How to hear the voice of God

I was asked to teach on this by a pastor friend, so I am addressing a particular audience.  But I am sharing this with everyone else, because I believe others can benefit from this.

I won’t say that I know everything about hearing God’s voice, but I have learned a lot.  No, I haven’t heard God speak to me audibly yet, but you wouldn’t need someone to teach you how to do that anyway.  You would just hear that.  And, no, I don’t know how to make that happen either.

1) A long time ago I learned the value of spending a lot of time just reading the Bible.  Psalm 1 speaks of delighting in the law of the Lord and meditating in it day and night.  Meditating here is not just thinking about it, but it’s on our lips, like in Joshua 1, where it says that this book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night.  (Joshua 1:8)  If it doesn’t depart from your mouth, it’s on your heart and mind all day too.

I felt God leading me to spend an hour a day just reading the Bible.  I think I started this in high school and did it through my years of Bible school.  I was reading through the Bible 4 times a year.  As I got deeper into my studies with Hebrew and Greek and Bible commentaries, it would take longer and maybe I went through the whole Bible once a year. 

In 2017, which turned out to be the year I was forced to retire from work (another story for another time), I strongly felt God telling me to restart this practice of reading through the Bible.  When I finish reading through the Bible this time, probably in August, it will be my fiftieth time.  I’m not bragging.  It’s nothing to brag about.  I am not even suggesting that you do the same thing.  I am telling you my experience in relating to hearing from God.  Don’t be surprised if He leads you in the same way, and don’t be surprised if He doesn’t.  Don’t follow me, follow God.

But reading the Bible a lot is important.

Two reasons.

It serves as a filter to your life.  I have heard of people who did bad things and then said that, God told them to do that.  If you know the Bible, you will know if something is from God or somewhere else. 

But the Bible is God’s revelation of all the information that you need to know about Him and life.  Or maybe it would be better to say that the Bible is all the information that He wants everybody to know.  That’s the minimum, and He is free to share more with whom He wants. 

I have heard people act like God only speaks to you through the Bible.  That’s not true.  You can see by the things God told people to do in the Bible, that they are specific things to their lives.  Reading the Bible won’t tell what job to take or where to go to school.  You need to hear from God.

But when you know the Bible, you will see countless times how things in your life will resemble things in the Bible, and you will know what God is doing or saying when these things occur.  You will see obstacles in your life, and God will bring to your mind the Israelites at the Red Sea, and you will know that you need to believe God that this is not a permanent block but a path to walk through.

When I first started reading through the Bible, I would just start at Genesis and read straight through.  I don’t do that anymore. 

In the Great Commission in Matthew 28, Jesus said to teach people everything He commanded us.  So I read a chapter a day from the gospels.  If I read through the Bible 4 times a year, that’s about 90 days for each time.  There are 89 chapters in all four gospels together.  So one chapter a day in the gospels is about 4 times all the way through in a year.

I read some Psalms everyday.  There are 150 psalms, so I read 5 psalms every 3 days, with the longest psalm by itself.  So that’s 90 days to read through the book of Psalms. 

There are 31 chapters in Proverbs, so I read 1/3 chapter a day.  That’s 93 days to read the whole book.

Certain parts of the Bible can be less meaningful for me, so I only read one chapter a day from those parts.  That is Leviticus, Numbers, and I Chronicles.  There are a lot of good things in those books, but a lot of chapters that make for less interesting reading, so I don’t want to spend a half hour a day on that.  There are 87 chapters in those books, so that’s roughly 4 times a year. 

The other parts of the Old Testament, the Wisdom books, the history, and the prophets I alternate days so I am reading them all in the same few days.

2) When you read through the Bible, you will notice how often God speaks to people through dreams.  I studied dreams for a while.  I greatly appreciated the work of Carl Jung on dreams.  He was a Swiss psychiatrist who developed the school of Analytical Psychology. 

While I don’t study that much anymore and don’t have a lot of success understanding my dreams, I did stop using alarm clocks that force me to wake at specific times and with sounds that immediately get my attention, whether music or talking.  I wanted to try to remember what I was dreaming, what I was hearing during the night. 

I have had dreams that were significant, but I cannot recall any of them right now that had a lasting significance, but I noticed something else.

