This is a teaching that I prepared and presented to the squad this weekend, but I felt like it was worth sharing:
Hearing the voice of the Lord is something that we can all do, and that I believe we all HAVE done.
Remember the verse, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” –Revelation 3:20
As Christians, we all at some point heard Him knocking and made the decision to open the door and let Him in. Whether this happened when you were 7 and you have spent your life learning what it means, or you were older and had a dramatic encounter, at some point you heard His call and obeyed. Now we are in communion with the Holy Spirit, who resides within us. The Holy Spirit is active in our lives and we have a choice: to listen for His guidance, or to follow our flesh. Discerning the thoughts in our heads can be difficult, but through practice, obedience, and diligent study of scripture, hearing the voice of the Lord can become the new norm.
Romans 8:5 says, “Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what nature desires, but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires.”
What this verse says to me is this: as Christians we have chosen to deny our flesh and align our thoughts and desires with His. This does not mean we are perfect, obviously, we are still one third flesh. (Body, soul, spirit) However, we now have the ability to choose to live in accordance with the Spirit. How do we do this? By listening and being obedient.
I would like to give some practical steps, and a few examples of times that I have heard from the Lord that may help you to get a better idea of how you can hear from the Holy Spirit and grow in intimacy with the Father.
Step 1: Scripture
2 Timothy 3:16-17 sums it up for us: “All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”
God-breathed, as it turns out is a synonym for the word inspiration, whose Latin root word, inspirare meant divine influence. Each time that we open the Bible and read we are coming under divine influence. This too can look different in accordance to how it is used. Some people talk about opening to a random page and pointing to a verse and being inspired. This may work for some. I personally recommend finding a Bible study related to what you are interested in learning and sticking to it. I have a study Bible that my parents gave me when I was a freshman in high school (18 years ago). At the beginning of last year I opened the cover and read the note they had written to me all those years ago:
“Matthew, Jeremiah 29:11-13. God has wonderful plans for you. Seek Him with all your heart, study His word, talk to Him, and listen to Him. God will use you in mighty ways to bring others into His Kingdom. We love you, Mom and Dad”
We all know Jeremiah 29:11, but what stood out to my parents, and now to me, was verses 12 and 13: “Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.”
Here I was about to start a journey, the World Race, with the goal of bringing people into the Kingdom, but what God wanted me to remember was that above all I should be seeking Him with all my heart, and that if I do so, I will find Him. I have a long way to go, but since I began to seek Him, talk to Him, and to listen, I have seen God move in tremendous ways, and I have found God in places I never before thought possible.
Step 2: Pray/Ask the Lord
James 1:5 says, “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him.”
God desires to share His wisdom with us, but we have to ask for it! I believe that this also means that if we want to hear from the Lord, we should ask Him to speak to us. This does not mean that if we ask He will speak audibly to us. (Maybe He will to some of you, that’s great!) What I have found to be most helpful is asking God to help me to recognize when signs are from Him. Sometimes things happen that can easily be attributed to chance, but after asking God to make things clear, chance becomes much more limited. Last year I was in Mijas, Spain at debrief. People were sharing stories of the amazing things God had done throughout the month. I of course was skeptical and analyzing everything that was said, reasoning my way through their stories and explaining how all of these things happened by chance. At this point, a good friend of mine, Shea Hendry, stopped me and said, “Matt I would like to challenge you with something. Instead of doubting and explaining all of this away, why don’t you, next time you doubt something, ask God to prove you wrong?”
I asked, and He did…
Step 3a: Listen
At this point I would like to give a plug for the book The Art of Listening Prayer by Seth Barnes. This book describes an effective way to sit in silence and open up an opportunity for the Holy Spirit to speak to you. It is a 30 day devotion style book and if you would like a copy, let me know!
Here are the steps recommended in the first chapter for starting listening prayer:
-When you are ready, quiet yourself and examine your heart. It’s often good to begin by reading Scripture. Ask the Lord to speak to you through it.
-Ask the Lord to protect you in Jesus’ name from deception.
-Ask Him to speak clearly in a way that you can understand, and to confirm anything he shared with you in Scripture.
-Then write down your questions for prayer. Then pause. This is where you wait and listen. The Lord has much to say to you. He may direct you to another passage of Scripture. He may share a tender word. Whatever you feel He may be saying to you, write it down.
Step 3b: Open Your Mind
Listening prayer does not always look like sitting in silence for 45-90 minutes and writing down what you hear the Lord saying. In fact, the process I typically use looks very different, and your process may look different than mine, but I will give you an example of how I have practiced listening prayer and let you decide the direction that will work best for you.
