When I was a young believer, I was deeply fascinated whenever I hear men and women of God share how God spoke to them. The stories of how they heard the voice of God were powerful and real. They birthed a desire in my heart to hear God and relate to Him in a similar manner.
Yet, for a long time, I felt like I never heard God’s voice and began to wonder if it was really possible to hear Him. In my immaturity, I thought it was an ability exclusive to a special group of people.
We struggle to hear the voice of God because there’s a war to keep us spiritually deaf. “Has God said?” were the words of the deceiver in the Garden and he still whispers them into our minds now. The enemy lies to us that we can’t hear God, it’s hard to hear God or drowns out God’s voice by bringing a multitude of other voices into our lives.
Jesus explains in the Parable of the Sower that, when God speaks to us, the enemy comes and takes away the seed of God’s Word. One way is to convince us that we didn’t hear God clearly or it wasn’t God’s voice at all.
Satan wants to prevent us from hearing God. If he can make us feel foolish, or convince us that it was our imagination and not the voice of God, then he has succeeded in stealing the fruit of God’s Word!
God wants relationship, and communication is a key part of relationship. Parents take it as their responsibility to communicate in a way that their children will understand. If earthly parents do so, certainly our Heavenly Father does too.
The Father wants to speak to all His children. We can trust in His ability and desire to speak to us. The Bible is filled with testimonies of men and women who heard His voice. We’re designed to hear and recognise the voice of God. It’s a lie of the enemy that it’s hard to hear God. When we’re born again, a natural capacity to hear God was put into our DNA.
The key lesson I learnt in hearing God was that He does not speak in a one-dimensional way like we do. He communicates in myriad different ways and on many different spiritual frequencies.
His first language is not any earthly language. To confine God to any human language would be like cramming the universe into a box. The sound of God’s voice entails much more than the verbalisation of a particular language.
Genesis 3:8 tells us Adam and Eve heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. The word ‘sound’ is translated from the Hebrew word ‘kole’, which means ‘voice’. It implies that the Lord communicated His Presence to Adam and Eve.
1 Corinthians 2:14 says, ‘The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.’
When we limit God’s voice to the realm of earthly languages, we limit our hearing to a one-dimensional realm. An FM radio tuned to the wrong frequency cannot pick up the signals though they’re there!
Likewise, our flesh cannot perceive the Spirit. If we can grasp this, we can begin to ‘tune our receivers to His frequency’. Then maybe we’ll realise that we can hear God much better than we think and awaken our spiritual awareness that enabled the first man Adam to hear and commune with the Lord God.
We must adapt to fit His ways. The difference between the spiritually deaf and the hearing is not how loudly God speaks, but how open we are to hear Him speak.
Practice makes perfect. It takes time to discern the different ways God speaks and there’s no substitute for experience. We cannot grow without making mistakes. We become sharper as we step out in faith to learn the diverse ways through which the Holy Spirit speaks.
God wants to speak to us because He has much to reveal. It’s about relationship, intimacy, and our journey of faith with Him. When God speaks, faith is birthed in us.
Something gets activated in our hearts that we might not fully understand yet. When we say “yes” and respond out of the faith that is deposited in us, He brings greater clarity and we set out to accomplish the impossible because of what we heard.
Jesus said it was better for us if He leaves, because the Father will send the Holy Spirit to guide us into all truth. The Spirit of God will enable us to become a prophetic community who understands the Scriptures, discern the times, and develop a keen sense of hearing.
As we heed what the Spirit is saying in these days, we can partner God to shape the events of our times.
