Are You Listening or Just Hearing?

You can hear from God as clear as day and still not listen, but just because you're not listening doesn't mean God's done speaking.

Dec 23, 2025

I know my kids can hear me.

After each of my kids were born, before we were even allowed to leave the hospital, a nurse came into the room and tested their hearing. She performed the test with a little hearing device, and she confirmed that each of my kids could hear just fine. As proof for anxious parents like me, she gave each of them a sticker that said, “I had my hearing tested today.” And, after a few more hours in the hospital, we took each of them home with the knowledge that they are fully capable of hearing us.

It’s official: My kids can hear my voice. The nurse told me so.

I have to remember that moment in the hospital because, most of the time, I have my doubts that my kids can actually hear anything that I’m saying. I can say something like, “Clean up your room,” but there’s no response—not even a twitch. So, I say it a little bit louder. Still nothing. If it hadn’t been for the hearing test in the hospital, I would start to wonder if they are starting to lose their sense of hearing.

If I need confirmation, though, I don’t need to call the hospital or schedule a hearing appointment. All I need to say is something like, “Who wants a snack?” Suddenly, it’s as if their hearing has been healed, and they come running.

The problem isn’t with hearing. It’s with listening.

As journalist Kate Murphy says in You’re Not Listening, “But it’s important to emphasize that hearing is not the same as listening, but rather its forerunner.”1 You can hear the words coming out of someone’s mouth without listening to a word that they are saying. Hearing is nothing more than the opportunity to actually listen.

If the first enemy of hearing God in the decisions that matter most is the need for clarity, the second is simply the failure to listen. Even if you heard from God using something like the H.E.A.R. Framework, which is what this forty email series is all about, you could still not listen to God—and you wouldn’t be the first.

Listen = Obey

Listening is about more than simply understanding what God is saying to you. In the Bible, there’s an essential connection between listening and obeying.

At the beginning of Deuteronomy 6:4, for example, the Hebrew word shema shows up. In fact, often this series of the verses in the Bible is simply called “the shema.” It opens with, “Listen [shema], Israel…” It’s a word that can sometimes simply mean hear, but often it’s translated as listen with obedience baked into it. (Even the etymology of the English word obedience can be traced back to listening.)

In other words, if God is speaking to you, you’re not really listening in any meaningful sense of the word if you’re not obeying.

Repeatedly, though, you’ll see that God’s people don’t listen and obey. In Psalm 95:7-9, it says, using the same word shema, “Today, if you hear his voice: Do not harden your hearts as at Meribah, as on that day at Massah in the wilderness where your ancestors tested me; they tried me, though they had seen what I did.”

The problem wasn’t with their hearing, it was with their listening—and, the human impulse to hear God without listening to him hasn’t changed. You want to hear from him, but when you actually do hear his voice through one of the ways in the H.E.A.R. Framework, you don’t want to obey him.

When Your One Job is to Listen to God

Nowhere in the Bible is the human tendency to hear but not listen more obvious than in the story of Jonah.

Jonah was a prophet in ancient Israel, which means that he had one job: listen for what God might want to say to you, someone else, or to an entire community. There was nothing else in his job description. That was it.

But, when “the word of the Lord came to Jonah” (Jonah 1:1), the classic way the Bible describes the moment a prophet hears from God, Jonah doesn’t listen. We aren’t told how exactly he experienced God’s guidance, just that he experienced God’s guidance.

Here’s what God says to him, “Get up! Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it because their evil has come up before me” (Jonah 1:2). For all we can tell, Jonah receives the kind of clarity we long for God to give but aren’t guaranteed to receive. He’s told where to go and what to do with his life next.

Instead of obeying, though, it says, “Jonah got up to flee to Tarshish from the Lord’s presence. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. He paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the Lord’s presence” (Jonah 1:3-4). If you aren’t familiar with the geography of the Ancient Near East, Tarshish is about as far in the opposite direction of Nineveh as you could imagine. Jonah bought a one-way ticket away from God’s will for his life with no intention of ever coming back.

