#STRask - How Should I Pray About Big Decisions If I Can’t Expect a Confirmation from God?

Episode Date: January 2, 2025

Questions about how we should pray about big decisions if we can’t expect to hear a “yes“ or “no” from God, what Greg means by “listening prayer,” and why he thinks the call of Samuel in 1 Samuel 3 isn’t an example of it.   In light of Greg’s teaching on decision making and the will of God, when I’m making a big decision and I’m told to “pray about it,” what does that mean if I shouldn’t expect to hear a “yes” or “no” from God? What do you mean by “listening prayer,” and why do you think the call of Samuel in 1 Samuel 3 isn’t an example of it?

– music – Welcome, this is StantReasons' Hashtag STR Ask podcast with Amy Hall and Greg Kogel. And today, Greg, we have questions about hearing the voice of God. We do come back to this every once in a while. We get a lot of questions about this because this is an area where you kind of stand out among other people because not a lot of people are saying what you're saying.

The irony though, I mean, in a certain sense, there are lots of people who hold the view that I hold, but they're not as, in a certain sense, the view that I hold turns out to be generally silent in the body of Christ. Those who hold the other view, that you develop an ability to hear the voice of God, are not as silent because you hear them talking about hearing the voice of God, when the other side doesn't say that kind of stuff. So it gives the impression that there are more of these kind of people than there are, but it is a huge number of people.

I agree. So before I even get into the questions, I just want to mention on our website, we have a series of three articles called Does God Whisper? They're three parts. So if anything in this episode you don't understand or you take objection to or whatever it is, go ahead and read through those. They're not too long and they might answer a lot of your questions or at least help you kind of make sense of what Greg's saying because sometimes the first time you hear these things,

it can be kind of a surprise. And so you don't maybe hear it exactly the way that you're really saying it. So I'm very careful how I put my words with people just hear much more than I say. And incidentally, those articles are specifically written to assess the meaning of verses that people will use as proof text for this notion, whether it's in decision making or the still small voice, that kind of mentality. And all I'm trying to do is look at the passage in its context and show what the passage means. And it doesn't mean what people think it means when they are simply quoting it on the fly. And most of these are not controversial when you look more closely.

So that's what they'll get when they find, when they take a look at those pieces. So we have questions about a few passages today, but we'll see how far we get. Okay. So we've got a few questions. All right, this first one comes from Chris Martens. In light of Greg's teaching on decision-making and the will of God, when I'm making a life slash family decision to buy a house or car, etc. and I'm told to pray about it, what does this mean? I feel I'm expected to hear a yes or no or get some kind of confirmation either way. Thoughts?"

Yeah, that's, that's not what we're praying about, or what we ought to be praying about. And what's interesting to me, I can say that with some conviction, because you don't see those kinds of prayers being prayed in the New Testament. You see them being prayed occasionally in the Old Testament, but it's always in unique circumstances where anointed leaders are involved, kings making decisions. And the reason that God gave the law initially is to provide guidance for the kings and the, well, the prophets are basically law enforcers, for the leadership of the nation to know what to do under different circumstances, okay? And even wisdom. When Solomon was offered the opportunity to get something from God,

notice that God appeared to him in a vision, and God says, what would you have me give you? Solomon said, give me wisdom so that I'll be able to lead these people. Now if what God, if the MO, the modus operandi of God, regarding his people making decisions about lots of things, was just that he would tell them, that would make people mere order takers, okay, just tell me what to do, okay, I'll do that. And anybody can take orders. But what wisdom is, is the right use of knowledge. It's insight. It's the ability to see the circumstances and to draw appropriate lines of action, given the set of circumstances.

So this is a misunderstanding. Actually, we had a question about it recently where somebody cited the book of James, Pray for Wisdom, and their, the presumption is all wisdom is, is an answer telling them what to do. That's not what wisdom is. Wisdom is insight that allows you to make the good answer, okay? And so, this is what we see throughout the Old Testament. We do not see this circumstance where, okay, I've got this decision, you tell me what to do, God. We don't see that at all. That requires no spiritual growth of any kind.

Okay? In the New Testament, we have something entirely different. We're to grow in wisdom and in knowledge, and we're to grow in our understanding of God's ways and grow in godliness, and all of these are thin, and our understanding of the Word, and all of these things in aggregate help form our decisions. So when it comes to the issue, I think Chris was, did she mention marriage as an example, right? Or where to live, what kind of job? No, he says when I'm making decision about life or family or to buy a house, a car, etc. Okay, well, those are general things, but in, in, uh, often times marriage is one of them.

