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.