(02/40) Why You Need a Guide Like Eli (and My TOP FIVE Recommended Guides for Hearing from God)

I've read some of the good, bad, and ugly writing on hearing God so you don't have to, and I've boiled it down to a few recommendations.

You’re asleep in the middle of the night. Then, you hear someone call out your name and it startles you awake. Groggy and sleep-deprived, you try to find where the voice is coming from, and you ask the first person you can find in your house if they called for you. They say, no. You go back to bed. Then, it happens again (and again)—three times in a row. And, you feel like you’re going crazy.

“Is that just the voice in my head?”
“Is someone just playing a prank on me?”
“I knew I shouldn’t have had pizza after 10:00 PM.”

That was Samuel’s first experience of hearing from God—and it’s all recorded in 1 Samuel 3 in the Bible.

Samuel grew up in a time when “the word of the Lord was rare” (3v1), which means that most people weren’t familiar with the voice of God. He was no different. It says, “The word of the Lord had not been revealed to him” (3v7). He wasn’t necessarily expecting to hear from God, and even if God were to speak to him, as he does in this text, he didn’t recognize the voice of God.

Eli, on the other hand, was experienced with hearing from God. Eli had spent a lifetime in God’s presence, learning to listen for God’s voice. And, it was Eli who, after Samuel’s third experience of hearing his name called, “understood that the Lord was calling the boy” (3v8) and gave him some much needed guidance about what to do.

Whether you’re seventy-years-old or twelve, we all need guides like Eli. We need men and women further along in hearing from God who can respond to your questions and give you wisdom. Why do we need guides like Eli? Because God’s voice isn’t obvious—even when it’s audible.

The Importance of Personal Guides

I don’t remember the first time I heard from God, but I do remember some of my earliest guides.

Ginny was a guide. She was my friend Danny’ mom, and she would teach us the Bible at summer camp. One summer, the theme was something like, “God can speak to you.” I remember the theme because we tye-dyed our camp shirts that year, and, regrettably, I wore that shirt my first week of public high school in a new city. I left camp that year expecting to hear God’s voice, and I subscribed to her weekly email where she regularly dropped wisdom for teenagers like me.

Then, there’s Rob. He was one of my college professors. The shelves in his office were lined with spiritual classics from proven guides in hearing from God. He helped me start reading the Bible because it was what one of his favorite guides, Dallas Willard, called, “the permanent address of the Word of God.” He carried around a little pocket notebook, like I do now, to make notes of anything, including what God might be saying to him.

I’ve had other guides over the years, but those are two people who, like Eli, taught me firsthand what it was like to listen for God’s voice. Personal guides like these, who can interact with you and your questions, are some of the best guides, and you probably already have someone in your life who might make a good guide for you.

My Top Five Recommended Guides (and a Few More)

In 1 Samuel 28, a king named Saul was struggling to hear the voice of God in his life for a variety of reasons. So, instead of talking to someone he knew, he tried to raise Samuel from the dead with the help of a “medium” to be his guide—the same Samuel who learned to hear God’s voice from Eli. And, Samuel wasn’t having it.

I don’t recommend Saul’s strategy for finding a guide.

But, in addition to personal guides, I do recommend finding a few people, living and dead, who have given talks or written books about hearing God. You don’t need to find a medium in En-dor in order to learn from them, though. You probably just need to go to your local bookstore.

Throughout this series, I’ll be quoting different guides that have been helpful to me over the years, but here’s my top five recommended guides for hearing from God:

1. Pete Greig, How to Hear God

2. Dallas Willard, Hearing God

3. Priscilla Shirer, Discerning the Voice of God

4. Ruth Haley Barton, Pursuing God’s Will Together

5. Frank Laubach, Letters by a Modern Mystic

I’ve also learned from living guides like Nicky Gumbel, Jack Deere, David G. Benner, and Sam Storms, and, in the words of Alan Jacobs, I have “broken bread with the dead” like George Muller, Samuel Shoemaker, E. Stanley Jones, Andrew Murray, Brother Lawrence, and others that have been recommended to me over the years. (I just didn’t try to raise them from the dead.)

How to Find a Guide Like Eli

As I said in my last email, I might be your first guide to hearing from God, but I shouldn’t be your only guide. Everything I know I’ve learned from other trusted guides. Since there’s a lot of people out there claiming to be “guides” who probably shouldn’t be, here’s two criteria I use for finding a good guide:

1. Good guides keep it biblical. You want to learn from people who ground their advice in the Bible. Be careful of people whose guidance is too “original” or can’t find biblical support.

2. Good guides keep it practical. Find guides with firsthand experience who can make God’s voice real for you. You’re not trying to write a research paper on hearing from God.

You can use those two criteria as a filter for everything I share in this email series. I encourage you to bounce what I’m saying off the Bible, check it against other guides like the ones I’ve recommended in this email, or talk it over with a personal guide you trust.

As you finish reading this email, say a short prayer asking God to bring a guide like Eli into your life, who can walk alongside you as you try to hear from God and read 1 Samuel 3.

Here’s what I would love to hear from you this week: Who are some guides who have taught you how to listen for God’s voice? Do you have any recommended books or talks that have been really helpful? Share in the comments. (I loved hearing from so many of you last week.)

After Samuel talks with Eli about what’s happening, Eli tells him that, next time he hears his name, he should simply say, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening” (1 Sam. 3v9). And, in my next email, I’m going to share part of a list I made, after reading through the whole Bible, of all the different ways God might speak to you—whether you’re asking him to or not.

(By the way, for more on Samuel, Eli, and God’s voice, check out this sermon from my friend Tyler Gorsline at A Seattle Church.)