Hearing God’s Voice Made Simple

If we want to hear God’s voice, we must come to expect that when we turn our attention toward Him, He will turn His attention toward us. One of the most difficult lessons of learning to hear His voice is getting past the bias we have that makes us think He doesn’t care about us. If your parents didn’t pay attention to you when you were a child, you may have learned to expect rejection from those who are important to you. If you’ve ever lived with a spouse or a roommate who seldom spoke to you, you may have learned to expect silence from others. You might think that if the people you cared about had nothing to say to you, why on earth would the Creator of the universe be interested in speaking to you?

God isn’t like your grouchy spouse, your silent roommate, or your stoic parent who never had much to say. He isn’t hiding from you because He hates you. He wants to connect with you every day. It isn’t true that He has favorites, or that He doesn’t want to spend time with you. If there is anything preventing you from knowing God more intimately, it is on your side of the relationship, not His.

How do we learn to meet with God? Let’s take a lesson from someone who walked with Him daily:

By an act of faith, Enoch skipped death completely. “They looked all over and couldn’t find him because God had taken him.” We know on the basis of reliable testimony that before he was taken “he pleased God.” It’s impossible to please God apart from faith. And why? Because anyone who wants to approach God must believe both that he exists and that he cares enough to respond to those who seek him.
Heb. 11:5-6 (MSG)

To get your parent’s attention you may have had to do your chores or clean your room. Others may have expected you to do favors for them. People usually require us to jump through hoops in order to earn their favor. But that isn’t true of God. Enoch’s walk with God was simply a matter of faith. If you want to be intimately involved in God’s plans and want to know Him as a friend, the first step is to believe that He exists and that He cares enough to speak to you. For many of us, that means changing the way in which we think of Him.

The thing that prevented me from meeting with and hearing from God for the first 38 years of my life was unbelief and skepticism. I chose not to believe He existed, that He cared about me, or that I could know Him. That was a choice I made. But the moment I made a different choice—the choice to believe that He existed, that I could know Him, and that He could be heard—His voice was as easy to hear as that of anyone else. My choice to believe is what allowed me to draw near to Him.

This is an excerpt from my book Hearing God’s Voice Made Simple.