hearing and genuinely responding to two sermons on a Sunday (let alone nine!). For my dear brother, listening to sermons was a hobby. Perhaps this has its place, but it is not genuine spiritual learning. It is not the spiritual discipline of meditation and response to the Spirit’s ministry of illuminating our minds with truth. To meditate is to “slow down,” as the song says. If there is one thing that I need to know, one thing that the Spirit is drawing to my attention, what is it?

He wondered if I would miss the main thing that the Spirit was saying to me by trying to absorb everything I was hearing. And since then I have often been reminded that each time I sit in the pew and hear a sermon, this is what I am being called to do: to hear what the Spirit is saying to me, not to those around me, not to the whole world, but to me in particular.

As children of the Enlightenment, we tend to be one dimensional in our listening and learning. Our contemporary school systems, whether we have grown up in the East or the West, have not taught us how to listen with heart and mind, to attend to both affect and intellect in our learning. We have actually been taught the opposite, that education means that we discount affect and learn to engage the facts with as little emotion as possible. Our university systems have been built on the premise that scholarship is objective and detached. We have been taught to engage information cerebrally and dispassionately because, as we “learned” again and again, our emotions are messy and complicated and undermine “true” learning.

What he clearly longed for was that their minds, indeed their entire beings, would be thoroughly and deeply informed by the Word of Christ. And what is noteworthy is the context in which he stated this. He first urged them to “let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts” (Col 3:15). While this is not strictly a case of Hebrew parallelism, there is an obvious link.9 Just as the peace of Christ cannot rule in our hearts unless we receive the Word, so also the Word of Christ cannot dwell richly within us unless the peace of Christ rules in our hearts.

When he reminded his readers that they needed to be slow to anger, he was acknowledging that we live in a broken world and we may well have good reason to be angry. He acknowledged, in other words, the legitimacy of anger. But we must not be easily stirred to anger or easily lose our temper; we must appreciate the inherent danger that resides in anger, which is why the apostle Paul stressed that we must not sin in our anger and that we must not let the sun go down on our anger (Eph 4:26). If we fail here, Paul stated, we make room for the devil. Hence the need for vigilance! However legitimate the anger, however right our response may be to some circumstance or development, we cannot stay there. Anger is not the emotional disposition in which we can live in the Spirit. As James put it, “Your anger does not produce God’s righteousness” (Jas 1:20).

The lectio divina is a form of prayer that has as its intent that we would hear, for ourselves for this day, the Word of God.10 The question is not, what is God saying here for others? If we are teachers and preachers, for example, we do not approach the text wondering how this will preach. Our agenda is rather God’s personal word to us through the ancient Word.

The attention which Mary gave to Jesus, sitting at his feet, was by no means a personal indulgence or a pleasant daydreaming. Nor was it a selective groping for those ideas which suited her, which she “felt able” to translate into reality, let alone pass on to others as her ideas. It was entirely open-ended readiness for the Word, a readiness to participate in it, without preferences, without picking and choosing, without a priori restrictions. It was an alert, sober attitude, attentive to the slightest indications, yet ready to embrace the widest panoramas.

We may need to relearn how to learn and how to open heart and mind as we engage truth. Something that can assist us in this endeavor is music. We often think of music as a form of entertainment and overlook it as a powerful medium for learning. Luther and Wesley, and the whole Evangelical revival along with them, appreciated the fact that when we sing, we open our hearts and minds to the truth we are singing about. Therefore, worship songs and hymns must have theological depth and we must sing with vigor, for when we do, we open our hearts.

Rather, we need to foster an orientation of life that enables us to choose well. We do not want merely to discern in times of choice; we seek to become discerning women and men. Having said this, it is most helpful to think about the patterns of our lives by using our decision making as a lens through which we consider the whole.

Wise Christians are not impressed by the common notion that spontaneity is more life giving, more fun or a greater reflection of the presence of the Spirit in our lives. To the contrary, they recognize that the Spirit is very much present to us, but that we cannot trust the impulses of our hearts. We cannot trust spontaneity but must be discerning.

