Charles Stanley writes, “I believe one of the most valuable lessons we can learn is how to listen to God…And the Bible is explicit, God speaks to us just as powerfully today as in the days in which the Bible was written.” This is very confusing, seeing that if it is so explicit, why do we not find one passage about how we learn to hear God’s voice. Where do you find anyone being taught how to hear it?  The passage cited by Stanley to demonstrate it is 1 Samuel 3:4-10. He claims that Eli taught Samuel how to listen to God. So, according to Stanley, Samuel’s first lesson was how to listen to God. Samuel heard His voice because it was audible, but he thought it was Eli’s voice. In addition, verse 1 tells us that the word of God was rare in those days and visions were infrequent. This would explain why Samuel thought it was Eli’s voice.
Samuel didn’t need to learn how to hear God’s voice. There was no learning or discipline involved as we are told. However, if God speaks today in the same way He did in Bible times, we ought to have some examples where God speaks, but the hearer was unable to hear Him or recognize it.  We should be able to find God’s ability to communicate being hampered by our inability to hear Him. Using Morris’ language, we should find examples where humans need to tune in to the right frequency to pick up God’s messages.
Now, we can find examples where people did not hearken to God, but it wasn’t because they didn’t hear Him. They didn’t obey Him because they were rebellious, hard-hearted, and disobedient.  Further, the communication was heard. They got the message, but the message was not an inaudible unction, impression, or urging that arose from their own thoughts or a still small voice. It was a clear revelation that was heard and understood as being from God. They just refused to obey it. The problem with this teaching is that we can neither learn to hear something that is not being said, nor miss something that God intends for us to hear.