How to Hear From God
1. Develop the skills
2. Tear down your strongholds
3. Renew your mind
- Develop the skills, which is the practice of prayer; the practice of the presence of God; spending quality quiet time just listening and dwelling in His presence; having daily devotion, which means taking one good scripture that the Lord directs you to, writing it down, asking God to reveal to you the reason why this particular verse is for you, then write down whatever comes to your spirit; learning to properly interpret the Bible. There is only one truth, but infinite applications. These are just a few of the skills we should practice if we want to hear from God.
- Tear down your strongholds first by understanding what they are: agreements we have made with the enemy which involves believing certain lies, such as “I’m not good enough to be a child of God”, “I could never be forgiven for that sin”, “I was raised that way, that is my culture”, and “I’m too weak to give up my addiction” to name but a few. Strongholds always attack our identity in Christ, and they are major impediments to hearing God. Tearing down a stronghold involves identifying it, discovering the root agreement with the Father of lies (a tree shall be made known by its fruit), and then most importantly replacing the lie with the truth found in the scriptures. Without the truth planted deep in your heart, it will be as if the house was swept clean but left empty so that seven times worse lies can return. How do we accomplish tearing down our strongholds? See 3.
3. Renew your mind by putting away all things that stand between you and God. Garbage in, garbage out. Holiness in, holiness out. As you practice 1. and 2. on a daily basis, you will find that things which interested you before will begin to fall away as you spend more and more time in prayer and studying the scriptures. This is when you practice taking captive every thought. It won’t be easy at first because the mind has been accustomed to jumping around like a monkey in a cage. Develop good listening skills in public, in private, and especially in prayer, for when you are truly listening, your mind goes quiet in anticipation. As you move from the milk of the word to the meat of the word you will be able to have more and more of it sink from your head into the depths of your soul. Remember, you are being formed into the image of Christ! As you renew your mind, you will hear God more and more clearly, not always with words, but you’ll know. There is one thing I should have mentioned:
You cannot hear from God at all until you are so in love with Him that you don’t care if He speaks because just being in His glory is sufficient. You must love God so much that you pick up your cross and follow Jesus. You must love God with all your heart and mind and body and soul and strength. You must love Jesus more than anyone else, even yourself. And you must love your neighbor as yourself.
Moving at the Speed of Love 