Well, Paul gives instruction about marriage. In 1 Corinthians 7, there's a whole chapter about the decision of whether to get married or not, and he never says, ask God. He tells you, here are the pros, here are the cons, here are the liabilities of each, and here are the moral obligations applying to either singleness or being married. If you're single, you can't have sex. If you're married, you can't get divorced, for example. And the Proverbs has more information too about what's smart, you know, a given marriage. It says they're like a gold ring and the snout of a pig is a beautiful woman without discretion. Okay. Is it a sin to marry a beautiful woman without discretion? No, it's dumb. You get the gold ring, but the pig comes with it. And this is the instruction of Solomon to his

own son. So I'm just giving these examples of how scriptural elements are ones we take into considerations when we make the decisions that God has given us to make, whether it's marriage or buying a car or where to go to school or where to live or anything like that. Now, where does the prayer come in? The prayer comes in as an attitude of surrender to God

and a request for help to assess the challenges that you have, and some, I should say, the decision that you're facing. Now sometimes the prayer is for a kind of provision, all right? So if a young man is not married and he wants to be married, I don't think the right prayer is, tell me who I should marry, because there is no justification for that kind of prayer anywhere in scripture. And some people want to hark back to Abraham, so they've got to go back four thousand years for an example of a father choosing a wife for his son. So at best, what you have there in the example is an arranged marriage. Well then they kind of spiritualize it. Well this is the Holy Spirit sending the Holy, I'm sorry, it's the Father sending the Holy

Spirit to find a mate. That's what God does for us. There's no justification for making that kind of metaphor. And you see nothing like that in the rest of scripture with regards to that decision. So that's misdirected. What we pray for is we pray for wisdom, we pray for insight, we pray for opportunity. So if you're praying about being married, I had a fairly clear idea of the kind of woman I thought would be good for me, and I prayed for that kind of woman, that the Lord would bring that woman into my life, that I would have the wisdom to see those qualities in a woman that would best suit a wise choice for marriage. There are moral obligations that apply too, you know,

if you're going to get married, you have to marry a Christian. You can't be unequally yoked. And by the way, that's a moral obligation, but it's also smart if you're in full-time ministry you don't marry a new Christian because you don't know if they got staying power. That's a wisdom issue. Now, where are you going to get that wisdom? Some from the text I've just described. A lot of it you're going to get from other Christians. So this requires that we interact with other Christians to lay out where we're at, what we're faced with, and get counsel from them. Of course, it takes prayer to ask, to request of God that we get, we are given good counsel, and that we are able to separate the meat from the bones, because not all the counsel we get

is going to be sound. So there's plenty of things to pray about. The thing you don't pray about is the thing you are not told to pray about or told to expect. You don't ask God to make the decision for you. And incidentally, there are people who do this on a regular basis, but then the question is, how do you know when God answers that? Scripturally, when God intervened, it's in almost every circumstance, it's a supernatural intervention. I mentioned Solomon had a vision. Joseph had a vision regarding Mary, and then another dream regarding escaping Herod. So there's directives that God gave directly, but it wasn't a nudge, nudge, hint, hint kind of thing,

which is almost exclusively the way people think that God is telling them what to do. I'm feeling led, I've had confirmation, I have a peace about it, you know, etc., etc. And as I, in the piece, as you mentioned, has God spoke, or rather, does God whisper, I look at all those passages and show that these are not going to help you in this, because that's not what the writers were talking about.

So the prayer is going to be for lots of different things, and sometimes we don't always know the best way to pray, and this is where the Holy Spirit comes in for us, Romans 8. So we trust God in that, and we ask for wisdom, and we ask for insight, we ask for provision regarding specific things, and I mean, I know friends that just, you know, are out of work now, out of nowhere, bam, out of work. I'm praying for them. What am I praying for? Same thing, they're praying for themselves. Lord, give me opportunity. And then when the opportunities come up, then they have to be assessed. Are these good opportunities or are they not good opportunities? All things considered.

