Hearing God's Voice
Developing sensitivity and accuracy in hearing God
"All these blessings will come down on you and spread out beyond you because you have responded to the Voice of God, your God: God's blessing inside the city, God's blessing in the country; God's blessing on your children, the crops of your land, the young of your livestock, the calves of your herds, the lambs of your flocks. God's blessing on your basket and bread bowl; God's blessing in your coming in, God's blessing in your going out."
God created us with physical senses to enable us to be aware of, interact with, master and enjoy the world around us.
But what about his world?
We can't see God or touch him. We can't smell his intoxicating fragrance or taste the delicacies of his banquet table. But we can hear his voice. We hear it every time we read the Bible he inspired. Sometimes, we could swear we hear his voice in the wind and the rain or his still, small voice high atop a mountain.
We're told that God talks to us all the time, so we should be hearing his voice always and everywhere, right? But we don't.
Maybe it's because we have expectations of what God will say or how, when or where we expect him to speak, what his voice should sound like or all of the above.
The religious spirit tends to gag God. It talks and talks, repeating the same things over and over, century after century, and he never seems to get a word in edgewise. Theology often shuts him up, too, filtering out everything he says that disagrees with it.
Then, there's fear. Fear doesn't keep us from hearing him, but our reaction to fear does. Maybe we have an Old Testament viewpoint that sees God as intolerant and angry with us, so we run and hide every time he shows up. Or maybe we think his holiness considers only one day of the week to be holy enough for us to be in the same room with him. And even then, we're expected to merely sit, kneel and stand when told to and keep still except to sing or recite.
As I've said before, most of us view God primarily as Lawgiver and Punisher. So it's no surprise that we really don't want to hear him, because we believe that whatever he has to say can't possibly be good.
All this, and more, keeps God nearly as still in our lives today as during the four silent centuries before Jesus was born.
If we want to hear him more, we need to trash all that and take a fresh look at God, our Lover, as well as a fresh look at ourselves, his Beloved.
I have learned that, to hear the voice of the Lord, I need to actively and constantly listen for it.
Once, I was ministering in a church and called a man and his wife to the front. I had never seen them before, but the sound of God's voice was so strong in my spirit that it overwhelmed my natural reluctance to prophesy over him in public.
I told him he was in a political battle for his life and that the tables were turned against him by wealthy players. The Lord, I said, had chosen him to win the upcoming election, since he was running for a cause that was close to the Lord's heart. God would create a vehicle for his message to get to the people, it would be swift and he would gain an overwhelming victory over his opposition.
"Do you know me?" he asked after the meeting. "Have you seen my ads?" I said I had no idea who he was.
He said the elections were a week off, and he needed a miracle to win. The next day, the Lord gave it to him.
This candidate was the first man to do robocalls. He won by a landslide and called after the election to thank me. Hearing the voice of the Lord that day broke and shifted something on his behalf. He served four terms, then left office after he had accomplished what the Lord put in his heart to do.
The fact is that God speaks to us a lot and in as many of the same ways as we speak to one another.
We speak differently to people, depending on their gender, age, education, culture, environment and what we have to say. We don't speak to a parent like a teenager or to a teenager like an infant. We speak differently to men and women. If we're at a football game, we shout to the person next to us. If we're at a funeral, we whisper. If we're at a circus, we gasp and laugh.
So, one reason we don't hear God much is that we limit him with unrealistic expectations.
Is he awesome, and would we fall to the ground and lie there like a corpse if we came face to face with him? Absolutely. Is he terrible, and will he cast everyone who rejects him into hell for eternity? For sure. He'll most likely forget he ever created them.
But 99.44% of the time, he is Love. And we can't even begin to imagine how much we're missing when we're not longing for, listening for and losing ourselves in his voice.
The voice of God is the only legitimate source of prophecy. We can't recognize it unless we know it. And we learn to reject anything that doesn't sound like it. God's voice reveals supernatural secrets and truths never heard or known by mortal man. It is the divine expression of love for his Father and for us—singing over us and to us and letting us listen as he sings to his Father. Absolutely nothing is more wondrous.