Can Children Hear from God?

The question really becomes how do children hear from God.  In one way, God is always speaking for those who can hear: "The heavens declare the glory of God. . . day after day they pour forth speech."  (Ps. 19)  Certainly the scriptures are God's word for us.  God's word is always there.  He is speaking.

With my children, I have had to teach them how to distinguish God's voice.  For a long time God's voice came through Dawn and me.  Their consciousness was not fully developed, so they were not aware of their own thoughts, exactly.  Of course, God spoke to them, but they were not fully aware of it in a specific sense.  They seemed to merely live in it by instinct, so to say.

What I mean is that the Creation is constantly interacting with and trusting God, but it does it by instinct.  God made human beings special in that they can choose to interact with and trust God and also be aware of it.  Those are things that other earthly created beings cannot do.  Children seem to start with a somewhat automatic sense of God, but then they come to a place where they must choose such interaction and become conscious of it.

Our fallen nature comes in as a "missing sense."  I read somewhere that being fallen is the fall of our hunger and awareness of God from the highest and most prominent part of ourselves to a place of death and insignificance.  Children, then, have to be taught to nurture that hunger and awareness although it is fallen and weakened by our present condition.  (Kind of like a lifetime of rehab.)

My daughter, Bethany, asked me recently if her dog, Hudson, obeyed God.  I answered, "Always."

She then said, "I wish I was like Hudson."

I said, "That's good, but Hudson is not aware of God; he just obeys out of instinct.  God has given us the gift and responsibility of having to choose to obey and being aware of that choice.  That's an important part of love."

She said, "Oh, then, I am glad I am not like Hudson."

"Me too," I said, "you'd be too fuzzy."

Kids are great.