Tethers: Learning to Trust the Voice of God
Friday night, Micah Williamson shared a teaching she first gave at a leaders' retreat earlier this year, built around a simple goal: that we would leave more confident about hearing God's voice, and more confident about how He sees us. It's a subject she's walked out over twenty years of learning to discern what's from Him — and what she offered wasn't a formula, but a way of understanding how God actually speaks to people He loves.
How does God see people?
Micah started by asking the room a question straight from Scripture: how does God describe people? The answers came quickly — the apple of His eye, His children, co-laborers, the bride, wonderfully and fearfully made. "Generally speaking, it's positive," she said. When God created Adam and Eve, He said it was very good. "We are image-bearers. We demonstrate who God is." That matters for hearing His voice, because most of the time God doesn't speak in an audible, outside-of-us voice. He speaks through our faculties, our intellect, our imagination — even through other people. "God speaks to us through us," Micah said, which means understanding how He sees people is the starting point for trusting what we hear.
The concept of tethers
The heart of the teaching was a picture Micah drew years ago that she called "the bouquet of my life" — a list of the roles and relationships that were always going to be part of her: wife, mom, musician, theologian, prophet, writer. Some things we're tethered to, she explained, will never go away. Our culture, our physical needs, our core beliefs, our training, our relationships — these aren't distractions to strip away in order to hear God better. "God isn't expecting us to just cut off the responsibilities that we have," she said. Jesus Himself said His burden is easy and His yoke is light — life with Him isn't meant to weigh us down.
But not every tether is light. Some are heavy, and those are the ones worth bringing to God to examine. Micah illustrated this with a hot air balloon her family watched being launched on a trip through Albuquerque: the tethers holding the canopy to the basket have to stay strong so the balloon can rise, but the sandbags tethered to the ground have to be released before it can lift off. "There are some things that will hold you back from the call of God... until we follow the Lord's leading to sever those tethers." The question isn't whether we're tethered to things — we always will be — but whether those tethers are healthy, and whether any of them have grown too tight, too loose, or need to be let go of entirely.
Abram's honest complaint
To ground the teaching in Scripture, Micah walked through Genesis 15, where God tells Abram in a vision, "Fear not, Abram, I am your shield. Your reward shall be very great." Instead of gratitude, Abram pushes back: "Oh Lord God, what will you give me? For I continue childless." It's an honest, almost whiny response to a promise. And God doesn't rebuke him for it. He answers him directly, takes him outside, and shows him the stars: "So shall your offspring be." Abram believed the Lord, and it was counted to him as righteousness. Micah pointed out what made that moment possible: Abram was honest, self-aware, not bypassing what he actually felt. And God met him there with comfort and assurance rather than correction. "That middle place... is where God loves to come and be with us."
An invitation to let your heart talk
Micah closed by inviting the room to bring whatever was stirring — a comment from a coworker, tension at home, something they'd been too busy to process — directly to God instead of dismissing it as a distraction. "Don't just assume that everything that comes up is meant to be ignored," she said. "Let your heart talk. And as you do, keep your eyes on the Lord." She offered simple questions to sit with: What am I tethered to? What's weighing me down? Is there a tether that's too loose, or one that's too tight? The invitation wasn't to become less human in order to hear God more clearly — it was the opposite. God became human in Jesus and showed us that our humanity isn't something to escape from in order to know Him.
Something to sit with this week
What is one tether in your life right now — a role, a relationship, a responsibility — that's begun to feel heavy instead of light? And like Abram, what would it look like to bring your honest, unfiltered response to God this week, trusting Him to meet you there rather than correct you for it?
Catch The Fire Boulder meets Sundays at 10:00 AM at 700 W South Boulder Rd, Lafayette, CO. We'd love to have you join us. Watch the full message or plan your visit.
