That being said, I think “listening prayer” is something that can be unhealthy or even dangerous, depending on who is doing the praying and how they are going about doing it.
The article says, “Perhaps the hardest part is clearing your mind.”
Even though the author is primarily referring to clearing the mind of worldly worries or random thoughts, this still bothers me. I don’t ever remember seeing where Paul or Jesus or any apostle taught believers to clear their mind. Instead we are taught to fill our minds with God’s Word and to meditate on it day and night. Prayer is not passive, but active. We don’t sit back and wait for God to fill our blank minds, but we let Him guide us as we study His Word with our minds bathed in His Word.
Also, principle #2 [in the article] REALLY bothers me:
“2. Read some scripture. Ask the Lord to speak to you through it in a way that you can understand. Ask God to protect you in Jesus’ name from deception.”
It sounds so non-chalant. Just read a few verses, and ask God to use those verses to speak to your situation. The Scriptures don’t work like that! They aren’t meant to be applied one way to one person and another way to someone else. They carry “inherent truth” in them, that we must discern (with the aide of God’s Spirit) through careful study and prayer. We then take that truth and apply it to our lives, not vice-versa. In other words, we don’t look at Scripture through the lens of our lives, hoping to find something that applies to “where we’re at”, but we look at our lives through the lens of Scripture, applying to all areas as we grow in sanctification and holiness.
The very fact that the author encourages us to “Ask God to protect you in Jesus’ name from deception.”, shows that even HE thinks there is some inherent danger in waiting for some inner voice to speak to us in our minds.
And finally, the verse from John 10 that [was] quoted in the comments above, “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.” (John 10:27) is not speaking of something akin to “listening prayer”. Read the whole context of the chapter (verses 3-5, for example). There’s a lot more going on, and deeper theologies being presented here than that. You won’t find any commentary on this chapter that presents the view that John is speaking of some kind of normative form of “listening prayer for Christians.
http://www.gty.org/Resources/Sermon+Series/221
And I just recently listened to a couple of sermons by blogger/pastor Phil Johnson (http://teampyro.blogspot.com) on John 10 as well. They can be found at:
http://www.thegracelifepulpit.com/philsermons.htm
Both of these sermon resources are relevant to the question that Jeff brought up in saying that he thinks “Scripture itself speaks to this issue of hearing God’s voice”.
Scripture does indeed speak of hearing God’s voice, just not through the listening prayer techniques listed above.
