The other day I asked a pastor who has been reading my book That’s Not Church!, which is a compilation of some of my blogs about disciple-making in the local church, if anything had caught his eye. I was surprised at his response.

He referred to an essay that combined several blogs on The Living Word and featured these quotes from Eugene Peterson:

As God’s word written (scriptura) the scriptures are a great, but mixed, blessing. They are a blessing because each new generation of Christians has access to the fact that God speaks, the manner of his speaking, the results of his speaking. The scriptures are a mixed blessing because the moment the words are written they are in danger of losing the living resonance of the spoken word and reduced to something to be looked at, studied, interpreted, but not heard personally…

Words, separated from the person who spoke them, can be beautiful just as seashells are beautiful; they can be interesting just as skeletons can be interesting; they can be studied with profit just as fossils can be studied with profit. But apart from the act of listening and responding, they cannot function according to the intent of the speaker…The intent of revelation is not to inform us about God but to involve us with God…Some of Jesus’ sharpest disagreements were with the scribes and Pharisees, the persons in the first century who knew the words of scripture but heard the voice of God not at all…For them the scriptures had become a book to use, not a means by which to listen to God…

The Enemy has subverted the spoken word into an ink word. The moment that happens, the imagination atrophies, and living words flatten into book words. No matter that the words are believed to be true, they are not voiced words – Spirit-voiced and faith-heard – and so are not answered. They go through the minds of readers like water through a pipe. – Eugene Peterson, Reversed Thunder, quoted in The Word of God with Power by Jack R. Taylor, pages 58 – 60.

This pastor, a very good guy, told me: “I wish someone had told me this 40 years ago. I thought my job was to analyze the scripture and report what I discovered. Nobody taught me how to listen to God.”

Sad. Especially since pastors are the gatekeepers. If they don’t know how to listen to God, they’re not teaching their flock how to listen to God either. Praise that this pastor heard this lesson through the blog and received it, and I’m certain will act on it.

So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. (Romans 10.17, NKJV, emphasis mine)

But He answered and said, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’” (Matthew 4.4, NKJV)