Hearing God Part 8 – The Complete Multimedia Experience

July 6, 2009 · Filed Under spiritual hearing 

From Alan Smith’s Blog

There’s a story I often tell when I’m teaching about how to hear God or about prophetic ministry. It’s about an experience I had early in my own journey as I’ve learned to recognize the voice of God.

In a midweek service at a church I previously attended, the pastor gave us an excellent and very basic teaching on prophetic ministry, then he split us up into groups to do an exercise together which involved asking God to speak to you about one person in the group and then sharing with that person what you felt you heard.

I was immediately drawn to a woman in the group. I knew her name but little else about her. As I focused my attention on her I immediately heard God’s voice. He said “Blue Couch”.

I was as confused as I’m sure you are.

I assured the Lord that there was no way I was going to tell her that unless he gave me a bit more to go along with it, preferably something that made sense. I felt him add “tell her I’m going to heal her.” So I shared the word. Turns out it really made a difference in her life. “Blue Couch” didn’t mean anything to me, but it spoke to a specific event in her past in a way I could never have predicted. It was pretty cool.

When you read above that I “heard God’s voice” and that “He said ‘Blue Couch’”, what did you picture? Do you picture sound waves hitting my ear drums, being converted into digital format and traveling via an auditory nerve to my brain? Do you think of exactly that experience in my brain, just bypassing the sound wave, ear drum, auditory nerve steps – as if I heard it audibly, but without external physical stimulus? Do you picture the words emerging in my mind? In my heart? Do they arrive all at once like a download or do they emerge consecutively like a ticker tape, first “Blue” followed by “Couch”? The answer is none of the above. In that instant, I actually “saw” a blue couch. The image of a blue couch appeared in my mind within my imagination.

What about the next part? “Tell her I want to heal her?” That didn’t come as a picture, but rather as a sentence. Not so much like an audible sound without the external physical stimulus, but more like a thought, an idea.

My point is this – don’t make assumptions about what exactly the experience of hearing God has to be like. God talks in images, in ideas, thoughts, words, nudges, impressions and all of the above. Sometimes he speaks in a very intuitive manner – things just “smell good” so to speak. God speaks through the internal multimedia faculties of your inward thoughts and imagination.

Next time you hear someone say they “heard” God speak, ask them to be more specific. See if you can get them to articulate exactly what is was like for them to “hear” God. I often find that people struggle because they have very narrow assumptions regarding what to expect and once those assumptions broaden, they discover they’ve been hearing God all along and just didn’t recognize his voice for what it was.

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply




*
To prove you're a person (not a spam script), type the security word shown in the picture.
Anti-spam image

    My Journey with God Image

    Receive blog updates by email

  • Recent Posts

  • Categories

  • Tag Cloud


  • Archives

  • Admin

Christianity Blogs - BlogCatalog Blog Directory