When the church became more about talking then walking, I think that's when the noise pollution level went up.

Sometimes, I hear a lot of noise when I make a decision.  Depending on the issue, sometimes the "Christian" voices will agree; oftentimes, they won't, because there are just so many ways to do "the right thing."

So, which right thing?  Right?

It depends.  But not on your church, or your mentor, or your friends.  It depends on you.  Because, for some reason, pastors and other "Christian" leaders still have a hard time teaching their flock, "Ask God yourself."

Maybe some of us struggle with control issues.  Honestly, people who are gifted in leadership often are.  So how do we teach people to hear God's voice?  By ourselves being listeners.  Christians in this country have a tendency to confuse faith with strictly mental assent.  But people who hear from God know how to hear from God.  How do you know that they hear from God?  Watch their lives and see how much their walk matches their talk.  Unfortunately--or rather fortunately!--we don't often have the privilege of seeing directly into a 24/7 webcast of other people's lives.  If you still doubt, ask God to give you a clear, sensitive, and discerning spirit, to distinguish true from false.  Faith comes from God, but you keep it clean and working through practice.

There are some Christian leaders who teach in such a way as to make their audiences feel as if they absolutely need to know this or that in order to be a mature, Christian believer.  In the West, 99% of such teaching is nonsense.  Not necessarily untrue, nor absolutely useless, but, lost in the exaggerated importance of amassing right knowledge, such teaching is often near-sighted and unaware of its own awkwardness or irrelevance in light of what the Spirit of God is doing right in that moment, place, or time.  Christian leaders need to be clear on exactly what is essential to knowing God--and then move the hell out of the way for the Spirit of God to do his work.  If they've relegated faith to the intellectual arena only, they will likely lack the experience of spiritual sensitivity to be able to tell when God is moving, and to join with him.  If they cannot tell when God is moving and willingly adjust their lives and plans to be in line with his, they will make the same mistake as the teachers of the law who crucified Christ.  They didn't recognize the Son of God because they aggrandized the importance of their own, complicated teachings over the simple laws handed down from God through his servant Moses.  Today, the danger is the same.  Jesus, not your pastor, is actually the only intercessor between you and Father God that you will ever need.  And because his Spirit lives in everyone who believes in him, we can and do hear his voice.

I will cover "How we hear his voice" and "Common objections to Christian experience" in upcoming posts.