That’s why, even if you do get clarity for God about a decision you’re facing, you’ll often discover that clarity was never the problem. It’s more often a failure to listen. The human impulse to run to Tarshish lives in you and me. God could write his will in the sky for you about a decision you’re facing, but the only thing that would crystallize for you is that you’re not interested in doing what he says.

You don’t need your hearing checked, you need your listening checked.

God Doesn’t Quit Speaking When You Aren’t Listening

If you keep reading Jonah, you’ll notice that God, in his mercy for you, doesn’t always quit trying to get your attention when you choose not to listen to him.

Jonah’s boat gets hit by a storm, an experiential set of circumstances, that God uses to get Jonah’s attention. He sleeps through it, and he’s clearly still not listening. Next, the pagan sailors “cast lots” to see what the gods might be trying to say, and God uses that to single out Jonah and speak to him again.

At this point, though, Jonah thinks it’s over for him and he tells everyone to just throw him overboard—in what feels like either a last ditch effort to avoid doing what God is saying or an acceptance of his destiny for disobedience. He’d rather be dead on the ocean floor, it seems, than go to Nineveh.

But, he’s swallowed by a fish that God sent his way, and three days later, after what probably felt like a lifetime, the fish vomits him up on dry land again. He’s back to where he started when he heard God’s voice before, and listen to what it says, “The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time: “Get up! Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach the message that I tell you” (Jonah 3:1-2). This moment is almost an exact replica of what happened just two chapters earlier before the storm and the fish, and Jonah has to be feeling some deja vu.

This time, though, it says, “Jonah got up and went to Nineveh according to the Lord’s command” (Jonah 3:3). God circled back to what he spoke to Jonah and gave Jonah a fresh opportunity to obey, and this time Jonah listened and obeyed.

Terry Walling, who has helped many leaders pay attention to what God might be saying through their lives, said somewhere that God will often repeat things in your life that he said before but you haven’t listened to yet.2 Like Jonah, God will sometimes bring you right back to the place where you started again and again until you’re ready to obey.

And, I’ve also heard it said that if you feel like you aren’t hearing from God, maybe what you need to do is go back to the last word you sensed God speak to you and consider whether or not you obeyed what he’s already said.3 Sometimes, you’re begging God to speak to you, even though he’s already spoken to you, and he’s just waiting on you to listen and obey.

Obedience Takes Practice

If you want to be the kind of person who obeys God when he speaks to you about the decisions that matter most, it starts with practicing obedience in your everyday life. Don’t wait until you’re facing a big decision to start obeying God, start obeying God as often as you can starting right now.

For example, when you read the Bible, practice obedience. Eugene Peterson says, “The most important question we ask of this text is not, ‘What does this mean?’ but ‘What can I obey?’ A simple act of obedience will open up our lives to this text far more quickly than any number of Bible studies and dictionaries and concordances.”4 Don’t settle for finding the Bible interesting or even just trying to understand it. Look for one thing you can obey starting today.

Or, when you feel something that might be God in your heart, obey it. You might be walking and sense, “Go talk to that person,” go talk to that person and see what happens. Or, you hear about a situation that someone is going through and you sense God might be saying to help out, do it. As long as it’s within the boundaries of the kinds of things God could say (i.e., it’s loving, not sinful), practice obedience when you can.

If you’re practicing obedience in the little things, you’ll be more likely to practice obedience in the big things—the decisions that matter most. As the classic saying says, how you do anything is how you do everything, and that’s true for what you do whenever God speaks. (And, in the next email, we’ll explore how to live a life of hearing God, not just in big decisions.)

Maybe you heard God speak to you in a variety of ways about a decision that you’re facing throughout this forty-email series. Even if you don’t have total clarity about the next step, at some point, you have to decide if you’re going to take a step forward and obey regardless of your degree of clarity.

If the two final enemies of hearing God in the decisions that matter most are the need for clarity and the failure of obey, then the antidote is simply to do what the words of the old hymn says, ”Trust and obey, for there’s no other way to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.”

Austin Gohn

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