Day 2: How to Hear His Voice
God teaching me how to hear His Voice has probably been the biggest spiritual breakthrough I’ve had since being baptized in the Holy Spirit. It also is the only way to build upon being emptied like I talked about in the last blog. To be emptied means that something will be missing. His Voice should be the only voice guiding what to fill our lives back up with.
Okay, so how do I learn to hear His Voice?
Well I can only share my story.
God often shows us Himself as uniquely as He created each one of us. Your journey will look different than mine, but I know He can use it to spark a flame in your heart.
The Holy Spirit gently showed me how to tune in to His Voice by inviting me to a challenge that involved the laying down of my pride and also pushing me outside of my comfort zone.
Before, I prided myself in reading my Bible every day since I was 19. I also had a lot of pride in the fact that I’d nearly finished reading the whole Bible every year since then.
I was pretty blind to this pride and dependence on knowledge instead of nearness to the Voice of God, but He was so Kind and Gentle to show me a better way.
1 Corinthians 8:1 says this:
“…We know that ‘We all possess knowledge.’ But knowledge puffs up while love builds up.”
I didn’t need more knowledge. I needed to use what I knew of the character of God to finally discern His Voice.
What I “knew” wasn’t the problem, but it was only the key for the door of deeper Communion.
So the Father invited me to something so simple that it killed my pride and something so profound that I’ll never be the same.
He challenged me to stay in John 15:1-17 for all of 2017.
Everyday, I read that passage.
“I am the True Vine and my Father is the Gardener….”
I couldn’t survive on the words I read alone anymore, it was the same everyday. I didn’t have any more words to run to, any favorite passages to re-read, or any stories I could go to that would encourage my heart. I had to dig deep and start to ask the Lord to show me something deeper.
This started within me a conversational prayer life with the Lord.
I also was introduced to the concept of listening prayer at this time. It’s a very simple practice of asking God a question and writing down what you think He’s saying.
Listening prayer really helped me test what has been God in my life and what hasn’t. Testing what we are hearing is a very important step in waking with God that we rarely talk about. 1 John 4:1 talks about it plainly.
“Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.”
This passage is for sure is speaking about prophets, but also about testing whether God’s Spirit or evil spirits are being heard. We are tasked to test every “spirit”. When you hear the voice of depression, if you test it, you will find that it is an evil spirit. Now you can stand against that voice and listen to it no longer. That is a place of new Freedom.
Once you start to test what you’re hearing on a daily basis, you’re most likely going to be surprised at how many “spirits” are producing rotten fruit in your life!
Also I belive that you’ll be surprised at how much God IS speaking to you.
Finding God’s Voice isn’t about Him finally speaking to you, it’s about you finally finding what He’s been Speaking and Singing over you your whole life.
The Truth is that God has always been speaking to you. We are the ones who have to learn to listen. Actually most of us hear God’s Voice all the time and don’t even realize it. This is where we need to grow.
The realization and awareness of His constant Love and Communication.
It may be hard at first. You may not feel like anything is “happening”, but I promise you that if you create and opportunity for Him to show up, He will do it.
This has changed the very way I live and breathe.
He’s in everything!!
He’s constantly wanting to speak with me!
He longs to spend time with me, so much more than I want to spend time with Him!
Over the entire year of 2017 I stayed in one passage, but experienced and heard God like I never had before in my life. Every morning I longed to read the same passage because I knew He was going to speak something new to me through it. I desired just to sit with Him and ask Him what He was thinking and write down His Precious Thoughts. He started to interrupt my day just to speak His Love over me and stop me in my tracks. The more time I spent with Him, the more I heard His Voice, and the easier it became to stay there. I finally knew what it was to walk with God. And you can too!!!
Okay, there are a couple things I want to share with you on a practical level.
1. God is Spirit
John 4:24 tells us this.
That means that His most practical way to communicate is to our spirit and not to our ears. God’s communication is Spirit to spirit. We have to learn how to hear Him from our inner most being (our spirits). He can communicate audibly, we know this, but what takes more faith? Being led by the familiar or unfamiliar? I believe that He is constantly pushing us to rely on Him and not what we “naturally” know and see. He wants us to know Him on that level, a level that’s beyond ourselves.
So practice! Stop and discipline your mind and spirit into silence and solitude. Usher your spirit to come in tune with the Holy Spirit and ask Him to come and speak. Write it down, and then test it! You’ll find Him. Don’t give up.
2. How to test God’s Voice
There’s a simple tool I was given that really helped me discern God’s Voice. And I want to share it with you. It’s five simple checks to test what we are hearing.
1. Is it Scriptural?
2. Is it confirmed by the Body(spirit filled believers)?
3. Can it come to pass?
4. Does it bear Good Fruit?
5. Does it exalt Christ?
These are important questions and they give us some foundation to work off of. They point us back to the written (logos) Word of God, the unchanging character of Christ, and to Godly community around us.
There’s so much more to say on this one. This is not an extensive teaching on hearing His Voice whatsoever, but just simply what is currently on my heart. And I must stop somewhere. This is a journey we all have to take with the Lord if we wish to experience it. (“The Art of Listening Prayer” by Seth Barnes, and “Practicing His Presence” by Brother Laurence are also great resources.)
Like I had mentioned at the beginning of this blog, hearing His Voice like never before has been eternity changing. If I experienced the last three years just for this gift it would have been worth it a million times over!
Come back tomorrow for the next blog.
Day 3: Childlikeness!
