If you want to have those kinds of experiences, you will have to learn how to listen to your heart as you go about your day. You will have to learn how to hear the still, small voice on the inside of you—in spite of the bustle and noise on the outside of you!
To do that requires diligence and commitment. It take s commitment to put God first place in your life every single day. It takes a determination to daily spend time in the Word and in prayer no matter what!
Why is that time so important? Because hearing from God is not as much a skill you learn as it is a sensitivity you maintain. You can be full of knowledge about how to hear God’s leadings. You may have heard them thousands of times before. But if you want to hear today, you must be in communion and fellowship with Him today. You must maintain fellowship with Him on a contin- ual basis.
It is not enough just to go to church on Sundays. You have to stay in touch with God all the time. With the help of the Holy Spirit, you have to rid your life of things you know are displeas- ing to God, so your communion with Him will not be hindered. Stay full of the Word of God so that your faith will be strong and your spirit will be receptive to His directions. Be constantly looking to and listening for Him so that when He speaks, you can hear Him. Otherwise, you’ll miss out on those gentle promptings He gives you. You will be so occupied with your own plans and activities that you won’t pay attention to the witness of the Holy Spirit inside.
When you do sense a leading of the Spirit, when you do begin to discern His voice, it is important to obey the instructions in Hebrews 3:15. “To day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your [heart]....” That means don’t resist the promptings of the Spirit.
If you sense He is directing you to do something and you decide—consciously or unconsciously—No, I don’t want to do
that. I think I’ll go another way, then you have just hardened your
heart. Most of the time, that’s how we miss the will of God. We are not trying to be rebellious; it’s just that in one situation or another, we don’t follow His leading in our spirit. Our natural mind tells us the reasons why we shouldn’t obey those prompt- ings. So we don’t.
Let me tell you something: If you insist on being ruled by your natural reasoning and human intellect, the Spirit of God won’t be able to get much over to you. Even when He does, you will talk yourself out of it because, quite often, what God tells you to do will not make sense to your mind. His thoughts are so much higher than ours. (See Isaiah 55:8-9.)
Once, when I first began learning to hear the voice of God, I was standing on the front row during the altar call at one of Ke n ’s meetings. He had given the invitation, and quite a few people had come to the front of the auditorium. Among them was a young girl about fifteen years old. When she wa l ked up there, I sensed an urging in my spirit: Go up and put your arms around her and
l ove her.
Was that You, Lord? I asked silently. Or was that me? I wasn’t
sure, so I just stood there. Then that impression came back again.
Still, I wasn’t sure. Then I began to think of reasons why I shouldn’t do it. I don’t want to go up there in front of all those
people...I’ve never done anything like that before...and anyway, I don’t even know this girl. That’s the danger of not moving when
the Lord tells us to move. We begin to reason, which is the worst thing we can do where walking in the spirit is concerned.
But since I had asked God to teach me how to follow Him, He didn’t give up on me. As I stood there trying to remain sensitive to God, I heard Ken say, “Gloria, come up here and put your arm around this girl and just love her.” Clearly, God was telling me,
Yes! That was His prompting in my heart telling me what to do just
as I had asked Him!
Later, when I thought about it, I realized it wouldn’t have made much difference if I had obeyed that prompting and been wrong. It wasn’t a matter of life and death; it was just a matter of being embarrassed.
That’s usually how it is. God won’t ask you to part the Red Sea the first day you start learning to hear His voice. He won’t tell you to risk your life. He is a master teacher. He knows how to start where you are and deal with you perfectly.
But to obey Him you have to become like a little child. You have to be simple enough to just trust Him and do whatever He tells you to do. Jesus said in Matthew 18:4, “Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” If you want to be spiritually strong, you have to stop worrying about your image. You have to stop being concerned about looking foolish and caring more about how you look to people than about how you look to God.
You must be willing to humble yourself under the mighty hand of God and do whatever He says, even if you think it will make you look silly. And you might as well know right now that some of His instructions will make you look silly to worldly people, because they don’t understand God’s ways.
God told Isaiah, for example, to go naked and barefoot for three years. (He really did! You can read about it in Isaiah 20. The
Amplified Bible says that he “stripped to his loincloth” [v. 2].)
Don’t you know Isaiah looked strange to the people around him? But God said it was a sign and a wonder. Now I have no under- standing of that, but it serves to remind me that God’s ways are very different from our ways.
I can tell you, I didn’t go very far in following the Holy Spirit until I said, “Lord, I don’t care what I look like to others. If You tell me to do something, I’ll do it.”
Once you make that decision, obeying God will become much simpler. When you decide you would rather look ridiculous than risk being disobedient, you’re on the verge of an enormous break- through, because as you follow His promptings, they grow clearer in your spirit. Knowing what God says in His Word will help you to determine whether the thought or prompting was from God. The Holy Spirit will never tell you to do anything that disagrees with the written Word.