3)  I found that God would often speak to me immediately upon waking.  The thoughts would come to mind strongly without any prior thinking about these things.  The first time that I recall this happening was in 1996.  The first thing I ‘heard’ when waking up was the words ‘Rejoice always,’ which I recognized immediately as I Thessalonians 5:16.  This was the first step in a 10 month long journey of later being diagnosed with cancer and then being healed.  I tell the whole story in my book The Importance of Healing, which is available used on the internet.

I have learned to pay close attention to things I hear as soon as I wake up in the morning, or I’ll wake up in the middle of the night, and something will come to my mind, and I know it is from God.  And I need to get up and start writing.

This has happened so many times now I no longer even try to keep track of them.  Now that I write a lot, it often all comes together in the middle of the night.  A lot of writers experience something like this.  Except they might go to bed with something on their minds and get the answer in the middle of the night.  But that is rarely how I see it work.  The thoughts I get are rarely things I am trying to sort out or something I was already working on.

Most of my writing I feel like I am taking dictation, that God is giving me the words.

So pay attention at night and when you get up in the morning, and try to avoid distractions.

4)  I will add that I love music, but I rarely listen to it.  Why?  Because I don’t want lyrics or tunes stuck in my head where I lose control of my thinking, and something is running in my head that I can’t stop.  I’m not telling you what to do here, but if you want to hear from God, know that He speaks in a still, small voice, and you’re not going to hear it a lot if you are surrounded with a lot of other noise, and if your mind is occupied constantly with other things, even good things.  This is just my personal observation here.  Do what you want.

5)  I had a recent revelation, if you want to call it that.  I am writing a commentary on the book of Matthew, so I am forced to understand and think through everything and then explain it, so I am spending more time on things I normally wouldn’t. 

I realized in a fresh way that Jesus came to change everything about our relationship with God.  The Old Testament tells us all about who God is, what He is like, his awesomeness, His power, His holiness.  Then in the New Testament, we learn that this God is our Father.  And that indeed changes everything.

I realized that all of life, particularly family life, is designed or just inherently a picture of higher spiritual realities.  And, while before, we might think of God as being this Being out there who we pray to and make our requests and we try to please, now I see Him as Someone who is inside me, a constant companion and friend and father and older brother all in one. 

I think of God now as someone who is right there with me ALL THE TIME. I talk to Him like I would talk to a human who I could physically see who is always there.  I don’t start with Dear God or Dear Jesus.  We are always talking.  Yes, I do most of the talking.  And, yes, I tell Him I wish He talked more.  But countless times in our conversations, I will say something, and I sense His response, and I know it’s His response.  Can I prove it?  No.  But after dozens and dozens of times, you don’t question it any more. 

You know God is everywhere, the Bible says that He is now in believers, so how else would this look? 

We are children of God.  Now yes, I am a child of my parents, who are long deceased.  I have sons who are in their 30s.  They are adults but still my children.  But I think and have come to believe that God means this in the literal sense.  We act and think of ourselves as adults, but to God we are still children.  My kids as adults are peers in a way, but how can we be peers with God?  So He always sees us as children, like we see our children children.  Or maybe our grandchildren.  This is why humans are the only living things where it takes so long to reach adulthood, and then the cycle repeats with grandchildren, so we have this relationship firmly planted in our minds about what this child-parent relationship looks like.

Before God we are children in the full sense of the word, and He delights in us as we delight in our own children.  And we need to keep this image of us as children before God as much as possible.  This is how we are to God.  It’s not always easy to see ourselves as the object of this parental love.  It helps if we have children in our lives now where we see the kind of love we have for them. 

Now when we see God as this loving, constant companion who we talk to constantly throughout the day, about anything and everything, wow, what a beautiful day, thank you, Lord, bless that lady over there, those kids there, what should I do about my job, I wish my boss appreciated my work more, I feel uneasy at work a lot, I will leave this with you, help me to enjoy my work more, and so on.

Always leave room for God to speak back to you.  He will.  You may wonder if that is God a few times, but after a few dozen times, you will stop asking.  You will know that it’s God.

When I get up in the morning, I ask God, more like, Lord, as in Jesus, what do you want to do today?  I realize that God wants to be with me just like I just want to be with my kids or my granddaughter.  Being together is the important thing.  I have a general idea of things I want to do, but I am totally flexible.  I generally will do my Bible reading first thing, but very early into that today, for example, this came to mind and I followed it and wrote most of this as fast I could type it.

