It’s a tricky thing writing a blog post about hearing God’s voice, because the first reality you have to face up to is that most of the time we don’t hear God’s voice. In reality there’s a gap between us and God, such that many people have stopped believing that their Creator even exists, let alone speaks. The Bible says this gap is due to failure to live in harmony with God’s character and obedience to his commands; this failure is called sin in the Bible. However, the very fact we have 66 books written by people that have heard God, wrapped up in what we now call the Bible, show that God does speak to people. So why does it still seem rare?
In truth, I’m not fully sure. Perhaps because we still sin. Perhaps because we live in a world that hasn’t been fully restored by God yet. Or perhaps it’s partly because, in addition to God’s Spirit (his invisible presence) speaking the truth (1 Samuel 15:29; Heb 6:18; John 17:17; Titus 1:2), there is also a lying spiritual creature in the world commonly called the devil; that Jesus called “the father of lies” (John 8:44).
Nevertheless, particularly for those that have become Christians and therefore have God’s Spirit living inside them, it does become possible to hear God’s voice; with practice, discernment, and always done in community.
For example, a number of years ago I was standing singing in a church service when I suddenly felt a shooting pain down my left leg. It was as though the person standing next to me had punched me, but of course they hadn’t. While nursing my mysterious ailment I remembered something I had heard around that time. Apparently, one of the ways God’s Spirit can speak to us is by briefly letting us feel, in part, what someone else is feeling. This is one example of what is typically called a “word of knowledge” (1 Cor 12:8-10) i.e. supernaturally knowing something about someone else. So I put two and two together and made four. I went up to the service leaders, and whilst the congregation sang, tapped one on the shoulder and explained tentatively my strange pain, and my theory that God might be saying something through it.
They then said that they had just been discussing whether to lead the church in a time where we prayed for healing for those who needed it; to my slight surprise took my leg pain as confirmation that they were hearing God correctly. So they went ahead with their plan.
Two weeks later one of the service leaders ran up to me as I was entering church. “Did you hear what happened!?”, they exclaimed. They then explained that there was a lady at the service two weeks previously who had shattered her left leg in a motorcycle accident a couple of years beforehand. She had constant pain in, you guessed it, her left leg. She was prayed for through the power of Jesus during that time of healing prayer, and was completely healed! No pain left at all!
Fast forward a few years. I was with some church friends on my gap year after university, trying to learn how to listen to God. There were 4 or 5 of us, praying for one of the girls; let’s call her Mary (not her real name). As we shut our eyes and started to pray, into my imagination popped an image of two capital letters: “L.L.”.
I’m not usually one to daydream about acronyms, so I prayed silently, “Holy Spirit, if that’s you, what does L.L. mean?” Quick as a flash the words shot into my brain: “Lovely Legs”. “Oh no” I responded in my mind, “I’m not telling Mary that she has lovely legs. That sounds highly inappropriate!” So I did what any self respecting person would - I tried to think of something else.
But nothing else came. All I had etched in my imagination was “L.L.”, ”Lovely Legs”. So in the end, I went for it. I said something like “Mary, I think Jesus wants you to know that he loves the way he made you, and thinks you’ve got lovely legs”. At which point, everyone burst out laughing.
At this point I should clarify that I don’t think I’d ever noticed Mary’s legs before. I knew that she had some; it’s how she walked from A to B, but as far as I was concerned she was just your standard biped - nothing unusual one way or another. (Note to the reader: whenever trying to listen to God for someone else it’s important to pay attention to your own motives and to the relationship you have with that person. In this case my friendship with Mary was completely platonic and as the next paragraph will clarify she was only encouraged by the interaction).
I don’t think I ever regained my dignified reputation amongst that group, but a year or so later, Mary told me something that made it all worth it. She told me that earlier on the day we were praying, before the “Lovely legs” debacle, while she was walking with some others to the building where we were meeting, she told them how much she disliked her legs. I had no idea about this at the time! I was in a different part of town and hadn’t heard anything about this before. But somehow, Jesus put those words into my mind, to lovingly affirm the way he’d made her, and to free her from a negative self image.
So there are two examples of when hearing God’s voice definitely worked. But how can we learn how to do this?
The “how” is a huge subject, but the first thing to know and come back to is that, unlike the devil, God always tells the truth (1 Samuel 15:29; Heb 6:18; John 17:17; Titus 1:2) and therefore never says anything which contradicts something he’s said before. The Bible therefore says to “test everything” (1 Thess 5:20-21) we hear to make sure it lines up with what he’s already said in the Bible. If it doesn’t agree with what Jesus says in the Bible, then it ain’t from God! So if we are to resist the lies of the devil and get to know God’s voice, the first thing to do is to get to know, believe, and put into practice what God’s said before, aka the Bible. In my experience, the more you put God’s instructions into practice the more you’ll hear and understand.
When it comes to learning to hear God’s Spirit’s spontaneous whispers, there are few hard and fast rules. They can often come as just an unexpected thought or feeling, that you were unlikely to think of yourself. The best way to learn this is with others in a balanced church community, so I’d really recommend a course like one of the School For Prophecy courses (https://schoolforprophecy.com/) to learn how to hear God safely and sensibly.
Finally, for more information on how to test thoughts and impressions we think may be from God, commonly known as “prophecy” (1 Cor 14:3), check out this one pager explaining some of the basics.