Hearing God: Faith and Heart Purity

 

"I guess if I could sum up what I am trying to say here, it is that hearing God isn’t mystical. It’s about faith.  It’s about purity of heart. As we seek Him, and trust Him, we can’t miss Him. He will make His voice known to us. The condition of our hearts is central to all of this. Idolaters will not be able to hear God, and the pure in heart will not hear an idol. It's really that simple."

Hearing God’s Voice: Some Thoughts from Scripture and Jesus's Life

 Hearing and proclaiming God’s word is the outflow of the fullness of the Holy Spirit. When they were filled with the Holy Spirit, tongues of fire rested on them and they proclaimed His word in many languages.  Andrew Murray said that Christ is God’s word, and the Holy Spirit is His voice. Tougues of Fire. God is a fire, and His spirit sets our mouths on fire proclaiming Christ!

Hearing God touches on many things, of course, but here are some solid truths I think:

1.      Hearing God begins with faith. Only those who believe that God is, and that He is the rewarder of those who diligently seek Him, will go to God for answers and "meditate in His temple."

“Anyone who wants to come to God must believe that there is a God and that he rewards those who sincerely look for Him.” Hebrews 11:6 NLT

“If you want to know what God wants you to do, ask him, and he will gladly tell you, for he is always ready to give a bountiful supply of wisdom to all who ask him; he will not resent it. But when you ask him, be sure that you really expect him to tell you, for a doubtful mind will be s unsettled as a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind; and every decision you then make will be uncertain, as you turn first this way, and then that…” James 1:5

2.      Our faith must be rooted in Christ’s sacrifice, not ours, or any other mechanism of action.

3.      Our hearts must be pure. We hear according to our idols. To the extent that I love something as much or more than God is the extent that I can (not) hear His voice. The Israelites didn’t hear the Lord’s voice because they didn’t want to; they followed the “evil imagination” of their hearts, aka, idols. 

The purer the heart (i.e., I will God’s will alone), the greater our ability to hear him. My heart is the lens through which I see/hear the Lord.  This means that the more that we come before the Lord, asking Him to search and cleanse us, the more we can hear His voice. Moses was the meekest man on earth, it says, so God spoke to his face. Meekness is nothing but humble submission to God. Moses had no other agenda, desire, or need but to heed God’s word-no matter the cost. If you can say, along with Jesus, your commandment is my life, you WILL hear him!

 The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. His secret is with those who fear Him, and He reveals His covenant (in Christ) to them! The OT false prophets were deceived by false dreams and visions because they loved something else; the people were deceived who listened to them because they did too. (Jer 23). We can do this as well.

 4.      Do not lean to your own understanding but hear the Lord and perceive.

 In scripture, we see that the religious “reasoned” through everything that the Word (Jesus) had to say/do, but Jesus perceived by the Holy Spirit, and "heard" the Father. 

"And immediately when Jesus perceived in his spirit that they so reasoned within themselves, he said unto them, Why reason ye these things in your hearts? 9Whether is it easier to say to the sick of the palsy, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and take up thy bed, and walk?" Mark 2:8

 Jesus perceived in his spirit which is “epiginosko” meaning to recognize, to perceive, to understand fully. The religious “reasoned” which is “dialogizomai” meaning to muse, debate, consider, think, cast in mind.

 Jesus ran everything through the ears of his spirit by having faith in his Father, while the religious leaned on their thoughts. This is a key aspect of hearing the Lord, and we see the two ways of knowing contrasted over and over again when Jesus interacts with the religious folk. He said that is why your judgment is so off! First, you don’t really seek God in faith, and second, you reason through things in your own fallen mind! Here is one truth that is always true about the religious spirit: it is never truly seeking God. Jesus said, you seek the praise of men, so how can you say you have faith in God?

5. Connected to #4, resist the seductive voice of doubt. Doubt is the devil’s native tongue.  I think of it as the leash that Satan uses to lead us wherever he wants us to go. If he can get us to think through a  doubting thought, he has us on his leash. God never leads us to the truth through doubt. Truth just is truth. If God wants to reveal truth, He may ask us a question that immediately reveals the truth, but Satan's doubting questions always create confusion, so if a question doesn't bring more clarity and illumination, it's not from God.

The doorway to reason always goes through the voice of doubt. It is very seductive and hard to resist. We wrongly feel that we must look at the doubt, and think through it to know the truth, but that's a lie. It takes faith not to entertain doubt. God can be trusted to make the truth clear without us thinking through it. Doubt only comes slithering up to us when we perceive the truth. “What if that isn’t right? Maybe you are deceived? What if I am mistaken?" But God doesn’t talk like that! God is clear, like a solid tone, YES, or NO, and anything less is evil and we will know it when our minds begin to toss and turn, this way and that.  God wants us to know what we know in our knower, and like children, to trust that He will reveal the truth when we are in error. We will always have error as long as we are in this body. But God is your counselor and your teacher; if you are wrong, He will show you. Let Him. You be the kid. We are the dumb lambs, but oh, such cherished dummies.

6.      The Love of The World Test:  In 1 John, we are told to test all words that claim to be from the Lord. One way that we test words from the Lord, according to 1 John, is to discern if the world loves it.

  II the world loves the word, it’s not from God.

“Dearly loved friends, don’t always believe everything you hear just because someone says it is a message from God: test it first to see if it really is. For there are many false teachers around..These men belong to this world, so quite naturally , they are concerned about worldly afairs and the world pays attention to them. But we are children of God; that is why only those who have walked and talked with God will listen to us. Others won’t. That is another way to know whether a message is really from God; for if it is, the world wont’ listen to it.” 1 Jn 4: 1 &5-6

Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world."