Further, it is important to stress that God leads us one step at a time. We are not being asked to decide what we will do with the rest of our lives but only to discern what God is calling us to do in the following stage of life. We make the choice unnecessarily complicated when we overstate the significance of the decision.

consolation is our emotional response to a set of circumstances that reflect the power and goodness of God. Whether it is the joy of the sunrise, the satisfaction of a job well done or the pleasure that comes in human friendship, consolation speaks of our experience of joy and peace, consciously or unconsciously, in response to the rightful rule of Christ in our world.

We may be profoundly angry as a result of a deep injustice we have experienced. The anger may be quite legitimate. However, it remains as a basic rule of discernment that we must not make a decision at that point, acting out of our anger. We must only act in consolation.

desolation may be the right response to something that one has experienced. We may well feel desolation because we see the world as God sees the world. We may rightly feel the full force of anger when we encounter a major expression of injustice. Yet, however justifiable our anger might be, it is not the emotional terrain on which we can stand when are seeking to choose well.

Two other examples of desolation are discouragement and mourning. Each is an entirely understandable emotional response to setback and disappointment. But if we act out of discouragement, we are not acting in faith and hope. We are not in tune with the Spirit. And if our heart is filled with the pain of mourning, our heaviness of heart coincides with what we have experienced, but it is still not an emotional disposition from which we can act in freedom.

All loss is but a “small death,” as I once heard it put, and so we are wise to slow down, to be attentive to our hearts and to see and feel in truth. And discouragement for many is an opportunity to come to terms with disillusionment—to face up to the fact of their illusion and to put their hope, once more, not in their own dreams and aspirations but in Christ and his work in the world.

St. Francis stands over every culture and generation and urges us to see the lie that we so easily believe—the lie that if we have more money we will be content and have more joy. He calls us to appreciate the power and grace of simplicity, that is, the freedom that comes in contentment and thanksgiving. Joy comes in simple pleasures and routines and the satisfaction we find in enjoying that which we do not necessarily own.

And the lie of evil is that if we are going to make a difference, then we need power, and the more power we have, the more we can potentially make a difference. The more power, the more significance to our lives. The more power, the more capacity to influence what happens in the church, in the world, in the workplace, wherever.

the wonder of Jesus’ words is that those who make a difference are those who have learned to give power away, to serve in such a way that others are enabled through that service to be all they are called to be.

Do we ever have pure motives? Not likely. Not in this life, anyway. But as we practice the art of discernment, we can grow in our ability to recognize what is driving us, and how our fears and misguided aspirations can so easily derail us. We can learn enough about ourselves that we are able to act in a manner that gives us enough confidence that misguided motives are not the sustaining energy of our lives. Even when we are confident that we are to move ahead in a decision, we hold our resolution with modesty, willing to be challenged by others, never presuming that we have a unique insight into the will of God.

Holy indifference is not apathy; it is rather the inner posture of freedom, where we are able to say and feel that we are open to whatever God wills. If God gives wealth, this is good. If God withholds wealth, this too is good. If God grants us the position for which we have applied, that is good. If God grants it to another, this is good as well. We are indifferent. It is not that we do not care, but we have chosen to place our hopes and longings in God, and come what may, we will be content with how God provides. It also means that we will trust God to do his work in his time.

If we are truly in a waiting mode and are at peace in our waiting, that’s good. But we need to recognize when we are actually procrastinating, when for whatever reason (perfectionism, a poor self-image, the fear of responsibility or whatever it might be) we are refraining from choosing and acting in consolation.

We need deadlines, certainly, but when these markers are the primary criteria for when we will do something, it necessarily means that we have lost the power to act well and to do something at a good time.

And whether we choose to resign or stay, to leave or seek change from within the organization, hopefully we can see how what we are saying and doing comes in response to the presence of the Spirit in our lives. Discerning people refuse to be victims, refuse to be objects of fate and instead choose, within the circumstances (however difficult) in which they find themselves, to seek to know how God is calling them to act.

