Listening to Your Life

The idea of listening to your life sounds foreign to many and perhaps sinful to some. Learning to listen to your life is about listening deeply, an essential element of spiritual maturity and an important component found in spiritual disciplines like confession and solitude. John Calvin taught that “without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God.”The idea of self-knowledge or self-awareness is not foreign when we consider that God created us with the capacity to think, feel, reason, have desires and passions, as an expression of being made in His image and for His glory.

Listening to your life involves going to the inner recesses of your being to “hear” what is being spoken. It means honestly confessing and openly acknowledging what you are thinking, feeling, or experiencing, so that your thoughts, emotions, and encounters might be aligned with Christ. A biblical example of this is found in the life of Jonah (3:10-4:4). What we see in Jonah’s words and actions is actually what was going on inside him - the thoughts and emotions he was experiencing. This is what listening to your life looks like. In Jonah’s case, it led him to pray that God would take his life because he would rather die (v.3). His self-awareness was more than he could handle. But God had more in mind for Jonah!

Deep within, beneath the surface of your life, often hidden by pretense or fearfully guarded, lies the real you. To be self-aware is to be open and honest with ourselves – not as an excuse to stay the way we are – but to be completely free from such bondage by the power of the Spirit at work in us.

This is what God wanted Jonah to see as he looked into his own life.

He desires the same for you also. Jesus didn’t come merely to save your life; he came to give you a life! Your response is to learn to listen to your life so that you can hear what Jesus longs to do in you, for his glory.