Wish you could learn how to hear from God, but your life feels too chaotic? In this post, Elizabeth Abbott of Quiet Grace Blog is sharing three tips to help you learn how to hear God’s voice when you can’t even hear yourself think.
Our lives are getting louder and louder.
More notifications binging and blaring on the phone. More noise-making toys. More ways to stream movies and music. More traffic, more sirens, more airplanes, more neighbor dogs barking at all hours of the day and night.
Then there’s the visual noise too—everything we see or watch is screaming out a message.
But how come the one voice we really want to hear, the most important one, seems silent through it all?
We need to learn how to hear God’s voice — but how?
First of all, I want to make one thing clear: You can learn how to hear God’s voice, just not usually audibly.
God speaks (for the most part) through His written Word. If we want to learn how to hear God’s voice, we have to start here.
It might sound boring and cliché, but think about it—because of sin and the curse, we have to struggle through this element of being separated from God.
Even so, He didn’t leave us without a way to hear from Him. Isn’t that awesome?
If you can’t be with someone physically and communicate with them verbally, written communication is the go-to.
God gave us 66 different manifestations of His voice in the 66 books of the Bible. They are all different styles and genres and touch on many different aspects of “life and godliness” (2 Peter 1:3). By putting them all together, we have a big picture of the kind of things God says.
When we read the Bible, it allows us to learn how to hear God’s voice through practice.
The more we know God’s voice, the more we will love it. And the more we learn to love His voice, imagine our joy when we finally hear it face-to-face for the first time!
It’s like how a baby learns to recognize its mother’s voice before it is born. Just like a newborn baby, when we step into the full and true Light of eternity, we will finally see the face that belongs to the voice we have come to recognize as it comforts us in the long, dark phase of waiting.
Once you learn how to hear God’s voice through His Word, you will hear the voice of the Holy Spirit in your mind, reminding you of what God has said (John 14:26) and furnishing weapons to fight back when lies speak louder than truth (2 Cor. 10:4-5; Eph. 6:16-18).
Anything that aligns with Scripture is speaking in the voice of God. We need to read it God’s Word, meditate on it, and memorize it.
Even though it’s possible to hear the voice of God through His Word, it can still be difficult.
Often, we struggle to find the time, concentration, or discipline to really focus on the Bible and on what God is saying.
You can only really learn how to hear God’s voice when you turn down the volume, make space for peace, and stop hearing without listening.
Here are three ways I have found how to hear God’s voice in the middle of a crazy life.
Related Reading: How to Stop Getting So Distracted During Prayer and Bible Study
1. Turn Down the Volume.
Like I said before, we live fast and loud lives. Sometimes, turning down the volume is as simple as literally putting the phone on “do not disturb” and finding a quiet and private place. For my mom, in the middle of raising four children, her place was the bathroom. And if that’s where it has to be, own it. Do it. Lock the door and have that time alone with God and His Word.
Finding this quiet time is often the very first step to learning how to hear God’s voice in the midst of a busy life.
Related Reading: Struggling to Read the Bible Consistently? Here are 7 Reasons Why
2. Make Space for Peace.
When we are busy flying from this activity to that, we barely have time to hear ourselves think. I’ve been there. Especially during my time at Bible college, I often found myself so caught up in what was happening that I barely even knew how I was. Even now, there are times when someone asks me how I am doing and I say, “I don’t know. I haven’t asked myself lately.”
Sometimes, when we finally get alone in a quiet place, our thoughts become so loud that we can’t hear God’s voice.
As an overthinker, I’ve had to find ways to quiet my own thoughts. One way is to simply write down the top few things on my mind when I sit down to read the Bible. They can have nothing to do with the Bible, but once I’ve written them down, they can be out of the way.
Another trick I’ve learned is to make other times my “thinking” times and to do things throughout the day that fill me with peace, like taking a shower, playing the piano, or singing along to inspirational music while I wash the dishes.
Just like turning down the noise, this step towards learning how to hear God’s voice can take some practice and discipline, but it’s worth it.
Related Reading: How to Make Time for God (Even If You Barely Have Time to Pee!)
3. Stop Hearing Without Listening.
We hear without listening all the time. We do it when there is music playing in the background, when commercials come on during a TV program, or when we think someone is talking to someone else.
It’s easy to let the voice of God be one of those things.
If you spend a lot of time in a Christian environment like I do, Bible verses and even sermons just become part of the background track to life.
God wants our full attention when we come to His Word. We have the entire Bible at our fingertips, full of the voice of God, but if we let it go in one ear and out the other, we have missed the whole point.
“Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves,” the apostle James tells us in his letter, “Do what it says!” (James 1:22).
Why do we want to learn how to hear God’s voice? Hopefully because we want to be changed by it. And if we truly want to be changed by it, we need to come ready to not only hear, but to listen and follow the truth that we find there.
Related Reading: Is God Speaking to You? Here’s How to Know
Do you struggle with learning how to hear God’s voice? Has God’s Word become background noise in your life? What is one step you can take to better learn how to hear God’s voice today?
