Hearing the Voice of God

Announcer:Welcome to Sword of the Spirit, written and presented by Colin Dye, senior minister of Kensington Temple and leader of London City Church. Sword of the Spirit is a dynamic teaching series equipping the believers of today to build the disciples of tomorrow. We pray that you find these programs inspiring, and a catalyst in deepening your knowledge of God, your relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ, and your intimacy with the Holy Spirit.

Colin Dye: Hello, and welcome to The Sword of the Spirit, a school of ministry in the Word and the Spirit. Today we’re beginning a new topic—Prophetic Listening. We’re going to be talking about how to listen to God, how to hear God, how to hear God in your personal life, in your daily life, and how to put His Word into practice. Now God is the God who communicates. He is the living God. He speaks to His people. And He reveals Himself to us through His Word so that we can get to know Him. It’s just like in our human relationships—we talk to one another and we listen to one another. So when we talk to God, we also have to listen to Him. In this series, I’m going to be examining all the ways in which God speaks to His people. Of course, the chief way in which He speaks to us is through His Word—through the scriptures. But we also need the Holy Spirit to bring that Word alive within us, to reveal Christ to us through His Word. And when we learn how to do that, everything changes. We no longer feel lost and alone. We have guidance for our life. The Bible says that the Word of God is a light. It’s a lamp that guides us and shows us the way. And in this world of darkness, we need the light of God’s Word. We’re going to be looking how the Word of God interacts with our personality so that we learn to listen to Him personally. One of the big issues for believers is how can I know the will of God for my life. And we talk about that in a personal sense—how can God lead me and direct me and guide me? We’re going to be looking at all these issues in this series. We’re going to see, from the Old Testament, how the prophets heard from God. Then we’re going to see how in the New Testament, God has sent His Spirit into our lives so that we all have, in a sense, a prophetic dimension to life and living so that we can really get to know God. One of the greatest prayers of the New Testament is the prayer of the apostle Paul concerning the Ephesians when he said, “I pray that God will give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation so that you can get to know God better.” In other words, the light of your understanding will be illuminated by the Word of God so that the eyes of your heart will be opened so that you will get to see God, get to know God, and learn how to listen to His voice. We’ll be looking at how this prophetic dimension to life operates today, right now, in your life and in my life. God bless you as we begin this series.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to this Sword of the Spirit teaching series, a school of ministry in the Word and the Spirit. And the subject today and for the next sessions, is listening to God. Surely there can be no more important question than this—how to hear the voice of God. It’s this that is the secret to our prayer life—if we hear from God, we know how to pray. It’s this that’s the secret to our ministry in the Spirit—as we hear from the Holy Spirit, we’re led into the ministry of the Holy Spirit. It’s this that’s the secret of living a life which is successful before God, because as we hear His instructions and follow them in obedience, then the Holy Spirit can bless us. Indeed, the Bible says as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. So we’re talking about a subject that is so important, and it touches on many of the other subjects that we cover in The Sword of the Spirit series. And we’ll be seeing that as we go through.

Now I want to encourage you, first of all, to hunger after the voice of God for the purpose of hearing His voice and getting to know Him. Hearing the voice of God is all about listening to Him, speaking for Him, getting to know Him, getting to know His ways. Now when we meet together in church services, the emphasis is all on speaking. You have a preacher speaking to you. If you pray, you’re speaking to God. If you offer praise and worship, you’re addressing it to God. Or if you’re encouraging one another, you’re speaking to one another. I wonder what would happen if, in church services, the pastor and the leaders of the service said, “Today, we’re not going to say anything. We’re just going to listen to God.” People would not know how to cope with that. People don’t know how to listen to God. And yet today, so often, we hear the words, “God has told me,” “God says.” What does this mean? It means that we are learning in these days to hear the voice of God. We are learning to move in the Holy Spirit. And this is the basis for everything that God calls us to do. If we don’t listen to His voice, we can be led astray. If we don’t know how to distinguish between His voice and our voice, we can go into deception. If we don’t know how to distinguish between the voice of God and the voices of others, whether they are the voice of the devil or the voice of other believers or the voice of unbelievers, if we don’t know how to distinguish between the voice of God and other voices, then we’re going to get very, very confused. Now the goal of this series, Listening to God, is so that you might learn how God speaks—how God speaks in general and how God speaks to you. And you will also learn, having learned to hear the voice of God, how that process operates in your life and all of the scriptural principles that will make you sure that it is the voice of God. And my prayer for you as you study together this course in knowing the voice of God, is that you would develop a hearing heart—a heart that is open and responsive to the voice of God—and that you will be ready to act upon His words.