And that requires wisdom as well. So all of these decisions could be wrapped in prayer with all kinds of requests for God's help without saying, God, let's just cut to the chase. Tell me what to do. This is too much work. This is too hard. I got to have too many people. I got to, oh man, just tell me what to do. That's kind of the way people… You have to remember that God's greatest goal for us is to make us like Christ. It's not to give us this perfect life or to have us do certain specific things. It's all about shaping us. So why would He just give us, if He were just giving us a yes or a no, that would say, what's most important is where you move in life, what job you take, what car you buy.

But it's not. It's who we are. And that's why he wants us to mature through learning how to be wise and how to be discerning. So again, like, I would pray for wisdom. I pray that God would bring to light all the information I need for this decision, that if there's something hidden that I need to know that He would bring that to light, that I would get good wisdom from others, that I would be able to see things as they actually are and not be swayed by either mistaken ideas

or sinful ideas or whatever it is, that I would care about the right things as I'm making my decision. So all the, like you said, there are a lot of things to pray for. And just remember, your future is about God making you like Christ. That's the most important thing. So it's not like you're going to make some decision and your entire life will be off the rails and you've made this horrible decision you can't come back from and now you're in plan B.

And now you've given up God's best or whatever it is that people say. So interesting, I learned this many, many years ago when I was a fairly new Christian from John MacArthur, a great talk that he gave about decision-making and the will of God or found God's will as the title of this piece, and he made the observation that when you look in the New Testament for, and you, the language of the will of God, you don't find that language applied to particular decisions

about things like most people are asking God about. For example, for this is the will of God for you, there's the phrase, even your sanctification that you abstain from sexual immorality. Oh, well that's a character thing, okay. That's in 1 Thess 4, in 1 Thess 5 it says, give thanks in all things for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus. Oh, be thankful, okay.

It talks about do not, in Ephesians 4, do not be drunk with wine, but be filled with the Spirit, for this is God's will for you. Oh, so we're supposed to be Spirit-filled. You know, so there, and he goes through a number of them. Most of them start with S, so it's nice and convenient. But the point he's making is, is God's will is not a job that you, same one you made, job you, you're going to get a place to live, a degree to pursue, a person to marry. God's will is you and the kind of person you're becoming and being in that circumstance, the job, the marriage, etc. And we can rest knowing that we are not going to mess up God's plan.

I think a lot of people have this, again, this fear that if they make the wrong decision, everything is just ruined. Marry the wrong person, for example. But yeah, we can't mess up God's plan. If God wants us to be somewhere, we will end up there. So don't worry about that. Just work on being godly in whatever situation you're in, because that's what's important. Just a case in point very quickly, because I know we have to move on, but most people

consider standard reason the enterprise is a reasonably productive enterprise. 31 years now, we have a large team of people making a contribution in the lives of so many others. There has never been a single time where I ever felt led in the sense that people talk about it, heard the Lord's voice, or anything like that regarding anything having to do with standard reason. Now, I can clearly see God's hand orchestrating everything, not just the last 31 years since our inception, but all kinds of things that took place beforehand that God brought together to make this enterprise possible and fruitful. God's sovereign hand. God, to your point, Amy, God can work out his sovereign purposes just fine without having the Holy Spirit sit on our shoulder and whisper in our ear.

So let's go to a question from Philip, and some of this maybe we've already covered, but here's his question. Hi, in a recent podcast, Greg suggested that listening prayer wasn't found in the Bible. I wondered if Greg could define what he means by listening prayer and why the call of Samuel in 1 Samuel 3 isn't an example of it. Oh, okay. I'm very familiar with that passage. But the reason I say, well, let me back up. First question, what is listening prayer? And that's easy to figure out by reading anybody's

writing on it. Who was the guy who wrote the book? He's the pastor at Willow Creek in Illinois. Which book are you talking about? No, with the pastor of Willow Creek. Oh. Which book are you talking about? No, with the pastor of Willow Creek. Oh. I'm sorry, Greg. So soon we forget. He was one of the biggest pastors in the country. Absolute mega church anyway.

But he wrote a book that had a chapter in it about listening prayer. Okay, Bill Hybels. Oh, okay. Yeah. You're listening. It's just like I'm listening, Amy. It's infectious. Those aren't really my circles, so I don't know.

