Hearing From God

Here is a question that was posed recently in a forum I am involved with, along with my answer:

“Does anyone ever really get answers from God? I mean, honestly. I pray to God constantly. I read the word, and honestly, I find peace and faith in it. But I don't hear God.

I talk to people often that say, "God told me this..." or "God put it on my heart to do that..." and I feel a sense of envy. I pray, I write, I converse with God. But I don't hear.

I'm not talking about things of the world, like "God, give me a new car." Rather, I'm talking about the essence of the Christian experience. Whenever I have asked this in the past, I've been told I'm not listening hard enough or I'm not praying hard enough, as if through more hard work, it will be mine.

Still, I just can't hear. So, I ask... Do you hear God answer you? And if so, How?”

My friend, you have asked a great question here; and I believe, and KNOW, that God wants you and others who really want to hear from Him to know the answer. How do I know this? Because that is the way Jesus operated when He walked this earth physically: He said in the Gospels that He did nothing and said nothing but what the Father told Him to do and say. When we become born again, our spirit is recreated with the Spirit of Christ (2 Cor 5); Col 2 says that God makes us alive through Christ! Romans 8 says that when receive the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of God comes to live in us, and that those who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. Concerning believers, Jesus told the Father, in John 17:22 (the real "Lord's Prayer"), "I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me." The way the Spirit of God leads us is by communicating with our spirit through the Spirit of Christ, which is one with us (1 Cor 2); in fact , Paul says, "For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ."(1 Cor 2:16). That is how Christ walks the earth today, just as He did 2000 years ago, as He lives His life through us. And that is how I KNOW that God wants us to be able to "hear" from Him and be able to communicate with Him.

So the question is, since we know that God wants us to be able to hear from Him and that He speaks to us through our spirits, how does a believer go about hearing Him? Please allow me to suggest a few things that worked for me to get you started.

- A couple of the previous posters on this thread wrote that the key to hearing from God is LISTENING, and I believe that is correct. The question is, what am I listening for, how do I truly listen, when do I listen and how long do I listen? I can tell you, my experience has been that it is almost impossible to hear the "gentle whisper"(1 Kings 19:12) of the Father through the cacophony of this world in our everyday living; the Lord of the universe is not about to try and compete with the barriers of noise - TVs, radios, computers, cellphones, DVDs, CDs, etc - that mankind has created to compete with His "voice." (Think about it: What's one of the first things most people do when they get up in the morning? > Turn on the TV or radio. What's one of the first things you do when you get in your car? > Turn on the radio or the DVD. And what is one of the first things people do when they come home from the day's activities? > Turn on the TV again.) You see, God normally communicates with us through the quiet realm of thoughts, our "spiritual ears": We "hear" the thoughts of His Spirit through our mind, which is the portal between our flesh and our spirit (read 1 Cor 2:10-14). With that in mind, do you really expect to hear from God when you can't hear yourself think, or you are distracted by a flow of images?

- Prayer time would be a great time to hear from the Father, but we have so distorted the concept of prayer and praying that we seldom do. Prayer should be about listening, but we have made it about talking, and that mostly ours. (I once heard someone say that the fact that we have 2 ears and 1 mouth should be a clue that we should listen twice as much as we talk; makes sense to me - check out James 1:19!) Before I learned to listen, my typical prayer session was to go in and praise and worship God for a few minutes, thank Him for my recent blessings (if any), maybe read a Bible passage or two, MAKE A WHOLE BUNCH OF PETITIONS AND REQUESTS, listen for a couple of minutes to see if He had anything to say, thank Him in advance for answering my new "prayers" and get up and leave, all within the space of 30-45 minutes, max - IF I wasn't running behind for some reason. Sometimes that was all done while I was in my car driving to work, displaying my wonderful ability to multi-task. Many days I didn’t “pray” at all, especially if things were going well and I didn’t need any help. The idea of sitting down with my Bible and a notebook for a couple of hours and waiting for Father God to “say” something to me was completely foreign to me.

- May I suggest that one of the first things you must do if you expect to hear from God is find out what His "voice" sounds like. May I also suggest that until you know what He sounds like in complete and utter silence, you’ll never hear His whisper in all the noise of everyday life, especially if there is an emergency situation. The best way to accomplish this is to ask the Father to help you with arrangements (time, finances, place) to go on a solo retreat, away from everyone and everything in your normal, everyday life. Wherever you go, even if it’s a room where you can isolate yourself in your own home, it MUST be quiet and free from distractions (earplugs and/or sound deadening headsets are helpful here)! Allow at least a couple of three days for this retreat; believe me when I say this will be a life changing event for you (at least it has been for me and everyone I’ve suggested it to), so you don’t want to be rushing the Spirit of God - the more time you can allow, the better will be your encounter with Him. Finally, don’t take any thing with you but a Bible, a notebook, a couple of pens, a change of clothes, something to drink and maybe a couple of snacks in case you should happen to get hungry (you probably won’t!). DON’T TAKE praise tapes, instruction CD’s, DVD’s, or other books in with you...They are distractions, and believe me when I say that you won’t need them. Remember, the more you hear His “voice”, the more you’ll know what it “sounds” like; just go to LISTEN, and write down what you “hear” so that you can go back and study what He gives you and verify that it lines up with His Word. As for the question of how do I know it’s the Spirit of God talking to me, the answer is the same as for the age old question of how do you know when you’re in love: The answer is that you know because you know that you know that you know...

- How does the amount of time you spend alone listening to and communicating with the Spirit of God each day compare with the amount of time you spend watching episodes of “Lost” or “24” or “Scrubs” or the news or some sports event on TV, or surfing the internet on the computer, or perhaps reading a magazine or novel? If you consider your time to be a valuable asset, as I know most of us do, are you giving God the “first fruits” of your time, or is He getting the “left overs”? Do you give Him the first part of the day, when you’re fresh and alert, or do you give Him the dregs, when you’re tired and worn out? Do you recall what Jesus said in Luke 6:38 about giving (note that it never says what to give), especially the part about “For with the measure you use, it will be measured unto you”?
- If you have been hearing from the Father, but have run into a “dry spell,” consider this: What was the last thing that He told you to do that you haven’t done yet? For example, have you ever had someone ask you for advice on how to handle some problem, only to have them go off and ignore your advice and do their own thing, then have them come back to ask you for help when get in trouble? Or perhaps He’s given you a mission to accomplish, but you just haven’t gotten around to it yet. You see, I believe obedience is very high on God’s priority list, even if often it’s not on ours.

My friend, believe this: God created you for a specific purpose in the Body of Christ (talking about The Church, not the church); the only way you can know what that purpose is, and how to accomplish it, is by communicating with the Spirit of God in you, and that mostly by LISTENING (that is the part of praying that we can do continuously) for His direction, just like Jesus did. When you became a born again Believer, you became a child of the Father, a brother/sister of the Lord Jesus, a possessor of the Holy Spirit, and a prince/princess of the King. So set aside your sin consciousness and low self worth and KNOW that God wants you to hear from Him, early and often!

If you’re interested, the Lord gave me a book to write during my “listening time” over a three year period called The Prayer Directed Life, which goes into a lot more detail on how to successfully communicate with God. You can download it for free (it’s a PDF file) at my website, www.thepdl.org or www.theprayerdirectedlife.com .

Remember what Jesus said: "Seek first the Kingdom of God and and His righteousness, and all the rest will be given to you as well."