Ears to Hear…

“That’s it?” Amanda exclaimed as she threw her pen down on her open Bible. “That’s all it takes after two years of trying to do this God thing?”

We tried not to laugh because she was so fired up. But her incredulous, wide-eyed dismay cracked us all up.

I shook my head and smiled. “That’s it, friend. That’s really all I did to begin to hear from God.”

I hear these questions a lot: How do you hear God talking to you? How do you know if it’s Him? What if it’s not? How can I be sure? What if I am wrong?

Here is the scoop. A few years back, I heard one of my all-time favorite teachers, John Dee, talk about hearing from God. He said that God is the God who knows the language that our heart speaks and He is quite good at conversing if we will listen and believe. John also said that we don’t sit around stirring up God thoughts and notions on our own. He went to so far as to chide us lovingly that there is not enough good in us apart from Jesus to ever throw anything heavenward.

John said every heaven thought came from heaven to us and was pointing us back to heaven. His premise was that the Holy Spirit was constantly talking to us; pointing us to Jesus; causing us to learn, desire and hear. In short, John said, “It takes the Spirit of God to stir the spirit of God in us.”

Let me say that again: It takes the SPIRIT of God to stir the spirit of God in us.

I had to sit on that for about a week. And it dawned on me that all the good and God thoughts, warm fuzzies about Jesus, gentle convictions, desire for Scripture, hunger for worship, awareness of His beauty in nature, equating my joy as I looked in my baby’s eyes with God’s joy as He looked at me, the delight of enjoying great chocolate, cool grass under bare feet, a long sigh in the summer rain…all those notions and experiences were generated by His Spirit trying to awaken the God spirit in me to move me back toward my Father in awe, adoration and praise.

Over time, I purposed a step further. I decided in my heart that if I had a God thought, I would trust it was from God, and believe it was for me. After all, I never question hearing from the devil. Do you? So why then would we be so skeptical about hearing from the One who made us and loves us?

I  found once I had the willingness to hear from God, He had a lot to say! A perfect example is one time at the beach, I asked God to reassure me that I was in fact hearing from Him, that I wasn’t losing my mind. And I heard, Look down. When I did, I saw several seashells perfectly shaped like an ear and I heard this Scripture in my heart:

He who has ears to hear, let him hear.