Okay. Anyway, Bill Hybels wrote, I have the book, and then there's a chapter on listening prayer. And the idea is very simple. Prayer is communication, which I agree. And then there's another step. What is communication? Communication is two-way. All right, maybe. Thirdly, if communication is two-way, then when I communicate to God in prayer, then He has to communicate with me. Well, maybe. And if I'm talking to Him, that's the mode of communication, then the mode of communication He would have with me is talking back to me. So what

I do is I pray, or we should pray, and we say our side, and then we stop and we listen for God to say his side. And that's called listening prayer. Okay, now there are a number of things wrong with that. For one, well, let's just start prayer as communication. Yes, of course, we are communicating with God our needs and desires and whatever, and we are told to do that. Communication isn't always two-way though. I'm driving down the freeway and I see an ad on the freeway. They're communicating to me about the ad. I'm not communicating back to them. So communication could be one way. Secondly, if we think of communication in relationships at least as to being two-way, then what is wrong?

Doesn't God's Word qualify as the other side of communication if that's the mode we're thinking of? So I communicate with God, sharing my things, and then I read his Word to learn what he has communicated for all of his people and how he's worked in the lives of his people, so I can understand his ways, and maybe even modify my prayer when I see you pray and do not receive because you use it to spend it on your, you know, your whatever, your foolish things, James says, your wants or your desires or something like that. So, boy, that's one reason. I don't hear your prayer because you have sinned that you're not dealing with in your life, Psalm 32 or whatever. So, oh wow, that gives us information. God's speaking there. That's

why we call it God's word. Now for some people it's not as satisfying because it's nicer if we just have a chat. But we are presuming something about God then that God himself has not decided to do with us. Are there conversational relationships in Scripture? Occ, very rare, and it's not characteristic of the rank and file. In fact, virtually every time we have a detail of a conversation God is having with someone, which is akin to the kind of conversations we think about, I say he says, I say he says, kind of thing, instead of a nudge nudge hint.

I think God is telling me to go to Asia or something like that. No, God gives a directive. He talks. I was just reading it the other day in Genesis 18. It says God appears in a vision, and he says, and they talked, and then he responded, and it's a conversation that God is having with Abraham at the Oaks of Mamre, for example. So that is straightforward. That's the obvious way to read it, and that's what happens. And once in a while it does happen, but it's very rare, and it's unique, and it's generally in a very unique set of circumstances, okay? And so we see that. God can do it every once, but I'm just looking at the patterns. We don't see any kind of intimation of what people would characterize as listening prayer.

I'm not sure if it was the discipleship group you were in with me in my home many years ago or another group before that, but the whole group went through the entire New Testament, we divided it up into sections, and we were trying to figure out what does the New Testament teach on prayer. And since we divided up in sections, the point was to read through it and isolate those verses that had to do with prayer, even if they didn't have the word prayer in them. So a concordance isn't going to serve the purpose of getting all of the references. And so we put together the all that we learned and we made an outline of it, and it's available on our website. It says New Testament on Prayer,

and you can see the whole outline we've put together. There's not a single verse that says anything about listening prayer, none. So how is it that a very prominent pastor in this country writes a book on prayer and has a whole chapter on listening prayer, to which there's not a bit of biblical, for which there's not a bit of biblical justification? Now if you listen, if you go quiet and listen, I promise you're going to hear something, if nothing else, then the workings of your own mind. The difficulty is if you're told to do that, and then you go quiet, and then something comes to mind, the temptation is to assign that thought that comes to mind with divine

authority. And that's just not justified, but it happens a lot and it creates a pastoral problem for pastors with people who are convinced God told them to do something that they're not, that doesn't seem to be what God has said. All right? So there is a counterexample. Okay, well, what about 1 Samuel?

Now I've heard this claim so many times, little Samuel, he's in the temple and he hears God speak and then he thinks, of course, it's not Samuel. He thinks it's Eli who is the priest and he's serving Eli as a boy. And so there's that interaction there. And I've heard this characterized in different ways, as if Eli is teaching Samuel to recognize the voice of God. The idea being God is speaking, but we don't recognize his voice. We have to learn by somebody who knows how to recognize it, how to recognize the voice of God. And this is a strong part of the teaching of say, Dallas Willard or JP Morland on this particular issue.

Now, I mean, I have lots of love for JP. We're very close. We differ on this point, but this is one of the ways they will characterize it. The problem is I figured, I'm just going to figure this one out, and I did something significant. I went back to 1 Samuel and started in chapter 1 verse 1, and I went to the last verse of chapter 3. I read every single verse to get the entire account.