So now we’re going to go straight into the first part. And I’ve entitled this Prophetic Listening because it gets to the very heart of what I want to share with you in this series. Now before we go on, I want to show you how what I have to say in this series, Listening to God, relates to some of the other manuals and the series that you have. Knowing the Father, Knowing the Son, Knowing the Spirit—in these manuals, we note how that God calls us to an intimate, personal relationship with Him. It’s face to face partnership characterized by faith, love, commitment and communication. And this faith, love, and commitment is mutual. It’s our faith in God as well as acknowledging that God has confidence in us. It’s mutual—our commitment to Him; He’s committed to us. It’s mutual—our love for Him; He first loved us. And so He listens to us and we listen to Him. And as we listen to Him, then we can keep in tune with Him. And if we don’t learn how to listen to God, we’ll never ever know Him personally; not deeply and intimately. We may read the Bible and say, “Well, I’m listening to God by reading the Bible,” and that’s well and good, but you need to hear beyond, as it were, just the teaching. You need to hear the heartbeat of God your Father. You need to understand the passion of Jesus and the presence of the Spirit in your life because we’re called to know Him personally, not just propositionally. It’s a relationship with Him. Now in the series Living Faith, we see how it’s important to hear God’s words before we step out in faith. Faith is about believing God. And if you don’t hear God, then you don’t know what you are to believe. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. And so we must keep on listening to Him. In the manual Ministry in the Spirit, we recognize that effective Christian service depends on us listening to what God says to us. Not taking our own initiative in ministry, but responding to the Holy Spirit as the Holy Spirit leads us to pray for people and touch people’s lives. First we must hear from Him, and then we act. If we act without hearing from Him, then we’re acting, not in faith, but in presumption, and we are conducting our ministry rather than His ministry. And in the manual the Rule of God, I stress how that our relationship with God is based on our submission to His rule, not somehow following rules and regulations. And so how do we submit to His rule? How do we know what His government is in our lives? Yes, of course we go to the Word of God and we understand the teaching of Jesus from the scriptures, but beyond that also, there is the leading and guiding of the Holy Spirit, for we are led by the Spirit of God. We are not governed and controlled by legalistic rules and regulations as if we keep these rules then we are in relationship with God. No, we respond to God by hearing His voice and then we follow Him. It’s gospel obedience—personal, divinely enabled obedience. And it’s obedience to God’s particular will, not just His general will. So in every particular situation and circumstance, we need to know what God is saying to us so that we can flow in obedience. Now, since the coming of Jesus Christ, by His Holy Spirit [stutters] and His gift of His Holy Spirit into our lives, through these things we have come into a relationship with God by which we can hear from Him. And I want to encourage you right off at the outset, you can hear from God. In fact, God is speaking to you all the time, in so many ways. And I want to show you how to discern these ways and by the time we finish this, through some in depth teaching and some clear practical pointers, you will know how to hear from God.