As I walked the dog before breakfast and was doing my morning prayer, I had more ideas about this article, so I am working on this before I finished my Bible reading.

So, in short, fill your mind with the Bible, keep your head clear from distracting things, and talk with God constantly throughout the day, leaving Him room to respond.  Don’t just keep talking, finish with an Amen, and then shut yourself off from listening to God.  Be conscious of Him as being right there with you just like He was a live human being.

I have discovered this has totally changed my thought life.  I am constantly talking to God, but I am getting things done.  I am constantly asking God what I should do next.  Everyday is an adventure.  And productive.

Let me know if there are other things to talk about here or whatever.

Another Look at I Peter 5:6,7

1 Peter 5:6,7 (NASB95)  ⁶ Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you at the proper time, ⁷ casting all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you.

This is a very familiar verse, but I am not sure we fully understand it.  I’m not sure I fully understand it.

Let’s look at verse 7 first.

It says to cast all your anxiety on God.  Some translations read: care, or cares.  Anxiety is a fear of losing something or of something going wrong.  Care is just something that’s on your mind a lot that you must attend to.  It’s your responsibility.  It’s not necessarily worry per se, but it fills your mind and robs you of your joy. 

Peter is quoting Psalm 55:22 here.  Psalm 55:22 (NASB95) ²² Cast your burden upon the Lord and He will sustain you; He will never allow the righteous to be shaken.

In the Greek Old Testament, the word for ‘burden’ there is the same word as anxiety in Peter, and the verb and preposition are the same too.  So it’s ‘cast your care upon the Lord.  The Hebrew word for ‘burden’ means something that has been given to you, your lot.  There is that expression: we all have our own cross to bear.  Here it need not be a cross, but it is something unique to us.  We have that thing that is ours that weighs on us. 

Cast what has been given you unto the Lord, and He will sustain, support, nourish you.  This word ‘sustain’ is commonly translated as ‘provide for.’  It could, I suppose, be used of parents providing for their children, but it is never used that way.  It’s only used for all fully capable adults, who due to circumstances are dependent on somebody else to take care of them, to give them the basic things of life.

Joseph provided for his brothers and their families during the famine (Genesis 45 and 50), Barzillai provided for King David after he fled from Absalom (2 Samuel 19), Solomon had deputies who provided for his household (I Kings 4). 

So God provides for us, or wants to, when we cast those weighing things on Him.

In the Greek of Peter, the casting is in the aorist tense.  This is not a continual casting.  It’s done, or should be.  But this is connected to verse 6.

Our English Bibles say ‘humble yourselves,’ but this is clearly a passive, ‘be humbled.’  Does God humble us, or tries to?

Yes, Deuteronomy 8 clearly says so, and this is a foundational text for our lives.  Jesus quotes it in His encounter with Satan in a foundational time in His ministry. 

Deuteronomy 8:1–5 ¹ “All the commandments that I am commanding you today you shall be careful to do, that you may live and multiply, and go in and possess the land which the Lord swore to your forefathers. ² “You shall remember all the way which the Lord your God has led you in the wilderness these forty years, that He might humble you, testing you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not. ³ “He humbled you and let you be hungry, and fed you with manna which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that He might cause you to know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord. ⁴ “Your clothing did not wear out on you, nor did your foot swell these forty years. ⁵ “Thus you are to know in your heart that the Lord your God was disciplining you just as a man disciplines his son.

Israel failed to believe God when they should have at Kadesh-Barnea (Numbers 13,14), and so they were unable to enter the Promised Land, and then they spent the rest of their lives wandering in the wilderness until they died.  But that whole time was both punishment and instruction. 

He fed them with manna which they did not know (a new thing they never saw or heard of before) and their ancestors did not know so that they might know that not on bread alone shall humans live, but on everything that comes out of the mouth of the Lord shall man live.

Everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord is a dependency on God that I don’t think most people understand or even think of.  They have no idea how dependent their lives are on God.  We can only respond to the millions of things that happen around us everyday that we have no control over, the people we meet, the traffic in the streets, the weather.  We have read in the self-help books how we need to take control of our lives.  I’m seeing that we have control of nothing but ourselves, but that is not something that produces, or should produce, uncertainty in our lives, but God wants this immediate, continuous dependence on Him.

