Simply Listen? What’s that about?

Hi, and welcome to the inaugural post of this blog. We’ll keep it short. “Simply Listen” was born out of two convictions:

1. God speaks to us through the Bible
2. We are lousy listeners

The more I’ve thought about these two things, the more I’ve come to realise something. Something frightfully profound. Something life-changing. It’s this:

Listening to God is not rocket science.

Now, you might have come across terms like “homiletics” and “hermenuetics”, and other things I can neither spell nor pronounce. Forget about these strange beasts. The point is this: if you know how to listen to me, then you know how to listen to God.

Now, before I’m burned for heresy, let’s get one thing clear: God’s words are very different to mine. Here are some of the bigger differences:

• God’s words are always true
• God’s opinions are always right
• God’s words are always worth listening to
• God can create planets just by speaking
• It’s never a good idea to ignore God

Not a whole lot like my words then. But there are also some big similarities. More than we realise. And this is the life-changing revelation: listening to God is very much like listening to people. If we are good at listening to our wives, our husbands, our friends (admittedly that’s a big “if”) – then we should be good at listening to God. It involves many of the same skills.

Hence this blog. I want us to see that reading the Bible doesn’t require some magical, mystical process of guesswork. It doesn’t require a theology degree. You don’t need to know what “hermeneutics” are. Reading the Bible equals listening to God, and listening is a simple, everyday activity that we know how to do. (Even if we’re not always very good at it, I think we at least understand the principle.)

So in this blog we’re going to poke a little gentle fun at some of the ways we get this wrong (hopefully without offending our Christian brothers and sisters), and, in doing so, we should start to see how easy it is to get this right. (And if anything is worth getting right, it’s this.) Come back for the next posts and you’ll see what I mean.

For now, remember: reading the Bible is not rocket science – it’s just listening.

Simply listening.