Discerning His Voice

For years, though I was unaware I was doing it, I restricted God. I did not expect to hear him unless the conditions were just right. I had an unconscious list of how He spoke. A Christian song, a Church messages, the Bible, etc. Something has changed over the years and right now I'm in a season on my walk with Jesus that is particularly vibrant. I see Him, hear Him and feel Him...everywhere. Many times throughout the day and night he has been speaking, as if He really is as He said He was, near to me...every moment.

It has been my desire to practice praying continually over the last two years. By prayer I mean being aware of the presence of God throughout my day and night. Instead of being just inside my own head or caught up in the busyness around me, I include Him in my thoughts, but also open myself to what He may want to say to me or how He might have me pray and for whom. When I speak to Him, I allow space, silence; I wait for a response from Him. I also have set times where I say nothing and just sit in His presence. That time is often simply intimate silence. What a joy to be so comfortable with each other that we can be in naked silence, face to face, just being as we are together in a loving embrace. In this way I can savor His beauty, His holiness and the acceptance and belonging that my heart so desperately craves. This I carry with me throughout my day.

Now I am not all of a sudden able to do this praying continually thing perfectly, every day every minute, but as I have followed his bidding and made it an intention that I return to, I have experienced a much deeper intimacy with Him and have had some wonderful conversations.

It has been a journey of growing in discernment. I am learning to discern which thoughts and feelings are coming from my own broken, stinted places, or from ingrained beliefs or my old nature, and what truly is a fresh word of the Spirit to my heart. I have come to accept that it is a skill, a practice, which is something I have railed a bit against because it sounds like “works” to my grace oriented heart. But, really, it is an invitation to grow in relationship with Emanuel, God with us, not a work or a requirement, but a joy and the deepest longing of my heart. If my Life and Breath is speaking to me, I WANT to learn to hear Him clearly, and He invites me to enter that process, daily.

There are real obstacles to hearing His voice well that I have been made aware of. First I recognized the obstacle of lack of faith. God can be talking a blue streak, but if I don't really believe in my heart that He is speaking or will answer me, then I will not be listening for Him. Similarly, I have been made aware of my selective hearing. We all do it, or have kids who do it to us. We only listen for certain words. There have been things I have expected to hear from God that deafen me to his actual word to me. Again, it's a process of discernment and purposefully opening up to Him to remove such hindrances. It has been painful at times for sure, but how that pain pales in the sweetness of deepened fellowship with My Lord!

On that note, (the pain note) fear can also be a hindrance. I have feared He will be harsh with me; feared I will get the earful I deserve. But, the wonderful truth of being a beloved, redeemed, child of the Father, made righteous by Christ is that He motivates us with love and grace. When I have found myself cowering, waiting for Him to respond harshly to me like I deserve, He instead whispers love, grace and acceptance. He tells me how beautiful I am to Him. He is so much gentler with my heart than I am, and I soften in his embrace, time and time again. But if I expect to hear the shout of condemnation, I may miss hearing His whispers of grace. The sin He reveals in me He points out with tenderness even though it may sting. He rubs the place with a healing salve and stimulates healing with the warmth of his touch.

Discerning His voice also requires getting to know God and myself well enough to begin to tell the difference between my voice and His. I became aware of an ingrained belief of mine that says that to focus on myself at all, my desires, my hurts, my worries, my[gulp]beauty and worth, is not godly. It is selfishness. Having “time with God” to get to know Him is accepted as important. But the comments and teachings I have heard about the dangers of “navel study” taught me to “look outside of myself” and “serve others” to get my mind off of me. I don't think this is what Paul meant by “Less of me, more of You”. This belief has been so harmful because it has often caused me to be ashamed of myself and to hide parts of myself from Jesus and others. This results in separation and breeds the real isolation and selfish protectiveness we feared “navel study” would result in. This is an epidemic in the Church. We must be naked and honest before our God that He might hold us and heal every part of us. He longs for our heart, all of our heart. He wants us to know who we are in Him that we may be free to love others and be honest and naked before them. This is the fellowship of the saints. (1John 1:7) Only in our nakedness does the light of Jesus shine forth from us. Because we are new creations and made to reflect him, nakedness is a good thing! God had to heal me of the guilt I felt to even take the time for myself to nurture my soul. If Jesus needed to know who He was,(and He was so confident in who He was) then I need to know this too! If Jesus took time to nurture His soul and be reminded by the Father who He was, then certainly it is a legitimate need of mine! If God thinks I'm worth knowing, then I am.

This morning I was talking with God in the bathroom, lamenting because I long to share some of the ways He has spoken to me with others and yet there is rarely an opportunity where it feels natural to talk about what God spoke in this last week. And sometimes when I do it has felt like I am just bragging or drawing attention to myself. “Look how great my relationship with God is! See how holy I am!” His response was, “Jenny, (he calls me Jenny) it's about Me, not about you. I want them to know about how I have been with you. Tell them about Me in your life.”

So I have decided to blog about some of the ways He speaks. (Not everything, of course, there is far too much and some things are too intimate and are meant to only be between lovers.) This way I am laying out a kind of buffet that one might peruse and pick what is nourishing to their soul rather than flinging food at whomever I happen to be with! So my prayer is that you will find something here that feeds you and stirs your appetite for Him.

Oh taste and see that the Lord is good!