Now, listening is a process. And that’s something we must understand about so much of the Christian life. In Salvation by Faith and some of the other—Salvation by Grace, in that manual, I show you how conversion is a process. Just like a baby is born, it takes time. Something has to happen. Conversion is a process. You step from death to life, but the process in which the Holy Spirit brings you to that point where you are prepared by faith to step from death to life, that can take some time. And it’s not just some one off thing. In Living Faith, we see that faith is a process. It doesn’t happen just in one step; faith is a process. It develops. It grows in you. And in Knowing the Spirit and the Ministry of the Spirit also, we see that the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives, bringing His gifts and His grace to bear upon our experience, is also a continual equipping. We need to rest in Him continually. So it’s exactly the same with Listening to God. Now the devil tries to deceive us in this area, at this point, by suggesting many, many lies to us. And many of these are based on the idea that listening to God is only, you know, a very rare experience. And many evangelical believers seem to talk like that. They don’t like the charismatic emphasis that we talk about hearing from God because very often, they seemed to have boxed God up into the Bible and [stutters] they’re more like hearing about God than they are hearing from God. Now that’s not true of every evangelical believer by any stretch, but you see, in this school of ministry, we are combining the very best of understanding of the Word with the anointing and moving of the Spirit. This series is a series about the Word and the Spirit. And you will see the relevance of these comments as we go through because it’s not enough simply to read your Bible and to think you understand the doctrines that are on this page. You need, also, relationship with the Holy Spirit in which these words become real to you and become meaningful in your experience. You may say that many general principles from this book will govern your life and give you many great [stutters] a lot of wisdom as to how to proceed in many different situations. But there will be times when your specific situation is not outlined in the Bible. The principles there can govern you, but you need to hear from God how to apply the principles of the Word of God—the scripture—into your life and your experience. And so listening to God and hearing from God is a continual moment by moment and a lifelong process—a lifelong activity. Sometimes the devil would suggest that God speaks with a megaphone and unless you hear some great, megaphonic sound from heaven, then it’s not God speaking. And I have to confess, dear friends, that it’s we preachers who are the worst offenders at this. Because when we talk about how God spoke to us, we leave people the impression that it was through a thunderbolt, or through some great earthquake, or something. And we say, “There I was, lying on my bed, and God spoke to me.” And the people are left with the impression that an angel stood there, there was an earthquake, [stutters] and the whole room shook, and there was this booming voice saying, “Colin, I’m speaking to you,” and it wasn’t that at all. All it was was a quiet impression in our heart. No audible voice, just that quiet impression, that nudge, that growing conviction. But as you grow in the Spirit, you begin to discern that that is the voice of God working in you. And so, preachers so often speak about it and leaving the impression that it’s some dramatic event. And sometimes it is a dramatic event, but very often, most frequently, it’s singularly undramatic. It’s a still, small voice, as Elijah had to learn, again, after the great victory at Mount Carmel, and we’ll come to that in one of the sessions. And so the important emphasis from the beginning is that God is willing to speak to you and He’s not too busy to communicate, He’s not too reluctant to do it, or too holy to speak to us. And we don’t, therefore, need to get on our knees and beg Him to speak to us, although in our spirit of humility and humbleness of heart, God will be more ready to speak to us. But we have to trust Him that He is the communicating God. And so, we need to grasp from the very beginning, the problem is not with God speaking, the issue is about us listening. That’s why I’ve called this Listening to God. And it is about prophetic listening.  Now, I want to establish the context for that. Prophetic listening. When I say prophetic listening, I don’t mean that there are different forms of listening and prophetic listening is one form of listening. What I mean is that in listening to God, it’s a process which is part of the wider, prophetic manifestation of God. In other words, what I’m saying is this: all listening to God is prophetic. It’s part of the prophetic process. And so this series is also about prophecy—the prophetic gift and the prophetic ministry. And we will see how that relates. But now, this shows us that when we come to God to listen to Him as part of this prophetic process, that it’s an active, not a passive thing. When we listen to God, we are waiting for His Word to activate us and there is an active waiting on God. It’s not just a passive thing. Now you have to still your heart, and there is a passive element, but it’s not just sitting back waiting for God to do something, it’s an active listening to God. It’s seeking Him. And so often, when the Bible talks about seeking God, this is what it means. It’s talking about being active in your pursuit of God. So we listen to God, not just like listening to a piece of music to be entertained, rather, we listen to Him as a trainee pilot would listen to his pilot, his instructor, to be directed. Also, this shows us that listening to God is a relationship. It’s not just a mechanical function. So we don’t listen to God rather like we listen to the anonymous help line operator on the telephone. Rather, we listen to Him like children listening to their parents. It’s a relationship issue. And again, I want to stress, we listen to God continuously, not occasionally. And that’s the only way in which we can come online, so to speak. It’s like hooking up your computer to the internet and being online twenty four hours of the day. And this is what’s so exciting. You never know when He’s going to speak to you. In fact, He’s speaking to you far more often than you think. And we’ll have to show you about this, but I’m not talking about everybody going crazy and walking around, you know, with spiritual antennae up like this, all the time, saying, “What are you doing?” “Oh, I’m listening to God.” Oh no, you’re just being weird. You’re being weird. But God is speaking to you, in relationship with you, and sharing with you continuously. And then this also shows us that the whole process of listening to God is rooted in the prophetic. In other words, we listen to God like the prophets of old, in an intimate, anointed, servant relationship, ready to act on God’s words.

