How to Hear From God
We know that the veil was rent from the top to the bottom and when it was rent, that opened up the Holy of Holies to us to be able to come in and be in God’s presence and to hear him speak to us.
I don’t know about you but I can’t live life, can’t run a church, can’t live life at all without hearing from God. Now, I’m going to tell you a little bit about my personal story about how I came to hear from God and I believe it will help you a lot. I believe it will help you a lot. By the way, if you’re looking at this on YouTube or Vimeo, you can get to our website by going to joystones.org. That’s joystones.org and we’d love to have you. We actually have 14 more videos that you can look at on all kinds of different subjects. Let’s get back to hearing from God.
Well, I had a problem. I couldn’t hear from God and it was very difficult for me to hear from God. Maybe the same thing, I tried. I tried to hear the still, small voice. Now, what was interesting is I did hear the audible voice of God in 1986. God spoke to me in an audible voice. I took the notes. I refer to them as the five pages but I want to tell you something. You don’t want to be one that you hear the audible voice of God because you know why I heard the audible voice of God? Because it was going to hold me for some very dark, difficult, hard, very, very perplexing and generally, times that you don’t want to go through.
It’s much better to hear him the way he talks. I’ve met a lot of people that have heard the audible voice and they’ve been through literal, very, very difficult problems. I went through them also. It’s been a difficult road and I needed that. But let’s talk about how to hear the voice of God for yourself and what did I get? Well, what I found out was that if I settled myself down, I discovered that I could actually hear, not senses but I would hear thoughts. Have you ever heard thoughts, pray for someone? They’re called kind of accidental intersecting thoughts. What it is, is that if you are driving down the road and you think of someone to pray for, is that Satan telling you to pray for? You haven’t thought of this person for a long time. Is that you telling him to pray, for yourself to tell? No. It’s God.
I discovered that God doesn’t speak like I thought he would. He speaks in spontaneous thoughts, and spontaneous thoughts are thoughts that come without me expecting them. What I was able to do then was, and I heard from some other people, that if I would go to Habakkuk and if you don’t have your Bible right now, just listen because Habakkuk said, “I will stand on my guard post.” This is Habakkuk 2:1. It’s in just before the New Testament. The first key is really going ahead and hearing what Habakkuk said, and he said that, let me get this here, “I will stand on my guard post and station myself on the rampart; and I will keep watch to see what He will speak to me. Then the Lord answered me,” further in the scripture. “The Lord answered me and said, ‘Record the vision.'”
Well, Habakkuk 2:1 really, really has a key. And the key is, is Habakkuk said … God spoke to Habakkuk and said, not Habakkuk said. God spoke to Habakkuk and said, “Go up to the rampart.” Well, I didn’t have a rampart. I just had an office. I went into my office and I said, “Okay, God, I’m here.” I then did something that Habakkuk said to do which was wait, and I waited. What I did when I waited is I waited patiently. Now, what I was waiting for was to hear the voice of God because Habakkuk said, remember Habakkuk said here that, “I will stand in my guard post and I will go to a quiet place.” Well, one of the things I found is that I cannot have a lot of noise. I cannot have a lot of noise. Now, I don’t know about you but my life is a little noisy. What I needed to do was go to a quiet place. That’s what God told Habakkuk: Go to the quiet place. And then be patient and wait for God to speak.
I went to the office. I got quiet and I listened. I’ll be darned if God didn’t say, “Frank, I love you.” And I thought, “I don’t love myself very much.” This is about 20 years ago. I hadn’t done all of the research and understanding that I have now, and so, I actually listened to this and I decided, since Habakkuk said write it down, I wrote it down. When I wrote it down, what ended up happening is I was able to ponder that. In the end, he kept saying some things and I wrote. Then, I decided, “Oh, my gosh. This sounds like God.” Well, I did that and I did it. And I did it over and over and over again, and what happened is, is I ended up in a situation where I ended up having a new revelation. The new revelation was so profound because I wrote what God was saying to me. Oh, my gosh, it was incredible.
Over the years, I’ve taught scores and scores of people how to hear from God. The best way to hear from God is do what Habakkuk was told to do: You go to a quiet place. You quiet your mind and you listen patiently. It will take some patience. When you listen patiently, then you will hear. Write down what you hear. You know, if you’re listening to this, what you want to do is get a piece of paper when you’re done with this. What I wanted you to do is I want you to do what I’m telling you to do and try it. I recently had a men’s Bible study and what I ended up doing is I have them try it and they did, and they heard from God. You will hear from God, and it’s profound. It will change your life. It will certainly change your life.
Now, here’s the key. One of the things that you’ve got to realize that I had to realize also was this: There’s only three different situations that your mind is going to hear. Number one is from God. Number two is from you, and number three is from Satan. Well, Satan and God don’t talk the same. Satan is the accuser of the brethren, and they don’t talk the same. What they do, however, is our mind and God could be similar but you know what happens? And this is incredible. I learned this from somebody who did a lot more study on hearing from God than I did. What I found out that he shared was when we write down what we’re hearing from God, guess what it does? It causes our brain to be engaged in such a way we can’t hear ourselves.
Now, I will say this. If you’re really, really driven and you’re not quiet and you try to listen to God before you get quiet, and your patient and you really get settled, you will hear yourself. That will happen. You will hear yourself and I’ve done that lots of times and I really suggest that that’s not a good idea. I also suggest that you simply grab a piece of paper and say, “God speak to me.” It’s real simple, say, “God speak to me,” and then just wait. When you have thoughts, write them down. Then, run them by somebody. Don’t make decisions or don’t be thinking that what you’re hearing is 100% accurate. None of us are that good. I’ve been doing this for 20, 23 years and I’m still not that good. I really, really want you to be cautious about that.
It’s really, really important to be able to have someone you can trust that’s mature spiritually that can go over what you’ve written down. It’s vitally important. It can protect you so you don’t run off. We’re human beings, and we sometimes are not beings. We’re doings. We’re human doings and we run off thinking that what we’ve heard is what we should do and really don’t do that, please. But you will hear from God and it will be a blessing.
Let me just review here what I did so this is what you can do. Number one thing is you want to make sure to know that one thought will lead to the next thought. However, if thoughts are progressive, if you are not settled completely, your mind here will move you, so you want to be really, really settled.
Secondly, you want to always compare what you’re hearing to the Bible. The Bible is our guide. It keeps us steady and we want to compare it to the Bible. We want to test and the way we test is we want to see, “Is this me or is this God?” He’ll say some things to you that will be sure, especially when you first start, you’ll be sure that it’ll be different. What we want to do is we want to check with people. Run it by somebody who’s more spiritually mature and recognize that this is something that’s going to take practice. It’s like anything in life. It is something that’s going to take practice. You need to practice this. You’re not going to get this overnight but be patient with yourself as God will be patient with you and please, please, try it.
Then, when you try it, recognize there’s much more to hearing from God. We have a lot more information. Come and give us your email after you’ve watched this video. Give us your email and we’re going to send you a lot more information. We have a lot of good information that would really, really help you. Please, give us your email and we will take care of the situation. We want you to hear more from God and we want God to be a friend and speak to you in a new and powerful way. Be blessed, hear from God.