Developing a Heart that Listens to People

Scripture — 1 Kings 3:7-9 (NIV)

Now, LORD my God, you have made your servant king in place of my father David. But I am only a little child and do not know how to carry out my duties. Your servant is here among the people you have chosen, a great people, too numerous to count or number. So give your servant a discerning heart to govern your people and to distinguish between right and wrong. For who is able to govern this great people of yours?

Devotion

In the last couple of days, I have reflected on Solomon’s prayer for “a discerning heart.” In yesterday’s devotion, I examined the Hebrew phrase translated as “a discerning heart, which literally means “a listening heart.” Solomon knew that his wisdom would come from the Lord, and therefore, he needed a heart that heard God’s voice, and, by implication, the voices of other people as well.

It’s important to note that in Hebrew, lev, translated as “heart,” does not have the same meaning that “heart” has in English. When we speak of “matters of the heart,” for example, we’re referring to things like emotions, romantic love, and so forth. Ancient Hebrew would locate those things in the bowels, not the heart. For speakers of Hebrew, the “heart” is closer to what we’d call the “mind,” the location of our thinking. But “heart” also includes the will and, sometimes, the emotions. As it says in Psalm 13:5, “But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation.”

So, a discerning heart, or we could say, a listening heart, isn’t only about using our minds to pay attention to God and other people. It’s also about the shaping of our inner beings, our thinking, willing, and feeling. A discerning heart seeks and responds obediently to God’s guidance. It also listens to people, knowing that wisdom often comes in the community of the faithful, not just to individuals. As Uli Chi writes in his book The Wise Leader, “One of wisdom’s key attributes is the ability to watch and listen carefully” (p. 29).

I have tried throughout my professional life to be an attentive and faithful listener, both to God and people. Along the way, I developed certain practices that help me to listen. I thought it might be beneficial if I were to share a couple of these with you. I’ll focus on one today. (I’ll write about the other in next Monday’s devotion.)

When I was the pastor of Irvine Presbyterian Church, I knew I needed to become better at listening to the people in my congregation. My pastoral mentor, Lloyd Ogilvie, always emphasized the importance of listening to people, even and especially when preaching. As a newly minted preacher, I knew that I was not naturally wired for listening. I was good at speaking, urging, and advising. I thought I was the person who was supposed to have all the right answers, not the right questions. Listening wasn’t my strong suit. But, by God’s grace, I discovered a practice that helped me become a better listener.

It was called The Pastor’s Study. It was a Bible study I led each Thursday morning from 6:45 to 7:45 (so that people could participate before their workday began). The Pastor’s Study was not like many church Bible studies, however, with most of the time devoted to a lecture-style presentation. Rather, the folks in the study and I would work together on the Bible passage I was preparing to preach on the following Sunday. Yes, I’d share some insights from my prep times. But mainly I’d ask for input from the group. I asked lots and lots of questions. The participants would share their thoughts on the meaning of the text. They’d think out loud about how a given passage spoke to their daily lives. They’d talk openly about their hopes, fears, convictions, and doubts in light of the text we were studying together.

I learned so much from listening to the people in The Pastor’s Study. I got new insights into the biblical text. I learned how a certain passage perplexed them or moved them. Their stories often became examples in my sermons (used with permission, of course). When I started doing The Pastor’s Study, I became a much more effective preacher, not because I became smarter or worked harder, but because I was listening attentively and empathetically to the folks in my church. Plus, I got to know some of my people in a much deeper way because of our weekly conversations about the Bible and our lives.

I was experiencing what Scott Cormode, a Fuller leadership professor associated with the De Pree Center, teaches about listening:
You begin with this idea that leadership begins with listening. We tend to think that the stereotype of a leader is a leader who speaks. And of course leaders speak. But leadership begins with listening. We listen to the people that are entrusted to our care. Christian leaders don’t have followers. Jesus has followers. Christian leaders instead have people that are entrusted to our care. These are people who already belong to God, and God entrusts them to our care. And as we listen to them, we listen to the things that matter most. We listen to the things that keep them awake at night.

Yes, that’s it! Thank you, Scott.

By listening to the people entrusted to my care in The Pastor’s Study, not only did I gain helpful insights for my preaching. Something else was going on inside of me through this practice. My heart was being formed by God in a new way. I became less of a speaker and more of a listener. I was, by God’s grace, becoming more able to follow the counsel of James, “Be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger (James 1:19).”

So, if you want to have a discerning heart, you might work on your listening to people as well as to the Lord. There are many ways to do this, of course. One is suggested by Uli Chi in The Wise Leader:
One practice that I’ve found helpful is an extension of the practice of active listening. In that discipline, we try to repeat to people what they’ve said to us. That’s relatively easy with simple things, like what someone had for dinner last night. But it’s more complex when dealing with people’s values and beliefs. It requires work to get into their heads to understand what they are saying (p. 72).

But that kind of work will reward you, not only by helping you make better leadership decisions, but also by forming your heart to be more like the heart of God.

In this season of my life, I don’t preach every week, though I do a fair amount of guest preaching. My main way of communicating is through writing, especially Life for Leaders. I don’t have the benefits of The Pastor’s Study anymore. But, in my ten-plus years of writing Life for Leaders, I have received more than a thousand messages from readers, usually in the form of emails. I get to hear your responses to what I’ve written. People will often share with me their struggles and challenges. Or you’ll tell me what really touched your soul. My effectiveness as a devotional writer, like a preacher, has everything to do with how well I listen to the people who use Life for Leaders to grow in faith and faithfulness, that is, to people like you. (This is also true, by the way, of the others on our writing team. Thank you for communicating with them as you do with me.)

If, like Solomon, we want to have a discerning heart, then we will learn to listen to the Lord as a top priority. We’ll also learn to listen to people, especially, as Scott Cormode observes, to the people entrusted to our care.

Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the unique website of our partners, the Theology of Work Project. Reflection on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: Everyday Moral Choices.