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***This is follow-up post to Does God Still Speak Today?

In the first part of this conversation on hearing God’s voice, we saw how the Bible affirms that God speaks personally to people and that He still does so today. We also talked about how to discern whether it’s genuinely God’s voice speaking to you. Now let’s dive into the specific ways we see God speaking in the Bible so you can recognize when He’s speaking to you today.

6 Ways God Speaks to Us

Every Christian may or may not experience God speaking to you in all of these ways, but here are some ways Scripture says God speaks to people.

1) His Word

God speaks to us through the actual written content of His Word, the Bible. The Bible is the final authority for belief and practice for all areas of life. (2 Timothy 3:15-17) God speaking to us through the Word also means that He causes the Word to come alive in our hearts as we read it. (Hebrews 4:12)

As we read the Bible, God gives us insight and understanding into the Word, teaching us and helping us to understand what His Word says, what it means, and how to apply it to our lives. If you’ve ever had a moment of particular insight or had God cause something to stand out to you, impacting your heart as you read the Bible, you know this to be true.

The foundation of hearing God’s voice, and the absolute best way to learn to discern God speaking to you, is to fill yourself with the knowledge of God’s Word.

2)  Inner voice

This way of God speaking is best descried as an internal voice. We “hear” or sense phrases from God in our hearts or in our thoughts. (Acts 8:29; 9:11; 10:19; 13:2; 18:9; 20:23)

There’s a story in 1 Kings about the prophet Elijah. He was discouraged and venting to God. God visited Elijah with His presence and spoke to him in a gentle whisper, teaching us that God can put phrases in our hearts and thoughts as a means of speaking to us. (1 Kings 19:11-13)

3) Impressions or promptings from the Holy Spirit

Being prompted by the Holy Spirit isn’t some crazy compelling force where you lose control and just have to go do something. Not at all. It’s when God stirs our hearts or gives us a gentle nudge from His Spirit about something. (Acts 19:21 // (Acts 20:22)

You might feel compelled toward a certain ministry assignment or to share a word of encouragement with a friend at a specific time. You might feel an unsettledness in your spirit about a decision and discern that God is leading you not to move forward.

I experience God speaking to me this way in prayer a lot, impressing me to pray certain Bible verses or for certain people. Ideas of what topics to blog about will often come to me this way as well.

4) Other people / Prophecy

God can speak into our lives through other believers. In the book of 1 Corinthians, the apostle Paul teaches about supernatural spiritual gifts that God will stir up in His people so we can help each other and minister to one another. (1 Corinthians 12:1-11)

One of those gifts is called prophecy. With this gift, God puts a message on the heart of a Christian to share with another person and that prophetic word is a message from God to encourage, strengthen and comfort the person who hears it. (1 Corinthians 14:3)

Future-telling is one aspect of prophecy (Isaiah 42:9 // Acts 11:27-28) but it doesn’t have to express itself that way. Contrary to popular belief, prophecy is most often a timely message of encouragement, strength and comfort from God to another person delivered through a follower of Jesus.

Often God will use those words to touch on “secret thoughts” in people’s hearts and lives –things that only God and the person receiving a prophetic word would know, but the person sharing the prophetic word wouldn’t necessarily know to speak into. (1 Corinthians 14:25)

I’ve had that experience when a friend shared several things God had put on her heart for me. She addressed almost verbatim some things I had prayed and journaled to God the day before that she knew nothing about. I was so encouraged by God’s words to me through her.

Prophecy isn’t mainly about giving people life-altering direction, speaking correction or publicly calling out someone’s personal sin, or pronouncing judgment. There’s a place for those types of conversations and a right way to go about them. There’s even a place for God to share that type of information through the gift of prophecy in some instances, and again, a right way to go about evaluating and sharing those things, if at all. The Bible is clear, though: prophecy as it pertains to the vast majority of situations today and New Testament believers in Jesus is about speaking encouragement, strength and comfort.

The Bible also teaches that because prophetic words are subjective they should be tested. (1 Thessalonians 5:19-22 // 1 Corinthians 14:29) You can use the same principles we learned in Does God Still Speak Today to evaluate prophetic words you feel prompted to share with others or that others share with you.

One more thing to clarify: Getting a prophetic word or part of a prophetic word incorrect doesn’t make someone a false prophet. In both the Old and New Testaments, false prophets are people who intentionally fabricated messages from their own imaginations and claimed those words were from God so as to deceive and manipulate people or who denied the truth about Jesus. (Jeremiah 23 // 1 John 4:1-6)

Being a false prophet is way different from making a sincere mistake as we all grow in discerning God’s voice and speaking on His behalf to others. Deliver prophetic words with humility and love for others. Keep your main focus on sharing encouragement for people. Give them the space to seek God themselves so He can confirm or deny the word for them. If you and I do those things, whether receiving or giving a prophecy, we can learn and make mistakes without causing much damage.

You can read my blog series 7 Things Christians Misunderstand About Prophecy for more on this topic.

5) Dreams and Visions

Don’t check out. 😉 I know this one is a bit weird, but it’s all over the place in the Bible. (Joel 2:28-29; Daniel 2 ; Daniel 4; Matthew 1:18-25; Matthew 2:9-12; Acts 2:17-18; Acts 9:9-16; Acts 10:3-6; Acts 10:9-18; Acts 18:9; Acts 16:9-10)

Dreams are images you see in your mind while you’re sleeping. Visions are images you see in your mind while you’re awake.

A vision could happen either with your eyes open where you see images before your eyes as if you’re in the scene of what’s happening, or like a daydream where you see pictures in your mind’s eye. This is based on what I see in Scripture, personal experience, and hearing from the experience of other spiritually mature Christians in my life.

Dreams and visions are often symbolic (Daniel 2 // Acts 10), although there are instances in Scripture of them being pretty straight forward as well. (Matthew 1:18-24 // Matthew 2:13-15)

We also see that God gives interpretation of dreams and visions when we ask Him for it. The same God who gave the dream or vision is able to help us understand what He wants to communicate to us through it and what to do with that information. (Daniel 1:17)

6) Circumstances / Open and Closed Doors

God can direct us through circumstances in our lives, or through “opening or closing” opportunities. In Acts 16:6-10, the Bible doesn’t say exactly how or why God prevented Paul and Silas from preaching the Gospel in those cities at that particular time.

What we do see is that God intervened and kept them from moving forward with one course of action and then redirected them to another course of action via a vision. We can see from this story that sometimes God will speak to us and lead us through circumstances in our lives.

Not every open or closed opportunity or circumstance in life is God specifically trying to speak to you, but as you prayerfully seek God in the process, He can help you understand whether He is trying to communicate with you and how He is leading you.

Let’s Talk: Which way do you experience God speaking to you most often? In which way would you like to hear from God more? Discuss this post in the comments below. Discuss this post in the comments below.