We cannot assume that a comfortable lifestyle is necessarily a sign of God’s blessing. We must beware of the false consolation that links our position of ease and power with a confidence in God’s love and be alert to the ways in which Jesus may want to disturb rather than comfort us.

Also, the convicting ministry of the Spirit to our hearts frees us from judging others, particularly those who are different from us. It is a witness to our hearts that transcends our propensity to equate sin with cultural expectations.

Prayer, as the anchor and center of our lives, enables us to experience the formation of our conscience by the Spirit.1 This is certainly not the only venue for the formation of conscience. We are in the world and in community. We are in conversation, study, work and play. However, if there is a formation of conscience through these other aspects of our lives, it will in large measure be because prayer lies at the center of daily routine and practice. Many people assume that decision making is simply about asking God for wisdom (James 1:5 urges precisely this), after which, they suggest, we can act in faith that this prayer will be answered and that God will guide our choices. God will enable us to choose well or at least will keep us from poor decisions. There are multiple problems with such a perspective on decision making, but for the moment I will highlight two of them. First, this posture discounts the power and significance of our personal encounter with God. It ignores the remarkable reality that God wants to be deeply and fully present to us, particularly in times of choice. It negates the wonder that we are not alone. It does not account for the remarkable reality that God does not merely give us wisdom but through his personal presence in our lives enables us to grow in wisdom—a wisdom that is formed through personal encounter. Second, while God may give us this “situational” wisdom, we may not be in a posture to receive it. Through the discipline of prayer we nurture a receptivity to God. While the whole of our lives is lived in relationship with God and in response to the voice of Jesus, it is in prayer where this takes specific form and it is in prayer that we are enabled to know the voice of Jesus in every aspect of our lives. So, then, prayer is not an escape from people or from responsibility. It is instead the exercise of the spirit by which we learn to see reality more clearly,

say. And the final objective of prayer is not experienced in our speaking so much as in our allowing God to speak, to have the final word, but more, to have the word that speaks into our lives. It is this word that empowers, liberates, sustains and guides; it is the word we long to hear.2 Thus all wise counselors of the spiritual life remind us that when it comes to prayer, we must beware of too much speaking, for God knows us and knows our hearts and knows what we will say before we say it. We must beware of prayer that sounds as though God is uninformed and needs more information so that he can do the job adequately.

This text has been a reminder to the church of a truth that is well known but for which we need regular reminders: if we are going to hear God, we need to learn silence. We must be still enough to listen, move slowly enough so that we do not miss the sound of sheer silence.

Confession. Next, we might spend five minutes reviewing the joys and sorrows of the past day, being particularly attentive to the ways that we, in thought, word or deed, were inconsistent with our own confession. Also, this is a good time to acknowledge the presence of desolation in our hearts, whether anger, fear, mourning or discouragement.

Now, however much we want to be sincere in our confession of sin, we wonder if we are genuinely open to confession because now it seems we no longer have deep contrition in the face of God’s holiness and God’s holy law, as we once had. And now truth seems present to us, but it does not seem to overwhelm us anymore. It doesn’t consume our hearts and minds like it did when we were beginners in the faith. And we wonder if something has been lost that we should recover. We wonder how it is that our eager love for truth has been dimmed by something, and if all of this requires or calls for some specific correction. Christians who are experiencing aridity in prayer react in different ways. Some begin to despair. Other Christians continue to go through the motions, acting like nothing has changed but knowing full well that their initial eagerness in prayer has dissipated; there is a sense in which they live a lie. And yet other Christians know full well that nothing is wrong, but they are nevertheless at a loss to explain why their prayers (and their worship) has changed. They know they do not love Christ any less. We need to make some sense of this aridity, particular as it relates to our prayers and the place of affect in discernment.

