Hearing God's Voice (Yes God! Week 2)

This response is connected with Proverbs 31 Ministries' Online Bible Study on "What Happens When Women Say Yes to God" by Lysa TerKeurst.

This week we are discussing, among other things, how to hear from God. I agree with Nicki Koziarz when she says, "We live in a loud world so the voice of God is becoming harder and harder to hear."

I am no expert or saint and I have trouble hearing from God, just like anyone else does. But after giving it a lot of thought and spending time in prayer, I have a few thoughts on how to hear more clearly from God.

The first is to be able to hear from God you must go to God. You must speak, pour your heart out before the Father, and then listen. The last is very important. I believe God loves to hear our prayers, it would be like music to His ears. However, to have conversation, we must cease speaking and begin listening. God wants to communicate with us and He wants us to hear His plan over our lives. So we must seek Him out and then listen to what He tells us.

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The next one is the hardest for me -- Be Still.

Psalm 46:10 -- "Be still, and know that I am God! I will be honored by every nation. I will be honored throughout the world."

We are generally very restless, I know I am. There is always something waiting to be done. It is hard but necessary to put all of that on hold to be still and listen to God. Just as God's voice gets hard to hear in a loud world, it is hard to hear God's voice when our head is crowded. I have even gone the extent to put prayer time in my schedule. For this half an hour, there is nothing on my list to do but listen and communicate with God. If any of you are like me, there are dishes to do, children to keep track of, dinner to cook, blogs to write, pictures to go through, and the list is endless. God knows our hearts, He knows we are busy. However, if we don't make that little bit of time special just for Him on a regular basis, it will be very hard to hear from Him when you need to reach out.

Lastly, we must have the expectation to hear from God, but we must not put an expectation on what He will say. There are times when God will tell you something you don't want to hear -- will you say yes then? Will you still listen? We often project on God what we think He will say -- what we want Him to say. Similarly, my four year old will ask "Can I have a cookie?" And in the next breath say "Yes? Thanks!" Then I have to correct her to say that no, she can't have a cookie right before we eat dinner. It seems harder to accept the no when you have already accepted yes. If we just stop and wait on God's answer, there are many instances where we would save ourselves a lot of heartache.

God can't tell us about Himself, His purpose or His love if we assume we already know what He will say. We have to get out of the way, we have to be ready to listen to what He says, not just what we want to hear. And then we need to say YES!

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