The best thing you can do to for your health body-mind-spirit is to be in constant conversation with God, but many Christians still struggle with how to hear God’s voice.
Training your “ears” to hear God’s voice begins with learning to discern the voices you listen to on a daily basis.
There are four voices you may be hearing at any given time: God’s voice, the enemy’s voice, your voice, or other people’s voices. Each voice is distinct and there are some characteristics you can listen for to help discern whose voice it is.
The Four Voices
God’s voice:
Always loving. May convict, but does not condemn – speaks life, hope, and redemption. Always agrees with Scripture, just maybe not our wounded understanding of Scripture.
The enemy’s voice:
Steals, kills, and destroys. Full of shame, death and condemnation – sounds accusatory and creates negative thoughts about yourself. Uses “you” language instead of “I”, and often feels intrusive. Contradicts, twists, or half-truths Scripture.
Your voice:
Feels familiar. May be positive or negative, but the lines of thought are traceable. Uses “I” or “me” language.
Other people’s voices:
May be positive or negative. You tend to be able to remember who said it and when it was said.
When trying to discern a voice, think about how the voice and its words make you feel. Do you feel loved and accepted? Or do you feel shameful, like you need to hide? How the voices we listen to make us feel says a lot about who is speaking.
Growing in How to Hear God’s Voice:
The best way to grow in hearing is to listen. Start asking God questions, especially silly little ones you could easily test for the answer.
Questions like “What color will the next car that drives past me be?” Or asking Him to tell you the name of your server at a restaurant. There are plenty of little questions like this that you can use to test out your hearing.
Another way to grow is to immerse yourself in the truth of scripture so when you hear other voices you can quickly rule out if they are lying to you.
God’s voice will never contradict scripture, but we all have lies we believe that cast a lens over how we see God. You may need to spend some time healing from those lies to be able to hear His voice clearly.
God’s voice can come to you in many ways. You may not hear an audible voice, but you might have thoughts that don’t quite feel like your own thoughts.
Other ways He speaks are through the Bible, dreams, visions, everyday experiences, and other people. Trust that He knows how to speak to you in a way that you can hear.
The Holy Spirit is your guide to hearing God’s voice and will teach you how you listen.
For more on learning to hear God’s voice, check out Hearing 101 by Faith Blatchford and Love Speaks by Carl Anderson