“It pleases God when we listen to His voice and then in faith believe what He’s spoken.” Pastor James Sunnock
A few months ago our pastor gave a great sermon about how to hear God’s voice. I’ve talked previously about hearing God’s voice in Can You Please Repeat That? However, our senior pastor shed new insights into what I already knew and took my understanding of hearing God’s voice to a new level.
First of all, he was talking about how God speaks in three different ways: Sometimes auditory, sometimes visual, and sometimes kinesthetic. I’ve read various true stories of how God came to people in dreams or they saw a vision of God. Sometimes, they died and went to Heaven before coming back to Earth and sharing their experience. I’ve always thought that would be awesome to experience. However, I guess I’m more of an auditory person because most of the time I “hear” God instead of “see” God.
God made me. He knew what kind of “learner” I would be and He knew how I would “hear” best and therefore, that is how He chooses to communicate most of the time with me. That makes me feel good. Not to say He will never talk in other ways but it just brought His talking to me to a deeper, more personal level.
The other point our pastor brought out was how do we know it’s really God and not just our thoughts? There are three guidelines our pastor uses in his own personal life, and having heard him speak about this topic in the past, I started using the same guidelines in my own life. The first is whether or not what is being said lines up with the Bible. That’s the most important too. If I think God is telling me to become physically violent with another human being, then I know God isn’t the one talking because God teaches us keep no record of wrongs, not retaliate.
The second guideline speaks about whether or not what we’re hearing produces the fruit of the spirit. That doesn’t mean that what God is asking us to do won’t stretch us or problems won’t arise where we’ll need to trust God to help us overcome. It does mean that while we’re walking the (sometimes) difficult journey that God called us to travel, we’ll have an underlying peace, knowing that God asked us to obey and He has something great in store when we finish what He asked us to complete.
Lastly, our pastor has people in his life that he discusses what God tells him about, a checks and balances of sort in his life to keep him on track. And, as he nicely pointed out, it’s better to get that friend/mentor/accountability partner in place before you need the advice or you might likely go find someone based on the fact you know they’ll agree with you.
Come back next time and I’ll share with you how God was speaking to me on the very day that I was hearing this sermon and how He reinforced the truth our pastor was speaking to our hearts.
© Cheri Swalwell 2014