How to hear the voice of God

Messages for October 2018: Our Month of Divine Lights

Message for Wednesday 17^th October, 2018

Theme: Hearing and Following the voice of God.

Topic: How to hear the voice of God

Introduction: In the time which we live in, the need to hear the voice of God in order to be guided by Him in our daily lives cannot be over emphasized. This is why it is so important for us to hear his voice. Sadly, many hear without realizing it because Jesus said in John 10:27 that His sheep hear His voice. Also, we see from Ps.32:8 where God said He will instruct and teach us in the way we must go that it is God’s will to cause us to hear His voice.

In light of the foregoing, we shall examine four simple steps we must take to consciously receive the voice of God. These four steps are set out in Hab.2:1-3. That text reads thus in the King James Version of the bible:

“I will stand upon my watch, and set me upon the tower, and will watch to see what He will say unto me and what I shall answer when I am reproved.

And the Lord answered me, and said, write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it;

For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie; though it tarry, wait for it because it will surely come, it will not tarry”

1.     Stillness: This is keeping still before God with absolute concentration and a determination to receive a revelation of your God given purpose from God or any other thing you may desire to know of the mind of God. A good example of this is found in the story of Elijah in 1Kings 19:9-21 in the Old Testament and Paul in the New Testament. Acts 9:1-20.

2.     Vision:  When God speaks, it paints a picture in the canvass of your mind. Where you have difficulty with comprehending this, God could even use something you can see physically to give you a vision because God works with what we can envision. This is the good use of the power of imagination God talks about in Gen.11:6. For example, God had to make Abram look at the sky to see and attempt to count the number of the stars in the sky until he lost count just to help him get a vision of how numerous his offspring will be even though he was said to be childless at that time and his wife Sarai was pronounced barren. See Gen.15:1-6.

3.     Spontaneity: The still voice of God that is not physically audible comes to you through a chain of spontaneous thoughts. You have no control over the thoughts. They just flow and when God is through with Speaking, they stop. This method God uses is also referred to as the flow because of the way it is received. There is no thought original with man. Thoughts are taken. This explains why Jesus said in Mat.6:25, 34 that we should not take thoughts that result in anxiety. These thoughts are words that are conveyed to the spirit of man which must first be picked by the soul. The spirit realm controls the physical one. This is why Paul says in Rm.8:14, 16 that as many as are led by the spirit of God are the sons of God. That the Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are the sons of God. See 1Thessalonians 5:23 which makes us understand that man is spirit, soul and body. Your spirit is the real you made in the image and likeness of God and which departure from your body causes physical death as revealed to us in James 2:26. Your soul is the intermediary between your spirit and body and contains your mind (seat of memory and creativity), your will (seat of decision making), and your emotion (responsible for the direction of your will and general drive in life). Your body is the physical you made up of the five senses of the central nervous system – sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing. Whereas your body controlled by your physical senses had dictated the way you have lived as a natural man because of the separation of your spirit from God’s through the fall of Adam, now that you are born again, you have to retrain your body to follow the dictates of your spirit which is now led by the Holy Spirit as we saw earlier. This is the real battle of the new creation man. The only way we can win this war is to allow the word of God renew our minds to have the mindset God wants us to have. When this takes place, our wills and emotions would easily follow divine directives and cause our bodies to act accordingly. See Romans 12:1-2.

4.     Journaling: Then you move on to the next step which is journaling. If you try to understand everything God is telling you at the moment, you will lose concentration and may not be able to receive everything God is telling you so you journal for the duration of the flow of thought and later, you can read through what you journaled and you will get the true picture of what God is telling you. This is how the ancient prophets kept records of what they were told (see 2Tim.3:16-17; 2Pet.1:19-21). God exemplified this when He gave Moses the law he wrote on tables of stone and to tell you how important this was to God, when Moses in his anger at the behavior of the Israelites destroyed the tablets, God called him up to the mountain again and made him get two other tablets of stone and He wrote the same commandments on these new tablets of stone. You will find this account in Ex.24:12; 31:18; 34:4. Moses recalled these incidents in his final speech to the children of Israel packaged in Deut.5:22. I believe that the importance of journaling what God tells you cannot be overemphasized. This is why God commands us to write the vision and make it plain on tables so someone can read it and run with it. If what God told the ancient prophets in the past was not journaled, Peter would not have had a more sure word of Prophecy to refer to in 2Pet.1:19. For example, Jeremiah the prophet wrote down what God told him and more than seventy years later, Daniel read it and ran with it. It enabled him to pray for the freedom of the children of Israel from captivity. You will find these accounts in Jer.36 and Daniel 9:1-4. Even when in Jeremiah’s life time, the king tried to destroy the writings of Jerimiah, God caused him to preserve it by telling him to write another which Jeremiah did. See Jer.361-4 and 27-32.

We shall draw the curtains here today for want of time. If you are yet to start hearing the voice of God because you are yet to make a commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ, this is your opportunity. You can start doing so right away by saying the following prayer out loud in faith and you will be born again and have access into God’s family. You can start hearing the father from today because your access is the repentance through the New Birth offered by God to us in the Lord Jesus Christ. You can say the following prayer out loud in faith and gain that access at once:

Heavenly Father,

Have mercy on me a sinner. Today, I believe that Jesus died for me and you raised Him from the dead for my Justification. I therefore declare that Jesus Christ is my Saviour and Lord and from today, I renounce the fatherhood of Satan and embrace Jesus Christ as my Saviour and Lord. Thank you for this father in Jesus’ name! Amen.

Congratulations! For more information and resources that would help you grow in this new life, please visit our website at www.kingdomheirsministries.org and our blogs at www.flourishinggirl.blogspot.com and follow us on twitter at alero_nanna and on face book on www.facebook.com/flourishinggirl www.facebook.com/khmii2015; www.facebook.com/thewellbeingcenter. Or www.facebook.com/kingdomjointheirsfamily email:  jointheirsfamily@gmail.com.

Acknowledgement

In my studies on hearing and following the voice of God, I was challenged in 2010 by a message by Mark Vickler an American minister who through His teaching on hearing God's voice from the book of Hab.2:1-3 brought out this light so clearly that just using His method has yielded great fruits in getting people to be able to hear God's voice and I believe God wants everyone to Hear His voice and He is the only one who has the franchise on His word. However I must say a big thank you to Mark Vickler for making it easy for us to teach others to also hear God.  Flourish A. Nanna