You hear God talking to you every day. You feel it.
Perhaps you ignore it. Perhaps you deny it. Perhaps your feelings have been deafened by choice or lifestyle. Perhaps you don’t recognize it as such. But you do feel it.
Maybe you want to believe it’s really Him, but can’t quite imagine why God would be talking to you. But you feel it. And He is.
You are a child of God. We all are. We are part of something beautiful and so much bigger than each of us. We’re all of us. We are one. It’s who we are. You opened the lines of communication with God on the day you were born. You affirmed it on the day you chose to believe in Jesus: “…for Christ makes us acceptable to God, and now we may draw near to him.“(Hebrews 8:19, according to the Apostle Paul)
God is talking to you through the Holy Spirit. His voice originates in your heart. It’s that divine spark that can be found in all of us from birth; a divine spark that, with God’s grace and spiritual nurturing, will grow. The Apostle Paul wrote that God speaks to each of us directly: “…says the Lord, I will write my laws in their minds so that they will know what I want them to do without my even telling them, and these laws will be in there hearts so that they will want to obey them, and I will be their God and they shall be my people. And no one then will need to speak to his friend or neighbor or brother, saying ‘You, too, should know the Lord,’ because everyone, great and small, will know me already. And I will be merciful to them in their wrongdoings, and I will remember their sins no more.” (Hebrews 8:10-12)
If we listen with our hearts and have faith that we will hear Him, we will. “What is faith? It is the confident assurance that something we want is going to happen. It is the certainty that what we hope for is waiting for us, even though we cannot see it up ahead.” (Hebrews 10:1) Everyone has faith in something. When we drive a car, we have faith that the cars in oncoming traffic will stay on their side of the road. When the sun sets in the evening, we have faith that it will rise again in the morning. God asks that we also have faith in Him.
I believe that God asks also that we carry our faith a step further. I believe God invites us to communicate with Him directly — through our hearts — with Christ to guide us. But we must have faith in God to hear Him. When we listen to our hearts with doubt or skepticism, what we hear may be unrecognizable or unclear.
“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 as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind; and every decision you make will be uncertain, as you turn first this way and then that. If you don’t ask with faith, don’t expect the Lord to give you any solid answer.” (James 1:5-8)
Have faith in God. Have faith in Jesus. Have faith in yourself — and listen. That feeling inside you that whispers not to be afraid, that you are loved, and that distinguishes between right and wrong: That feeling is the voice of God.
Photo by goldnetz