I’m always intrigued by how people hear God speak. Especially since I often wonder if what I’m hearing is from God or the nervous Nellie who resides in the pit of my stomach. (I’ve been trying to evict her for years, but she’s very stubborn…)
The other day I read an excerpt from my Guideposts colleague Rick Hamlin’s memoir Finding God on the A Train. In it, he writes about the first time he heard God’s voice back in the 5th grade. So often you expect God to speak in big, can’t-miss-it kind of ways. But Rick’s experience as a kid was quite different.
Here’s what happened…
“I had become fixated on it. What did God’s voice sound like? If you heard it, was it like hearing the principal’s voice over the loudspeaker at school? …Was it something that only you heard, making everyone else think you were out of your mind? Did God say actual words, or was the message just a feeling that came over you? (And if that was all, did it really count?) I even asked [my Sunday school teacher] Mrs. Clarke one day after class, when the others had gone outside, ‘How do you know if God speaks to you?’
‘My dear child,’ she said, looking at me with those dark, deep-set eyes that disappeared into her head and connected directly to her soul. She knew I was in earnest. She wouldn’t laugh. ‘You’ll know,’ she said. ‘You’ll know.’
Read More: 3 Ways to Hear God
Then one early evening on a clear, rain-washed winter day, I was bicycling home from my piano lesson. The smog that usually shrouded the San Gabriel Mountains had lifted or blown out to the desert. I was coming to a hill behind my school with an incline good for coasting around the corner and all the way to the next street. You could lift your feet off the pedals and sail on the wind. It was getting dark, and the mountains were crushed grape at the bottom and gold at the top. The royal palms bent with the breeze as I lifted my feet off the pedals. And in that moment God spoke to me.
He was in the mountains, in the sunlight, in the dead palm branches clapping against the trunk. He was behind the schoolyard’s chain-link fence and above the lone Frisbee thrown into the air across the newly sodded field, the sweet smell of grass tickling my nose. He was in the street lamps that just that moment clicked on–or did I only notice them just then? …He was in the meatloaf dinner that would be waiting at home and the Wednesday night elation of having got through more than half the week without any mishaps. He was in the approaching twilight and the fading pink. He was in the wind, the night, the day; he was in me.
I knew God spoke to me, words no more profound and no less than the great ‘I am’ echoing through the words of the prophets and the psalms. As I careened down the hill, borne by gravity and some strange emotion I had never known before, I cried because I knew God was.”
What about you? Do you remember the first time you heard God speak? What did He say?
1. Affirm All Is Possible
The things which are impossible with men are possible with God.
– Luke 18:27
Here's how to do an "impossible" thing: Size up your problem, pray about it, do all you can about it. If it seems impossible, don't give up but affirm: "The things which are impossible with men are possible with God." Keep relaxed. Don't worry. Avoid getting panicky. Never think, "This can't be done." Declare "it can be done, it is being done because God is doing it through me." Affirm that the process is in motion. The final outcome may not be entirely what you now desire. But, handled in this manner, the solution will be what God wants it to be.
2. Expect Good Things
My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from Him.
– Psalm 62:5
One of the most serious and powerful facts in human nature is that you are likely to get what you are basically expecting. If you spend years developing the mental attitude of expecting that things are not going to turn out well, you are likely to get that result. You create a mental condition slanted to an unhappy outcome. If, on the contrary, you develop and maintain a mental attitude of faith and expectancy —hoping, dreaming, believing, praying, working—you will create conditions in which every good thing can and will grow. Fill your mind with the positive power of spiritual expectancy and God and His good will flow toward you.
3. Renew Your Spirit
In Him we live, and move, and have our being.
– Acts 17:28
This text is a formula for maintaining physical, mental, and spiritual energy. The tension and pressure of modern living draws wearily upon our energies. But here we have a renewal method. The text reminds us that God created us and that He can constantly and automatically re-create us. The secret is to maintain contact with God. This channels vitality and energy and constant replenishment into our being. Every day, preferably about midafternoon when an energy lag usually comes, try repeating this text while visualizing yourself as "plugged" into the spiritual line. Affirm that God's recreative energy is restoring strength and power to every part of your body, your mind, and your soul.
4. Forgive Others
Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.
– Matthew 5:44
Make a list of all the people who have hurt and mistreated you or whom you do not like. Then pray for each by name and sincerely practice forgiving each one. Ask the Lord to bless them. Tell the Lord that you want to mean this. Repel the thought that after all you are "justified" in your resentment. Then speak kindly about these persons to others. Go out of your way to help them. This will, in time, break down many barriers, but even if it shouldn't, the effect upon you will be amazing. It will clear the channel through which spiritual power flows into you.
5. Believe You'll Receive
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.
– Matthew 7:7
This is a very practical technique of prayer. It works amazingly. One reason we do not get answers to our prayers is that we ask, but do not really expect to receive. We are expert askers, but inexpert receivers. This spiritual formula tells us to ask and then immediately conceive of ourselves as receiving. For example, to be free from fear, ask the Lord to free you. Then believe that He has immediately done so. The minute you express your faith by sincerely asking Him for a blessing and believe your prayer is answered, your prayer is answered.
6. Trust with All Your Heart
Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.
– Proverbs 3:5
This passage can help you avoid a nervous breakdown. The cause of much nervous trouble is frustration. The antidote to frustration is a calm faith, not in your own cleverness, but in God's guidance. The cure of frustration is the belief that God will help you obtain your heart's desire. Trust in God with all your heart and you will be able to keep on working in health and happiness for long years to come.
7. Get the Most Out of Life
Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.
– I Corinthians 2:9
Is something missing from your life? This Bible verse will restore the old delight in life. It tells you that you have never seen, nor heard, nor even imagined all the marvelous, amazingly fascinating things that God will do for those who love Him, trust Him, and put His principles into practice. As you surrender your life to God every experience of living will grow increasingly more wonderful.
8. Draw Upon That Higher Power
But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.
– Isaiah 40:31
This Higher Power is constantly available. If you are open to it, it will rush in like a mighty tide. It is there for anybody under any circumstances or in any condition. This tremendous inflow of power is of such force that in its inrush it drives everything before it, casting out fear, hate, sickness, weakness, moral defeat, scattering them as though they had never touched you, refreshing and re-strengthening your life with health, happiness and goodness.
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