Discerning the Voice of God: How to Recognize When He Speaks

by Priscilla Shirer

Persistent, internal inklings matched by external confirmation is often the way God directs believers into His will.

Thematic God

God hasn’t quit being persistent just because He’s speaking in a tone or byway of a circumstance you don’t approve of.

Don’t be codependent enough to think that every problem is necessarily yours to fix or get involved in. But if you’re truly, actively, purposefully listening for God—if you’re already tuned into Him through prayer and Bible study and routine moments of stillness—you won’t have to guess when He’s calling your name to take part in a ministry request.

The “ministry of Eli”—the process of bouncing what you’re hearing in prayer and Bible study off the wise, trusted ears of your brothers

and sisters in Christ—is one of the great blessings of being in ongoing fellowship with a faith community.

As long as you keep a tender heart that desires to do His will, He’ll keep speaking until you hear Him.

Many times in Scripture when God spoke to people, He used their given names and intersected their lives right where they were.

To condemn means to consider something worthy of punishment. To convict means to bring something to light in order to correct it.

This seems like a generalization.

These men had no desire to help this woman out of her sinful lifestyle or to seek restoration for a life being lost to misplaced desire. Their aim in using her was to expose, embarrass, and disgrace her, discrediting Jesus in the process.

Goal of the men who caught the woman in adultery.

Huh?

How you be sure?

More importantly, it can cause you to carry undue burdens.

The challenge is part of the plan.

This seem like circular reasoning.

Your ego will present an option designed to keep your self-image intact. (2) Your fear will present the route of safety, free from the risks often required to tap into divine reserves.

Your Enemy will offer ease and comfort to keep you from accessing God’s supernatural resources. (4) Your flesh will hope to appease itself and satisfy its own desires.

He speaks principally through His Word. And His Word is always true.

Where the Scriptures are ignored, He remains the unknown God.

If we’ve not taken care of the basics, we shouldn’t anticipate any fruit.

Nothing, Paul said, is as wonderful as knowing Christ—not even hearing His voice and knowing His will, as precious as those are. Hearing Him and discerning His direction were never Paul’s primary goal because he fully understood that if he knew Him, all those other things would naturally follow.

Inventory: do you want God’s voice/will more than God?

When His presence is our constant companion, His chosen path not only becomes clearer to us, it also becomes the only path we truly want.

He never became so disillusioned by his problems and pitfalls that he stopped seeking to know God.

Whoever seeks God as a means toward desired ends will not find God. The mighty God, the maker of heaven and earth, will not be one of many treasures, not even the chief of all treasures. He will be all in all, or He will be nothing. —A. W. Tozer

This is not the same as study of scripture and what is outlined could be dangerous.

There’s no code for you to crack. No puzzle He’s waiting for you to put together. No stick He’s dangling in your peripheral vision, then snatching away when you turn your head toward it. He’s not sitting up in heaven with the cameras rolling and stopwatches ticking, testing whether or not you’re spiritually sharp enough to figure out the next move He wants you to make.

God’s goal in your life is to move you from a mental knowledge of Him to an experiential one.

It’s His job to speak; ours is to listen.

And our joy to be invited to join in.

God is never hurried, rushed, or behind schedule. If you do not know yet, it’s because you don’t need to do it yet.

Zero in on what you know for sure you’re supposed to be doing right now, and get busy doing it.

This is one of the main reasons hearing God can become so difficult for us—so cloudy, so confusing—is that God, who knows our hearts, doesn’t do much speaking into a person’s life who isn’t dedicated to obeying Him.

By no means am I suggesting that you have to earn the right to hear God’s voice. But the Lord knows how deeply you desire to respond.

Poor word choice

Scripture makes clear, over and over again, that the prerequisite for experiencing God is obeying Him.

That seems a gross generalization.

Interesting phrase

Obedience to God—the kind that invites His continued speaking to us—must be complete obedience. Obedience without question or reservation. Obedience that does what He says even over the objections of reason and comfort. Obedience with no hedging or fallback plans.

believers who always have an escape plan—another option waiting in the wings, a plan B to revert to—are what the Scriptures call “double-minded” (James 1:8). And they can never expect to fully know and experience the power and presence of God.

How do you know what he knew? After all, Kierkegaard wrote a who.e book ruminating on the possibilities of what Abraham was thinking.

God has often had to remind me, whenever I can tell that my desire to obey is waning, that He is love and He is good. These are not mere personality traits of God; they are innate to His being. And while that doesn’t mean I’ll always enjoy His choices, knowing these certainties about Him assures me that He will never ask me to do anything that is not both best for me and in keeping with His plan.

Not quite accurate.

He was not willing. He was even angry after he went.

God is always working. And if we will keep our eyes open in full anticipation, we will find that even situations in which He appears to be indifferent are actually filled with God’s handiwork, insight, and instruction for us.

God is using my children to produce spiritual fruit in me; something for which I’ve fervently prayed for years and years but expected to be answered in a much more lofty, much less daily and practical way.

Ask Him to open your eyes to see what He is doing and how He is moving.

Huh?

the process of waiting for a message from Him is often just as important as the message itself.

God were saying,

Subject/verb agreement error.