For the beginner, prayer is highly sensory. It includes an affective awareness of the presence of Christ. We are emotionally conscious of the presence of God in our lives, sensing that Christ loves us, calls us from sin and enables us to walk in the truth. But then, as our prayers mature, we experience what John called a “dark night”—a dark night of the senses, a dark night of the intellect and a dark night of the affections. In summary, it is a dark night for the soul, intellectually and emotionally. By “night” he meant that our senses are no longer gratified.8 We are, as he put it, “blind.” We no longer can look to or depend on what we understand, taste, feel or imagine, for “faith lies beyond all this understanding, taste, feeling, and imaging.”9 This is necessary, John said, because our sensual appetites (the affections) are as little children in their incessant demand to be gratified. A key indicator of maturity is the capacity to live with delayed gratification. John suggested that just as a child must be weaned of the mother’s breast, so we must be weaned of our desire for sensory gratification.10 Indeed this is what St. Paul was speaking of when he contrasted “milk” and “solid food” (1 Cor 3:1-2).

When the senses are gratified, this satisfaction is a gift from God. But it is just that. It is a gift; it is not God himself. And if we come to love and enjoy God for himself and not for the gifts he gives us, then, John contended, we must with grace accept that in time God withdraws the gifts.

Further, John suggested that we will not mature in prayer (let alone in the whole of life) unless we come to this point. He expressed his longing for those who do not want to mature in their Christian faith: “Some are content with a certain degree of virtue … but never achieve spiritual purity … . For they still feed and clothe their natural selves with spiritual feelings and consolations instead of divesting and denying themselves of these for God’s sake.”

Teresa of Ávila captured the theological premise behind all of this when she insisted that spiritual maturity “does not consist in spiritual delights but in greater love and in deeds done with greater justice and truth.”17

Indeed one could easily argue that all true worship involves not only affect and intellect but the whole person. Yet the continual danger for those who plan and lead worship is that the event would be designed for and later judged on its level of emotional satisfaction.

The downside comes when music is used to stir up emotion such that the liturgy no longer really sustains life but becomes an escape from life. Then what we have in worship is not an encounter with God but the experience of a feeling. An emotional package has come to represent for us the presence of God.

an authentic experience of public worship for God’s people needs to legitimize all emotional experience, rather than just (as is so often the case) that outward display of emotion that appears to be perpetually happy. True worship gives space for us to acknowledge that we live in a broken and cruel world and that we often come to our worship with heavy hearts, mourning loss, discouraged with setback, bearing sorrow, just as Jesus fully acknowledged the grief his disciples felt (Jn 16). When we legitimize only happiness in worship, the irony is that we do not really foster joy, but when we affirm and recognize the whole range of human emotion (as do the Psalms), we actually cultivate our capacity as the people of God to live in joy as the fundamental posture of our hearts.

hymn of much joy and happiness that is sung because that is all we are allowed to sing does not nurture joy, for it denies what we are actually feeling.

Perhaps the longer we walk with Christ, the more our encounter with him tends to be quiet and dark or dry. And as we mature, what we need in the liturgy is a worship that allows us to express what we are feeling, certainly, but that mainly allows us to be with God’s people in the presence of Christ. When that is all we need, emotional manipulation strikes us as gimmickry, novelty and a distraction from our worship.

This is part of Balthasar’s perspective that even the solitude of the dark night is something we experience as members of the community of faith and that we therefore need the community of faith to help us interpret our own prayers.

We need to accept that our prayers have changed, but then we need to be intentional in our response to the aridity and darkness. First, it is vitally important that we continue our regular routine of prayer and meditation. But we do so without the same set of expectations or longing for emotional (or intellectual) gratification. We choose to be content with the simplicity of the act of prayer,

they fill up their time with activity that gratifies them in a different way but is a poor substitute for the transforming presence of Christ. Others may keep praying but then occupy their prayer with busy activities or exercises or extended intercession to fill up the time, and so in a sense they live distracted by their own busyness rather than choosing to be lovingly attentive to Christ.

Second, the aridity in our prayers will likely mean that we are less and less inclined to nourish our hearts on special images, places or thoughts. John of the Cross put it this way: “The truly spiritual person never considers nor becomes attached to the particular comfort of a place of prayer, for this would result from attachment to the senses.”22 Holy spaces, such as a sanctuary or a prayer place in our homes, and images that we use to foster our prayers are no longer as immediately meaningful to us.