The Challenge of Listening to God Through Scripture

Steve Shaffer, Director of Discipleship and Coaching

Since I was a child, I was taught to read the Bible as the primary way of listening to God. It was interesting to me when people said things like, “I’ve read this passage many times, but today when I read it I found something new.” How does that work?  The words on the page did not change. The original author’s reason for writing, context, intended message, and original audience are fixed.  So how could Scripture “say” something new? What’s changed? Perhaps, there is something in the passage that I hadn’t understood before and by rereading I came to a new understanding of what it had said all along. Even if I had a clear understanding of the passage, perhaps there is something in me that is shaping today’s reading. Very likely, my state of mind and current concerns  are also playing a part in how the passage “speaks” to me today. Perhaps a third possibility is that the Holy Spirit is involved with every reading of Scripture, working in the liminal space between text and take-away. It is this third possibility that makes listening to God through Scripture challenging, because it allows for the possibility that God could use a static composition to speak something new, fresh, and personal to me. Hearing this fresh expression requires that I learn to listen with my spirit, attending to God’s Spirit, and hold the literal text loosely. In our Discipleship Cohorts, we lean into the practice of learning to listen to God through Scripture as a spiritual discipline of attending to the Holy Spirit. Then we listen to one another and share how God used a particular passage to say something personal.

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