First Samuel opens at the end of the judges — a period the narrator has just summarized with the bleak line that "the word of the LORD was rare in those days; there was no frequent vision" (3:1). The audience is an Israel that has grown accustomed to silence from heaven and corruption in the priesthood. Eli's sons are abusing the sanctuary; Eli himself is dim-eyed and tired. Into that dark room a boy is sleeping near the ark, and God speaks. The narrator is teaching a later Israel — and us — that God begins again with whoever will listen, even when the official channels have gone quiet.

From the writers we read together

Dallas Willard

philosopher at USC, author of Hearing God and The Divine Conspiracy (1935-2013)

Willard's whole project was to argue that the Christian life is not a code to be kept at a distance from God but a friendship in which God actually speaks and is actually heard. He thought the church had quietly given up on this — settled for principles instead of a Person — and he traced the loss to a posture problem more than a theological one. Samuel's line is the posture Willard kept pointing to. Not "Listen, Lord, your servant is speaking," which is most of our prayer life, but "Speak, for your servant hears." The order matters. The verb assigned to God is speak; the verb assigned to the servant is hear.

What Willard saw, and what 1 Samuel 3 shows, is that hearing God is ordinary and learnable. Samuel mistakes the voice three times before Eli helps him name it. He is a boy in a dim room, not a mystic on a mountain. Willard would say: this is the normal shape of it. You will misidentify the voice at first. You will need an older believer to help you. You will need to lie back down in your place and try again. The condition is not unusual sensitivity; it is willingness to obey what you hear. Most of us cannot hear God because we have not yet decided to do what he says.