Hi Friends, it’s been awhile. I hope you all are doing well! Today, I wanted to chat with you about how to discern the voice of God, because it’s soooo important to our Christian walk. Let’s hop right in.
My mom has several sisters and they are all close. They have the same parents. They were raised together. They talk to one another daily. So as you can imagine they have some similarities. Beyond their features, some of them have similar voices.
I’ll never forget when I was in law school and one of my aunts called me. She just wanted to let me know that she and my uncle were passing through my city. But as we chatted I noticed something I had never noticed before. She sounded like my mom. As she spoke, I could hear notes of my mother’s voice in hers. In a sense, it was kind of comforting and familiar.
Though that was a beautiful moment, the Holy Spirit revealed something to me through that memory. As believers, we must be able to differentiate the voices.
Do you know God’s voice?
Do you truly know God’s voice? Or are you easily deceived by voices that sound similar to His?
“The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.
When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice.
But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice.””
John 10:3-5 NIV
No matter who sounds like my mom, I know my mother’s voice because I’ve spent my whole life learning it. It’s the voice that raised me. It’s the voice I hear daily. Over time, I’ve learned the rhythms and inflections of her voice. I know her vocabulary. So I know the types of things she would say and the things she would not say. I can properly distinguish when one of my aunts call my name versus when my mom does.
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That’s the same way it should be with my relationship with God.
By now, I should know God. I should know His voice and be able to distinguish His voice from the voice of the enemy.
You see the enemy, he’s a master deceiver. He’s cunning and subtle. He’s spent time around God and he studies His ways so that he can deceive the believer. So this is what he does to have us fall into deception.
- He mimics the way God speaks to us.
- He twists the truth with lies.
How to Know When It’s Really God
But this is the way you and I discern the difference between Satan’s voice and God’s.
- We spend intentional time with God (Prayer, fasting, reading the Word, worship).
- We evaluate whether what we heard is something God would say by fact-checking with the Word.
- We lend our ear to the Holy Spirit, meaning we let Him know that He is welcome to speak to us.
- We evaluate whether what we heard feeds our flesh (i.e. it’s just something we want to hear) or it feeds our spirit.
- We discern whether what we heard leads us to Christ or towards sin.
For most of us, this takes time…so give yourself grace. I just want to encourage you to get into the practice of questioning and rightly dividing what you hear.
Author’s Note
If you made it this far, I want to say thank you for taking time out of your day to read this post. I pray it blessed you. I must admit the last several months (even years of my life) have been hectic. Seasons have changed and the time I once devoted to my blog have been shifted elsewhere. However, I have never forgotten about you and I am grateful that you are still on this journey with me.
I am blessed because so many of my friends contributed to my blog when I was studying for the Bar. As such, it’s been my honor and privilege to share my journey on their platforms. Today is the release of a FREE e-book called Begin: Personal Stories of Christian Creative Women curated by my friend Krystle Barrington. This is an e-book you do not want to miss.
So until I write you again…
Big hugs,
Ayanna