Hearing God
God speaks to us and we can hear Him. As a good Father, He cares about every single one of His kids and wants to talk to us about our lives. The big stuff, the small stuff – it’s all important to Him.
Rarely though, are we going to hear the audible voice of God speak to us. Most of the time, He’ll speak through the Holy Spirit in a gentle whisper to our human spirit.
Sometimes whispers can be drowned out by competing noise. We are never short of noise, but it’s especially excessive and relentless these days.
So how do we position ourselves better to hear Him speak, particularly in times of crisis?
We hear Him better when we let our spirit be the captain of our soul and body.
God created us a living being, complete with spirit, soul and body. Our human spirit is the most central and important part of who we are. This is where we commune with God and is the part of us that goes to be with Him for eternity when we leave this earth.
When we allow our human spirit, empowered by the Holy Spirit, to be the captain of our soul and body, we can acutely tune in to hear the voice of God. This takes practice and persistence, and rarely produces perfect results. We’re all human! But the more we can do it, the clearer we can hear God’s words for our lives and the more likely we’re going to hear them next time.
We hear Him better when we trust Him with our desires and dreams.
Every one of us has desires and dreams in our hearts. Some are God-breathed; others are man-made.
When we lay down our own agenda and trust Him with everything in our future, we can more accurately hear what His dreams and plans are. They’re way better. His word tells us His thoughts are higher than ours and He is able to do exceedingly abundantly more than we can ask or think. Letting go allows us to listen clearly.
We hear Him better when we are grateful.
God created us to be grateful people. We are wired to be thankful.
Few things distort the voice of God more than ingratitude. When we’re ungrateful, we turn up the negatives and inadvertently deafen our hearts to the positives. It creates a difficult environment for the words of a life-giving and faith-igniting God to have any airtime.
Being grateful opens the heart to hear God.
Now more than ever, God wants to speak to us. He has wisdom for this season and words of peace for His people. Together, let’s lean in and listen to the whispers!