And so let’s have a look, a little more, in more detail, at prophetic listening. The English word ‘prophet,’ ‘prophecy,’ or ‘prophesy’ and ‘prophetic,’ all these words, are derived from two Greek words—pro, meaning ‘forth,’ and phemi, meaning ‘to speak’—prophemi. They signify speaking forth. So the prophet speaks forth the mind and the counsel of God. And so the phrase, prophetic listening, not only points to the place of listening in the prophetic process, but it also underlines the fact that we are listening to the forth speaking of the mind and the counsel of God and there will be times when we have to pass that message on and we need to speak for Him and complete that prophetic process. And so prophetic listening is not like physical listening to the sounds that come to the ear; it’s a spiritual exercise. We are listening spiritually. Our spiritual ears are tuning in by concentration, by faith. And when we do this, we are receiving the personal mind and counsel of God, His revealed Word, and His revealed will. These things are coming to us through this prophetic process. Now, while, of course, I’m going to offer in this teaching some practical guidance and some biblical principles about the way we listen to God, yes, I’m going to do that because I want to teach you how to listen to God, but the emphasis you need to know as I’ve prepared this and got it ready for you, the focus is on God speaking; on the way He communicates His Word and His will. If we understand the way God does it, then we will know how to listen. It’s very simple. If you understand how satellite television works, then you’re likely to know what to do in order to receive the signal. If you know that a satellite television operates by receiving a signal from the sending satellite, and the signal is captured in those discs, those dishes, and then put through a machine—which is about as technical as I’m going to get today—which interprets that signal in a form that is capable of being received on your television, then you know you need a dish, a decoder, and a television—a monitor. And so you get those three, you connect them together or have somebody else do it, and then you’re ready to switch on. And so if you know how a communication operates, then you’re likely to know what to do in order to receive it. So the emphasis will be on God and God speaking, which for me, is far more exciting than just concentrating on us listening. Listening to whom and for what purpose? But if we know that we’re listening to God and how He speaks and the purpose that lies behind His desire to speak to us and the purpose that He has in us listening to Him, then I think it’s all going to fall into place. Now, this means that prophetic listening is not listening to silence. That’s some kind of mystical, new age thing. And you meet these people and, “Shh.” “What’s the matter?” “I’m listening.” “Listening to what?” “I’m listening to the silence.” Now there is a real sense in which we need to tune out in order to tune in. but this isn’t just some mystical emptying of your mind so that any evil thing can pop any evil thought there. This is focusing on God, opening up our hearts to receive the Holy Spirit and to receive the Spirit’s testimony. Now I don’t know what it’s like for you, but I have a few practical points whenever I need to listen to God. As well as training myself to hear Him throughout the whole day in the hustle and the bustle and the busyness, especially when I’m ministering—when I’m ministering, I’m listening to God as much as I possibly can and I’m not even listening to myself so much as listening to the Holy Spirit so that I can receive what He is wanting to share and I can be led and guided and directed. But as well as that, you are never going to learn how to listen to God in the busy, public place until you’ve learned to still you heart in the quiet, private place. And for me, it’s quite desperate at times. And if I’m really wanting to hear from God at a level of depth, apart from those gracious times when God can just drop a thought into my heart which is so significant and it might be a real life changing experience, a life changing word, as well as that time, those times, when I’m seeking God, it takes me at least an hour, my friend, just to get my body quiet. Then it takes me another hour to get my soul hushed down. And then it takes me another hour before my spirit really, really is in tune with God at a level of depth. That’s how it is for me. And so I can spend two to three hours waiting on God, and then, oh, it’s just like somebody’s cleaned the line; somebody’s cleaned the wax out of my ears. And then the sense of God’s presence is really strong. So we must practice the presence of God like that, regularly. And the more you wait on God in the private place, then the more you’re going to be sensitive to Him in the public place. And so the emphasis must be, not just on the techniques of listening, but on the God who is always communicating. Now in this Listening to God series, like the other Sword of the Spirit topics, I spent a lot of time founding this, grounding it, in the Old Testament. And that’s very, very important. In fact, it’s an important feature of all of this Sword of the Spirit series. And so we’re going to be understanding how God revealed Himself to and through the Old Testament prophets. We’re also going to learn from the New Testament, the early church prophets, at how they listened to God, and we’re going to see how this prophetic listening should be applied to us in the church today. Now in parts 5 and 6, we’ll be looking at the prophetic application of our listening and [stutters] well, we’re doing, seeing how this is applied to the church and the prophetic foundation in parts 5 and 6 and then we see the prophetic application of this to our lives in parts 7-9.

Recommended reading

• Dye, Colin. Reaching the lost, Kensington Temple, 2007
• Bonnke, Reinhard. Evangelism by fire: Igniting your passion for the lost,Full Flame Gmbh, 2002

Additional reading

• Osborne, T. L. Soulwinning out where the sinners are, Harrison House, 1980
• Bonnke, Reinhard. Time is running out: Save the world before it’s too late, Regal Books, 1999