How to Recognise the Voice of the Lord?

JohnClay said:

This is from my sisters' minister. He used to call himself a prophet. Anyway it goes for a bit over 2 minutes.

He says that God's voice is "quiet, calm, still, and small" based on 1 Kings 19:12:

"After the earthquake a fire came. But the Lord wasn’t in the fire. And after the fire there was only a gentle whisper."

What do you think? Could the voice of God that you hear sometimes not be "quiet, calm, still, or small"?

Click to expand...

Uh.................. just for the record, I don't actually "hear" the voice of the Lord in any sort of audible way. It's enough for me to just read the Bible and contemplate what God's Will is for my life without requiring that I get a super-duper, empirical proof of 'His Voice.'

At most, I might proffer the idea that if the Lord is leading us, we'll feel promptings to resist sin and respond to what Jesus says in the N.T.

That's interesting. No, I don't believe God speaks to us audibly today, but He does speak to us in other ways! Like through His Word, like PhiloVoid said.

Is like when you have a friend, you start to be more in contact with them, and you would recognize them better the more you know them.

Well, I have had that kind of experience myself. I thought I wasn't the type of person to experience this, as usually my experiences of God don't involve that kind of communication, but it did happen to me. And it was as the pastor says, more or less. Nothing grandiose, just immediate and personal. Quieter than a whisper, if that makes any sense. It was unexpected, maybe even shocking in a way.

I would be suspicious of any kind of experience that wasn't at least analogous to what the pastor described.

The Rev. Traci Lind described a similar experience she had at McDonald's years ago. She grew up in a mixed religious home (Jewish and Christian), and was never sure about religion until she went to seminary. Finally she started praying in seminary, asking for proof that God was real, and she heard a voice, at McDonalds of all places:



The Rev. Tracy has been diagnosed in recent years with fronto-temporal dementia, so maybe a good idea to keep her in our prayers, BTW. She's retired from active ministry now.

What's the whole chapter in Kings about? If God speaks in a "still small voice" then we not likely to hear unless we are quiet within. That can take a bit of time. But I think this is not the whole theology of hearing the Lord. Maybe God speaks to some people moreso from the Bible, it will depend on ones tradition were the emphasis is. In fact if we want to discern whether the voice we hear is the Lord's voice, then we'd need to be well spiritually grounded in Scripture. That's were I would begin.

I'd also suggest Leanne Payne's book Listening Prayer or maybe Dallas Willard's Hearing God (In Search of Guidance) because I think there is a lot more to it than that two minute clip suggests.