I hear God in a variety of ways, so I’m going to touch on a few of them, and what I’ve learned about God along the way.
I’ve learned God is a personal God. While He has corporate messages for the children of God that come through various mouthpieces He uses, He is also very interested in personal relationships with His children individually. In fact, He speaks more regularly and directly to His individual children than He gives through corporate messages. I honestly think everyone has heard the voice of God, but maybe just haven’t recognized it.
Mostly, His is the still small voice in your head that sounds like your own, but maybe not how you’d say it. The best illustration I’ve heard of this is the baby in the womb who hears his mother’s voice from the moment his hearing is developed. For several months he hears this voice and it is familiar to him. Then when he is born, at some point the baby will turn his head toward the same voice.
People who haven’t recognized the voice of God yet are like the baby in the womb, hearing it, but not identifying it yet. There is a time we leave the womb (figuratively) and we begin to turn our head to that same voice out of the womb, and we begin to identify it. We start to get a face and an identity to go with that voice, and we grow in our relationship with that voice.
Trial and Error
Most of the experiences I’ve had with the still small voice have been a process of trial and error. A thought will come to me that isn’t quite what I was thinking, isn’t quite the way I would think it, and I’ll ask if that was God. Then I’ll begin a process of discernment. Does it contradict or align with Scripture? Does it contradict or align with the character of God? (That’s a bit trickier because we have some false concepts of God. More on that in a minute.)
For me, sometimes the voice comes out of the blue when I’m not even praying or conversing with God, when I’m not necessarily thinking about the thing that is said by God. These are almost always the voice of God. [For example, one day I was driving eastward on 21st St. and His voice, that sounded a lot like my own thoughts, said, “Do you know what your problem is, Michelle?” Well that was undeniably God. If I had asked the question, I would’ve known the answer. It came separate from my own thoughts, and caught me by surprise. – and THAT is a fantastic story of something I learned both about myself and the character of God, but will make this article too long.)
He also speaks to me in prayer or when I’m hammering something out with Him. Discernment is what enables me to recognize and understand when it’s His voice. This is the trickier part when it comes during prayer or a conversation. (We also must learn to cover our prayers with the Blood of Christ, because dark spirits like to interject into our thoughts and pretend to be God or just deceive.) Through time and trial and error, we’re able to discern His voice in prayer and dialogue with Him. Just practice and keep practicing. When you think it may be Him, proceed as though it is and see where it goes. Sometimes we recognize it later when we think back on something and then realize, oh no, that was the voice of God and I thought it was my own thoughts. Over time it gets easier and easier. We will miss it sometimes, but as we practice hearing, we’ll miss it less and less.
God frequently speaks to us via our thoughts. They sound like our own thoughts, but discernment teaches us how to sift ours from God’s, and the enemy’s (because he inserts himself into our thoughts as well). The process of trial and error is what sharpens us to more easily and quickly discerning when God is speaking to us.
[False concepts of God – Sidebar]
I only address this because it needs to be said. We carry a whole lot of false concepts of who God is in our being. Initially we struggle with transference. We transfer our dad or mom or our parents’ character onto who or what we think God is. That’s probably the first false concept we have to shatter.
The longer we’ve been in the institutional church, the more false concepts we’ll have of God. There’s just too much false teaching, too many feel good doctrines as well as wrath of God doctrines, and we’ll gravitate to what’s most familiar to us. Then without a lot of introspection, we’ll apply those doctrines to our perspective of God.
We basically have to strip our expectations bare and allow God to reveal who He is to us, without all the filters we insist we don’t have. Otherwise, we’ll wrongly attribute the voice of the enemy as God’s, because the enemy has been studying you since birth and knows how you think, and you’ll recognize the familiarity and accept it. Or we’ll discard or reject a word from God because it doesn’t sound like it could possibly be God (our version of who we think God is).
Dreams
God spoke to me in dreams a lot when I was going through deliverance from past traumas and abuse. It was a long season, and I didn’t know who or what to trust. God, who knitted me together in my mother’s womb, knew I was scared and untrusting. So He chose to depict scenes and scenarios in my dream life to speak to me separate from my mind. I’m intellectually driven, and God had to bypass my intellect to reach me in the regions of the soul and spirit. My intellect would have overridden His leading by the deception it was in, and I was unaware of this at the time. So it was dreams. And I had to learn the language of God through dreams. It circumvented my intellect very well, and He was able to begin a long, thorough process of walking me through healing and deliverance.
