Practice: The Spiritual Practice of Listening

Learn the spiritual practice of listening: being fully attentive with the intent of understanding. Listening is a matter of life and death when it comes to relationships. There is no life with God apart from listening. Our current culture is noisy with lots of talking. The practice of listening is a dying art.

Here's how you can practice listening: 
- Ask people how they experience your listening
- Think about how you can become a safe person

Practice listening so that you can be formed more fully into a person of love.

Spiritual formation is the process of how we become more like Jesus.

What is Sandals Church Podcast?

At Sandals Church, our vision is to be real with ourselves, God and others. This channel features sermons and teaching from Pastor Matt Brown and other members of the Sandals Church preaching team. You can find sermon notes, videos and more content at http://sandalschurch.com/watch

Spiritual priorities are being undermined right now, but we do want to wrap this up. Audio's good? We're good? Lighting good? Alright, whenever you're ready. Okay. We are all becoming someone. In fact, whatever has captured your attention, and the things that you find yourself doing the most, is very much shaping the kind of person that you are becoming. For those of us who follow Jesus, we refer to this as spiritual formation, which is a way for us to understand that if we want to become more like Jesus, then we need to do the things that Jesus himself did. And so today I want to talk to you about the practice of listening. Now, I would define listening as the practice of being fully attentive with the intent of understanding, not response, but understanding. When you think about God himself, by nature, God is someone who listens. When the scriptures speak about people who pray, they say God is the God who hears prayers, or he's heard our cry. God has listened to me and delivered me. This is the very nature of God. Like even in Exodus 34, when God describes himself as compassionate, slow to anger, abounding love. Listen, you can't be compassionate unless you've understood me. To understand someone requires that you listen to them. We see this even in Proverbs 18, verse 13. It says, to respond before listening is both foolish and shameful. So any one of us who would find ourselves responding to people before we've listened to them, the Proverbs says that's a fool and that's something to be ashamed of. And then Jesus arrives on the scene and gives to us this declaration that, him who has ears to hear, let him hear. The person who has ears to hear, let them listen. You see, there is no life with God. There is no life with Jesus apart from learning to listen, which is why Paul says, faith comes by hearing, hearing from the word of God. Then in James, you have this simple statement that we are to be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger, quick to listen. Now, I don't know if that would describe all of us in our current culture, where there's a lot of talking and a lot of noise. Based on the amount of people who we see entering into counseling and therapy, it tells me that the practice of listening is a dying art in our relationships and our communication. In other words, it's getting harder and harder for people like you and I to enter into a conversation in which we feel heard and we're dignified as human beings. Listening is something that we desperately need. A lot of times we learn things from people who are self-proclaimed thought leaders and talking heads on our screens. And if we're not careful over time, we become the kind of people who are most shaping us and teaching us. And so the invitation to withdraw from that kind of way of listening and learning to becoming people who are active and our ability to understand someone is a real gift that our world needs. And here's how I think this can happen. First, I want you to find someone who knows you well and to ask them how they experience your listening. Do you listen in a way to respond or do you listen with a desire and intent to be fully present and to understand who they are, what they're going through, what they're needing you to hear them out. And then secondly, I want you to think about mentally how you can be someone who enters into conversations, not as someone who's trying to solve, but someone who's just trying to be safe. Like, are you safe with people when they share with you? You know, we're told that 80% of our day is spent in communication. Now, how much of that communication is you talking versus you listening, right? So this is a practice we desperately need to recover. And again, we recover this practice like all of our other Christian practices, not so that we can go on kind of this self-improvement journey to become better versions of ourselves, but we do this so that we might become people who are shaped in the image of Jesus and become like him, who loves our neighbors well. Jesus was a stranger who first came to us and loved his neighbors well. He's transformed us by that love and we wanna model that in our lives. And so listening becomes a key step to you and I actually becoming people of love. So think about how you might learn to listen better and to see yourself as someone who is first safe before you're trying to solve something and ultimately discover the gift that God hears you, now you can hear the world and care for them as well. Grace and peace. the world and care for them as well. Grace and peace. Cool.

Transcribed with Cockatoo