 Any word that comforts the flesh, any word that makes the flesh happy just is not from God because he is at war with the flesh and the world. God hates what the world loves. That verse from 1 John would expose so many false prophets.

Galatians says that the flesh lusts against what Holy Spirit desires, and the Holy Spirit’s desires lust against what the flesh desires. (Gal 5).  I love this because the more filled we are with the Holy Spirit, the more we will hate what the old man sin nature desires, for the Spirit of God killed that nature on the cross. But I digress….

7.      We can’t fear conflict. Jesus said that we must love Him more than any other person or thing. That means that we will accept His truth that comes as a sword to divide us from those who will not walk in the truth. That sword divided Jesus from Peter when he rebuked Jesus. Jesus said that His word brings a dividing sword, but that very same sword will unite us in the truth, if we will let it divide us from error.

 I am a marriage counselor, and when couples see things differently, tension rises in the room-that’s conflict. I see white, and you see blue. Tension. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s not evil, bad or wrong. Conflict is actually a good thing, because once you walk through the discomfort, your relationship grows stronger, even though it’s hard, and even scary.  As believers, we have to learn to embrace conflict to unite in the faith of the gospel. We are to grow up into the faith and expose false teachings that destroy people and water down the power of the gospel. If we fear conflict, like in a dysfunctional relationship, the fear will destroy us.

Flee True Strife! Hate Steak Dream:

Many are hearing the Lord warn of the coming hatred and betrayal that will increase as the day draws near. Our human hearts are so vulnerable to it when left unguarded through exposure to media and various mouthpieces that are serving “hate steak”. I had a dream in which a black van pulled up and flung open its doors and began serving “hate steak”.  (Food is a metaphor for words/teaching in the Bible.) The Lord was warning me to guard against the voices that are stirring dissention, conflict, and hatred in our nation.  Especially among politicians, that hate steak is being served up in every conversation, and will we think that we can take that fire into our bosom and not be burned? Words are spirit, and that spirit is evil. Notice how you start to feel anytime one of the pundits, from either side, starts talking.  It's accusation, slander, and strife. Our hearts are so very vulnerable, and I pray for the Lord to give us grace to watch over our hearts in this precarious time.

My Deliverance from 2020 Anger:

In 2021, I was angry. I had hatred in my heart because I was so disgusted with people believing in lockdowns and mRNA vaccines. From the start, I couldn’t talk about lockdowns without wanting to scream. Words failed me. That was the worlds stupidest and most destructive idea! I was ticked off.  I have learned to fight sin at the cross and not in my willpower, but I could not get the anger out of my heart.  One day I asked the Lord why I couldn’t win the battle by His power, and immediately He said, “You aren’t getting to the root of it.” When I asked Him what the root of it was, I heard this deep in my heart, “You think that you have a righteous cause. Deep down, you are on higher moral ground than others who believe in that stuff, so you are angry at them.” Then He said this, “All strife, contention, anger ,and murder are cloaked in a righteous sounding cause. But My Son didn’t serve a righteous cause, He served Me.” That ended it for me. I confessed my self-righteous anger and from that moment it was gone.

8.      Trust your discernment. You can trust your knower, where God gives us the peace, or stirs a sense that something isn’t quite right here. Again, Yes, or No. That’s the voice of truth. Trust what your spirit knows. Just like Jesus, you will fully understand the voice of truth in your spirit man, not in your brain. Trust it!!!

 9.      Probably most important of all, live in the truth. You cannot tell lies and discern the voice of God. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Truth. We are not to lie, ever. Let no lie live inside of you, and tell no lies. The more that we only listen, and move in truth, the more we will immediately discern a lie, or mistruth. It's like introducing black dye into a white can of paint…it’s quite obvious!

10. The more we obey what we hear, the more we will hear (Hebrews 3). I was just reading in 1 John this morning about how the more we please God by loving others, as Christ loved us, the more we will grow in His love. And Hebrews 3 tells us not to harden our hearts when He speaks to us so that we will enter into all of His promised rest in Christ. When we harden our hearts and disobey, we lose the ability to hear Him.

 What do you think? Nothing too new here, and it isn’t mystical at all.

 You know, all truth will be thematic through scripture. The Kingdom of God is based on heart purity and faith in the power of Christ; this is in direct opposition to the flesh.  The flesh and Satan live in the sense realm. Teaching on hearing God that roots you in your senses is not from God, I believe.  The senses appeal to our flesh because our flesh doesn’t like to live by faith. The flesh wants to see and feel in order to believe, but that is the road to error, like Eve looking at that delicious fruit.  Smith Wigglesworth once said that “My feelings mean nothing. The only thing that matters is what I KNOW.”

 Hearing God is about the condition of our hearts. The pure in heart will see (and hear) God. It’s the stubborn heart that wants what it wants that God has blinded the eyes, and stopped up the hearing, and hardened the heart. I guess if I could sum up what I am trying to say here, it is that hearing God isn’t mystical. It’s about faith.  It’s about purity of heart. As we seek Him, and trust Him, we can’t miss Him. He will make His voice known to us. The condition of our hearts is central to all of this. Idolaters will not hear God, and the pure in heart will not hear an idol. It's that simple. 

What do you think?

Let me know your thoughts. Or maybe I should ask what do you know from the Lord?! I'm not that interested in your thoughts-or mine.

Summary:

1. What do you really want? Confess idols and cleanse heart impurity.

2. Don't lie.

3. Believe on God's promised Holy Spirit in Christ. Go to God in the here and now.

4. Be immersed in the word with the Spirit teaching you.

5. Never entertain doubt. Listen to your knower where you perceive the truth.

6. Test all prophesy and teaching. If the word aligns with what the world and flesh loves, it's not from God.