Often when I am doing a listening prayer for someone else, I will spend a few minutes praying for that person, then I will sit for a few seconds until a picture comes to mind. Then, no matter how off the wall I think it is, I draw the picture. I like to spend a lot of time drawing the picture, making it as detailed as I can. My imagination is not always the best, so sometimes I will look up a picture of the object I saw and then draw that image. Once I have finished the drawing, I will either look up scripture that I believe is relevant to the individual, or I will hit shuffle on my worship playlist and write the lyrics to the song that plays. This takes control of what is written out of my hands and relies on the Holy Spirit to say what He desires for this person to hear. I have examples of these prayers if you would like to see them to get an idea of what it can look like.
There have been times when I have given one of these and the person shrugs and says thanks. Other times people have been deeply impacted by what God had to say through the pictures or the words on the page.
Step 4: Be Obedient
I believe this is the most important and effective way to hear the voice of the Lord, through obedience.
James 1:22-24 says, “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in the mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like.”
James is referring to reading scripture and not obeying the law, however I believe that these verses can have another context. Often times we hear the Spirit nudging us to do something, talk to someone, pray for something, go somewhere, etcetera. In the moment we may not be able to tell if these are our thoughts or God’s thoughts, and so we do not go. In doing so, we are disobedient, and we may miss when the Lord has spoken to us!
I have an example of this as well. We were on the bus ride from Cuzco to Lima and I was across the aisle from Frieda. A few hours into the ride Frieda began to feel nauseous. I immediately thought to myself, “You should pray for her…right now.” (This was the Spirit) But then another voice in my head (my flesh) said, “The people in the row in front of you speak English and will hear you. They get off the bus in a few minutes…just wait until they leave.” I waited…they left, I took their seat, and then prayed for Frieda. In this instance, God was not just telling me to pray for her, He was saying pray for her right now. And I did not obey.
Looking back at this instance, it would be easy for me to say, “Well those thoughts were my own, and who is to say that God was speaking to me in that moment. We all survived the bus ride. No big deal.” But if we look at it through a lens of obedience then this is what could have been: I hear God telling me to pray for Frieda right now. I am immediately obedient to the voice of the Lord. Frieda feels better because of God’s power being poured out on her. I receive confirmation that the voice that told me to pray…was the Holy Spirit’s. As an added bonus, maybe the couple in front of me sees this happen and asks about it. I then have an opportunity to share the love of Jesus with them.
There are other benefits to immediate obedience as well. We often think of God outside of time, however I believe that specific timing is a part of His divine mystery. We may feel the nudge to go talk with a stranger on the street, we walk past, but still feel that pull, and when we turn back they are gone. Perhaps in the exact moment that we felt that nudge, that person was needing to hear that someone cares for them, that God cares. When we are immediately obedient we unlock opportunities to share Jesus, and to perhaps change the trajectory of another life, or even eternity.
James 1:16-18 “Do not be deceived, my dear brothers. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of first fruits of all he created.”
If there is a voice telling you to do something good…it is God! Everything good comes from the Father. Do we have thoughts of our own inside of our brains…of course! But who strung our brains together? Who placed every axon and dendrite into place? Who opens the alpha, beta, and gamma channels in our nerve cells that create thought?
Psalm 139 is a great example of how the Lord works in our thoughts and speaks to our innermost being. Here David writes: “O Lord, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar…” He goes on in verse 4, “Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely O Lord.” And in verse 13, “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” And again in verses 16-17, “your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. How precious to me are your thoughts O God! How vast the sum of them!” Finally in verses 23-24, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”
Step 5: Share
This does not look the same for everyone. In fact, I believe that God communicates with each of us in ways that are unique to us, and sometimes in ways that only we can know and understand. Other times God speaks in ways that we do not understand, but when we share what we hear with our community, other people may be able to interpret what He is saying. Side note: we were created to live in community.
“For where two or three gather in my name, there I am with them.” –Matthew 18:20
“As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” –Proverbs 27:17
God intended for us to work together. Sometimes we do not understand what He is saying to us because we are not supposed to do things on our own. We receive words for each other, and we encourage one another. We share what we have read in scripture and what one cannot make sense of, another understands and can explain. We are diverse for a purpose and God uses that diversity to grow us and refine us into the people He created us to be. As I have struggled to discern my thoughts and have wrestled through this very subject, I could not count the times that friends and teammates have said to me, “Matt, that is from the Lord” or “Matt…you hear from God so clearly.” Without community to point me towards Him and to force credit where it is due, I may not have recognized just how clearly He does speak.
Be willing to listen, and be ready to obey.