God’s humbling process is getting us to live in a moment to moment relationship with God.

I tell God, nobody lives like this.  But that doesn’t make it any less true.  This is what I am learning.

But Peter’s command to be humbled has a ‘therefore’ with it, so that means that the command is based on what he said before that.

Peter quotes Proverbs 3:34 from the Greek Old Testament, establishing a simple rule of life.  1 Peter 5:5 (NASB95) ⁵ You younger men, likewise, be subject to your elders; and all of you, clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, for God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

All these verses started with Peter talking about how Christians should relate to other people in the church.  He stresses the need for humility when interacting with one another. 

Why?

Because God is opposed to the proud.  The Hebrew text has ‘scoffers.’ 

Notice there is no middle ground.  There are no nice ungodly people.  Jesus said there are only two ways, a broad one and a narrow one.  (Matthew 7)  Psalm 1 says that the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish.  There are only the righteous and the ungodly.

So let’s turn this around now.

God wants us to be humble.  It is important for us to be humble. 

But what does that mean?

Again, there is no middle ground.  We are either humble or proud.  The Hebrew and Greek words are extreme words: scoffers and arrogant.  We see the outward appearances, but God sees the heart.  (I Samuel 16:7)

So Peter says choose humility, because God gives grace or favor to the humble.

And it’s not ‘humble yourself.’  Well, actually, it’s both.  There are passages in the Bible that do say to humble yourself.  Three times in the gospels, (Matthew 23:12, Luke 14:11,18:14), James 4:10, and Proverbs 29:23. 

But Peter is focusing on something here that we often miss.  God is working in your life to humble you. 

In the passage from Deuteronomy, when God humbled them, He let them be hungry.  And you know what happened then, right?  They started grumbling.

Exodus 16:2,3 (NASB95)  ² The whole congregation of the sons of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. ³ The sons of Israel said to them, “Would that we had died by the Lord’s hand in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat, when we ate bread to the full; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”

They grumbled, or murmured, against God.  That’s “a half-suppressed or muttered complaint.”

The things we complain about, the things that rob us of our joy, are the things by which God is humbling us, that we might know that we don’t live by all these things, and we have no real control over all these things, but by everything that comes from the mouth of God.

So Peter says to be humbled.  Let your life show you how dependent you are on God, “abounding in thanksgiving” (Colossians 2:7). 

Let God humble you that He might exalt you in due time.

People might ask what it means to be exalted.  The word itself may not mean to be raised to a position of prominence, but Jesus contrasts people who exalt themselves who will be humbled and those who humble themselves who will be exalted.  So there are definite distinct outcomes between the humble and those who are not.

All this is because God cares for us.  Our cares weigh us down, but God cares about and for us.  We are important to Him. 

Our biggest problem here is probably wondering if God cares about the things that we care about.  My big care is my country.  Does God care about my country as much as I do?  Aren’t all the nations like a drop in the bucket to Him?  (Isaiah 40:15)

But it wouldn’t make sense to say, cast these cares on Him if He wasn’t interested in working those things out for us.  Psalm 127 (NASB95) says: ¹ Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it; Unless the Lord guards the city, the watchman wakes but in vain.

So the Lord builds houses, and the Lord guards cities.  Your cares are His cares.

Now it is possible that we are caring for wrong things.  It’s possible.  There are so many things that I want to do in life, there isn’t enough time in the day to do them all.  God is helping me sort through all of this.

But being humbled by God is recognizing how little control we have over our lives and living before God as His children.  In human terms, we are adults.  To God, we are still children. 

Psalm 55 describes that care as what was given to us.  Certainly my efforts will change little.  By themselves.  I can be completely overwhelmed by the all the needs.  That’s why He said that all things are possible with God, but that’s another lesson.

Now my being humbled by God involves my casting all my care on Him.  Literally, it’s ‘be humbled under the mighty hand of God, having cast all your care on Him.’  If you haven’t cast all your care on Him, then you haven’t been humbled by Him. 

God cares about you and wants to exalt you, whatever that means.  There’s only one way to find out what any of this means.  Let God humble you and throw all that stuff that’s on your mind on God, and watch what happens.