And it turns out that there's no listening prayer that's going on here. Little Samuel, who's hearing from God, didn't initiate a prayer, and he's listening to try to hear. God speaks on his own initiative. Audibly. And he speaks audibly. And he speaks, we know it's audible because Samuel thinks it's Eli calling him. Now, Eli's not a godly man. The only time we know that God talked to Eli was through a prophet who put a curse on his family for sin in his family. And Eli doesn't even get it. A couple of times Samuel comes to him, he sends him back to bed. And finally he comes to his senses and he thinks, oh, something else is going on here. And so he tells Eli to ask when he hears it

the third time, speak, Lord, your servant. Is this listening or something to that effect? And instead of when God speaks, he doesn't run into Eli, he just asks God to finish his concern. So he has no problem. He doesn't have to learn to hear. Eli is not teaching him to hear, and Eli, there's no reason to believe that Eli has ever heard from God. okay? So nothing in this historical account matches the characterization that is offered by people who use this to support this view. In fact, there's no evidence that Eli is a genuine, godly man, a believer, okay? He's under a curse. And it says in the text that even Samuel doesn't

know the Lord. He's not a believer. He's just a kid. And the text says also in those chapters that words from the Lord were rare in those days. So what do you have here? You've got God initiating an interaction with a boy who turns out to be the first great prophet of Israel, Samuel. And he's the one of course that anoints Saul and that anoints David and I mean Samuel's amazing. What's interesting at the end of it, when he finally hears from God, then Samuel, I mean, Eli says, tell me everything he said! It doesn't sound like a guy who's used to hearing from God. He wants to know what's going on. All right? And then, it said, every word of Samuel's, I should, none of the words of Samuel's fell to the ground.

In other words, they all came true, which is a test of the prophet from Deuteronomy. And thus he was confirmed as the prophet of Israel. That's the end of chapter three. So what we see in Samuel is we see the exact kind of thing that God described. I will raise up prophets and I will speak to them and I will confirm them. and I will speak to them and I will confirm them. And this is what happened with Samuel. It is not a paradigm for Christians hearing from God, not in the slightest. And with regards to the question about listening prayer, there was no prayer that was being prayed, and there was no listening that was required because little Samuel heard God immediately. He just mistakenly and understandably thought he was Eli.

And that's the distinction that you make that the mistake here is thinking that you have to learn certain techniques to hear certain things from God. It's not that you're saying God never speaks to anyone ever. Correct. It's not that you're saying God never speaks to anyone ever, but rather that when He does, we hear. It's not something we have to learn how to do, and it's usually a supernatural thing. It's not like a hint or something like that. It'll be something recognizable that we know is God.

That's right. When you look at the book of Acts, virtually every single time God intervenes with special revelation, it is God. That's right. When you look at the book of Acts, virtually every single time God intervenes with special revelation, it is supernatural. It's a vision, it's Jesus showing up, it's an angel, it's the Holy Spirit physically transporting Philip from one location to another location. It's amazing. There's only two times that I know of where it's not specified, but one of those, it does specify their prophets among their midst. That's the first missionary journey. So it presumes, I mean, it's safest to presume that it was a prophet that spoke this word that sent Saul and Barnabas on that first missionary journey. But yeah, it's amazing to me that this way of looking at things that

have gotten so much traction. I mean, in one way I understand it because it feels personal and it's very subjective, and we're given to that a lot nowadays. But the biblical justification is nil on the method that most people are talking about in teaching. And just to be clear, Samuel's the first prophet with the kings, but of course there's Moses before that. Yes, that's right, right, right, but of course there's Moses before that. Yes, that's right, right, right. But he was the first great prophet to the nation. Yes, that's right. He's a… He started the kings because God had him anoint the kings.

Yeah, and it was from… I mean, Moses was absolutely unique and he was a type of Christ. But what Samuel was is he began the kind of the string of prophets that followed him that were God's spokesperson to the people to enforce the covenants. And yeah, so there is a distinction in that regard, but we don't want to dis Moses, do we? Don't forget Moses. All right. Thank you, Chris and Philip. We appreciate hearing from you. Send us your question on X with the hashtag STRask or go to our website at str.org so you can send in your question.

This is Amy Hall and Greg Kochel for Stand to Reason.