Now He does not speak to me in dreams as much. I’ve learned how to let my spirit follow His Spirit, and my intellect is kept in check (most of the time) to keep me from sabotaging His efforts. But He will break through to me in dreams when He has a special message or something He wants to show me that doesn’t follow our normal avenues of connection. I’ve learned how to hear and see Him through His dream messages, and they’re still some of my favorite exchanges with Him. I love them because I can’t contrive them. I’ve learned some valuable lessons about dream life, the subconscious, garrisoning the imagination, etc. Maybe I’ll write more on that later.
Just like everything else, your dream life needs covered in the Blood of Christ. The enemy can invade your dream life as well.
Nature
This may be one of my favorite ways God communicates with me. He expresses Himself to me through nature. From observation of nature, He speaks to me about His character. He shows me things about human nature and Himself. His presence is more vivid to me in these times.
Other People
This is one of the fewest ways God speaks to me. I’ve been burned too many times by charlatans and forked tongues. He knows I don’t trust people or their motives (for the most part), so I don’t receive messages very well through other people. When I do get messages from God via other people, it is usually quite plain. It’s a phrase He has previously dropped in my spirit. It’s a topic that He keeps revisiting me with. It’s an undeniable addressing of something only He would know.
But He does speak to me through my husband. I am able to hear Him through my husband, and occasionally another person I dearly love and trust.
His Word
He speaks to me through His Word. Sometimes when reading it, He elucidates a point. Many times I feel His presence and get a “knowing”. I just know and understand something that bypassed my intellect and normal modes of reasoning. He simply “downloads” understanding to me.
He then uses His Word throughout my day. He’ll speak to me in circumstances and show me how to apply His Word. A Scripture or story from the Bible will come to my thoughts and I’ll see how it applies. He will impress a particular Scripture on me sometimes when I’m praying for someone, and it will give me better direction on how to pray.
Numbers
He speaks to me in numbers. This probably came about for me because of all the dreams in the earlier years. There would be a number of something (four empty bar stools in the four corners of a room, four rotten eggs, four broken teeth and four exploded cars in four different dreams – many years ago. Other things like a dollar amount will be stated or written, a clock will be exposed, etc.) in my dreams and I’d have to seek the meaning of the number to understand the interpretation of the dream.
I downloaded and printed out E.W. Bullinger’s “Number in Scripture”, and have a number of dream books with number meanings. These were my go to for years.
Sometimes God will wake me up in the night, and the time will be a Scripture reference that speaks to me about something God wants me to understand. For example, one night I woke up at 3:51. I got up, went downstairs, got something to drink. Came back upstairs and went to the bathroom, fiddling around. When I went back to bed, the clock still said 3:51. This was an “impossibility”. I asked God what I was supposed to understand. As I searched for understanding, I discovered there were three books in the Bible with a 51st chapter (Psalm, Isaiah, Jeremiah). They each dealt with various deliverance issues (personal, corporate and national).
But yeah, God still speaks to me in numbers in my dreams, the clock, my daily encounters, etc.
And He’s speaking to you
It may be any number of these examples that He talks to you, or a whole different combination. I know a gal who gets messages from God from license plates. I’ve tried that. (correlate the license plate number to a Strong’s number and apply it to the prayer need) It doesn’t work for me, but it plainly and obviously did for her. I don’t discount that because it doesn’t really apply to me but does to her.
If I’ve learned anything, it’s that God is personal. He knows us intimately and He speaks to us personally. The way I talk to my best friend is different than the way I speak with the checker at the store is different than I speak to my daughter. And the way I speak to one of my daughters is not necessarily the way I speak to another of my daughters. I respond to people individually with tailored language that’s based on a myriad of things… our relationship, their personality (and mine), the topic of discussion, our history together, my mood or his/hers, etc.
The way God talks to me may make another person cry! (“Do you know what your problem is, Michelle?”) But He knows me. He speaks my language. He knows when He has to circumvent my intellect and when to engage with it. And as He has painstakingly made His ways known to me as I have sought Him, just as He does and will do for each of His children He calls by name.
On a separate post I will write up one of my favorite encounters with Him on this.