Originally published Monday, 23 March 2015.
How to hear God in the midst of your storm
Two of my favorite friends were talking about how to hear God over coffee today. How to know God’s will, understand who He is, and to move forward in faith is a common struggle among Christians. Don’t we all want to know and understand His plans for us?
I call it struggle because we hesitate asking or going to God in prayer first before the storms of life actually hit. We say “at least we can pray about it”. Or worse yet, we casually comment about mentioning the issue to God and then never utter one single prayer.
There is one thing I do know about human nature, we like to handle our own problems, hide the places we need a fix, and tend have selective hearing. It’s not necessarily a gender thing, or new christian versus veteran-for-life thing, it’s a trait that leans on procrastination. There will always be tomorrow or later to pray. Mostly we pray more when life gets tough, or a loved one contracts cancer. I like to call it lulling our selves into self-sufficiency or spiritual attention deficit disorder.
This is wrong thinking about talking to God. God always listens to our prayers and loves to speak to His children.
You see, God created us to need people, that’s why community feels so good or you might say “misery loves company”. One of the huge things about us is that we don’t like feeling alone. Isolation is a doorway that the enemy crouches at. I guarantee that Satan loves to seclude us to a place of loneliness to leave us in a pit of powerless feelings in every realm of your life. If he gets you in that position then, there’s doubt, we are defenseless, weak, often defeated in a moment’s notice.
Satan also likes to get us busy so we don’t have time to commune with the Holy Spirit by reading the Bible. Often we are confounded by the version that we think the super-Christians are reading. The real reason people don’t read their Bible is that they hold to the opinion that’s just a book of stories or that it’s boring. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s loaded with the most exciting adventures of life, history, and love. The currency of God’s word is still something we desperately need on a daily basis. I personally can’t get enough of it and consult it often. I take it very personal as God’s love letter to me.
The biggest way to hear from God in the calm days and the stormy days is to stay close. Don’t move from reading about Him, living in His words of advice, and the position of prayer. If you stick with these practices, then you will know the sound of the Lord. Adam and Eve knew His sound, they even hid when they heard it.
“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day…” Genesis 3:7-8
I’ve always thought that this sound was something that would have been audible and similar to leaves rustling or something natural like that. But one day as I was reading this verse and the Spirit helped me realize the intensity of the moment of where Adam and Eve had really understood their mistake. The first couple was so familiar with God’s presence that once He was near….they knew it.
There is something about when God enters the room. You know it, there’s no question about what that noise is, or if it’s a ghost or some kind of mistake in hearing correctly. When you know the sound of the Lord because of being in His presence you don’t have to ask for sure if it’s really Him.
Moses was pretty sure even though he asked the question of a bush on fire. Abraham obeyed Gods sound even though he had to give up his son he had waited his entire life for. David was in solitude when he heard God best. God still speaks today and it’s us who are deaf to His voice, have clogged hearing with sin in our lives and refuse to lean in and listen close to the love that is undeniably the sound of the Lord in every day life.
When do you have trouble hearing from God?
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