Published by FaithWords on April 16, 2024
Genres: Non-Fiction, Christian Life
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Award-winning author and pastor of WestGate Church gives thoughtful, Biblical guidance for how to hear God and share His love in a culture of noise.
The effects of social media and the news are felt deeply in our day-to-day lives. The countless voices—the pundits, the influencers, the personalities—offering opinions and spewing vitriol nonstop have created a cacophony of chaos. It’s difficult to know what’s true or who to trust. It’s difficult to hear God and be heard.
In this book, pastor and author Jay Kim offers thoughtful, concrete guidance for how to listen amidst the noise, hear God, and then speak Good News so to be heard. Drawing on Scripture, social science, and cultural exegesis, Kim helps readers:
Listen through prayer, reading the Bible, and participating in the church
Better understand the environment and effects of social media, news media, and politics
Share the Good News in this environment, encouraging those in your day-to-day lifePractical, biblical, and eminently wise, Listen, Listen, Speak is an indispensable guidebook for Christians living in our culture today. It will equip you to not just speak into the chaos with the love of Jesus but, more importantly, to listen—to one another and to God.
I have enjoyed Jay Y. Kim’s other books about Christian spiritual formation in the digital age, and this one builds on the previous books’ themes in a different way, focusing on what it truly means to hear God, listen to others, and speak with God’s truth, grace and love. Kim explores biblical teaching, secular research, and experiential stories as he addresses different issues, and he highlights how important it is for individual Christians and their church communities to cultivate good listening skills in a world full of outrage, division, and loneliness.
Kim has a gift for explaining contemporary issues in a calm, gentle, and biblical way, focusing on timeless truths and macro issues. He gets to the heart of societal problems, showing how the same issues apply to people on both sides of the political aisle, such as when pundits make biased predictions and people look to those pundits instead of God to provide them with certainty, reassurance, and meaning. Kim never makes potshots at anyone, and he explores the deeper spiritual fractures behind attitudes and behaviors that are contributing to rage, loneliness, and societal breakdown.
Kim explores how core spiritual disciplines such as Bible-reading and prayer can help Christians better attune to God’s voice and love others, helping them become healing presences in a hostile world. Even though Kim’s advice often feels like a basic church answer, he doesn’t just tell his readers what they should be doing, but explains how these practices can change us at a fundamental level. He also shares inspiring examples of how individuals and churches can break cycles of hostility and outrage, and he delves into Scripture throughout the book, exploring what different passages mean in context and how they apply to contemporary issues.
Listen, Listen, Speak: Hearing God and Being Heard in a Noisy World is a great book for Christians who want to process their own reactions to society and people they disagree with, recognizing ways that their digital habits and behaviors may be distracting them from God’s voice, preventing them from truly listening to others, and causing them to speak in ways that are not constructive or Christlike. This book shows how timeless truths apply to contemporary problems, and will encourage readers to keep growing in their Christian lives, even when it requires extra effort to go against the tides of digital culture. This book is winsome, thought-provoking, and encouraging, and I highly recommend it.