Revelation:
One of the reasons many Christians don’t believe that God speaks to them is that they don’t recognize his voice when they hear it and don’t understand the ways in which the Holy Spirit reveals God’s heart to us. Paul helps our understanding with the following passages.
The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man’s spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words. The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually discerned. (1 Cor. 2:10-14)
The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. (Rom. 8:16)
In 1 Corinthians 2, Paul reveals the process through which revelation comes to every follower of Jesus. Paul tells us that the Holy Spirit searches the mind of God and Christ, takes their thoughts or feelings relevant to us, and reveals those thoughts and feelings to our spirit. Our spirit, then, opens up those thoughts to our conscious mind so that we can perceive the mind and the heart of God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit). Because of that, we often hear the voice of God as a thought, an impression, a mental picture, a dream, or a vision that rises from our spirit into our consciousness.
Because this “download” from God’s Spirit to ours is experienced in the same way that we experience our own thoughts, we often dismiss a word of revelation from God as something we have intuitively known or discovered ourselves. Nearly every Christian has thought of someone spontaneously whom they had not thought of in days or weeks. But suddenly, out of the blue, they think of that person and sense that they should give him/her a call. When they do call, they discover that their friend or acquaintance was in desperate need of prayer or encouragement. Then, that Christian goes on his way thinking about what a lucky coincidence all of that was. What that person experienced was a revelation from God. It was a “word of knowledge” about that friend and a prompting to make the call. God just spoke to that believer through the Holy Spirit but it seemed like an intuitive thought.
Many believers have had premonitions or foreboding thoughts about an event, an accident, or a disaster that they cautiously avoided. They simply call it a premonition as if something had been floating around in the atmosphere and they had randomly sniffed a whiff of the future. What they actually experienced was a prophetic warning by the Holy Spirit.
Nearly all believers who study the word have had a moment when one scripture pointed to another and then another verse came to mind and suddenly a string of theological dots were connected that seemed like brilliant insight. What that person experienced was the Holy Spirit leading her into all truth and reminding her of things Jesus had said (Jn.14:26). God had just spoken truth to that individual through the Holy Spirit.
My point is that Christians who don’t believe in the miraculous gifts of the Spirit or God speaking to his people today, have nearly all operated in those gifts themselves and have heard from God on many occasions. They just call it something else because they have not been trained to expect the voice of God to come to them in a variety of ways.
The scriptures also tell us that God communicates with his people through dreams and visions. If we do not expect God to speak to us in those ways we will simply “write off” those dreams as something produced by our own minds and imagination.
If you, as a believer, have not been open to the voice of God coming to you, God has undoubtedly spoken to you or revealed himself to you on numerous occasions, but you simply did not know it was the Lord. As a young man, the prophet Samuel heard God’s voice clearly and strongly on several occasions but believed it was a human voice calling to Him. He finally asked Eli, his spiritual mentor, about the voice and Eli discerned that God Himself had been speaking to the boy. It was then that Samuel began to recognize the voice of God in his own life.
As we come to expect God’s voice, we will learn that it has qualities that set it apart from our own thoughts. Often there is a spontaneous quality when God speaks to us. We simply know that the thoughts we are experiencing are not thoughts that have come from our reservoir of experiences nor are they expressed in ways that are common to us. God speaks directly to us, not about us. Dreams from the Father tend to be vivid and unforgettable. Eventually, those who hear his voice on a regular basis will intuitively know it is God speaking to them as the Father, the Son or the Spirit.In addition to the inner voice of the Spirit, we may also hear from God in other ways as well – angelic visits, the audible voice of God, prophetic words, circumstances, dreams, etc. God desires to speak to his children in a myriad of ways and does so. .
Part of the joy of the Christian life is hearing personally from our heavenly Father in a variety of ways.I want to encourage you to begin to sense all the ways in a day that God has revealed himself to you and to begin to scan your own thoughts when you are in the Word or have been in prayer to sense the Father speaking to you. Invite him to speak. Then listen. Write down whatever you are hearing even though it will most likely feel like your own thoughts or imagination. Tomorrow, I will talk about discerning whether what you hear is from the Lord or another source.
