Rebecca Brown Posts

Hearing God's Voice 8

2-16-16  LEARNING HOW TO HEAR GOD'S VOICE -- PART 8

God frequently will communicate with us through His word.  This is why it is so important to spend time every day reading and studying God's word.  As you sit down to have a quiet time, always start by asking the Lord to speak to you through His word.  Many times as you read, a particular verse will just jump out at you.  Suddenly you will just KNOW that God is speaking to you through that verse.  You don't have to jump around in the Bible for this to happen.  I do not do that.  I always read straight through a book, or through the New Testament or Old Testament.  I frequently read through some of the New Testament and the Old Testament during each quiet time.  I don't jump around, I read straight through.  God is able to use His word to speak to you no matter where you are reading in the Bible.  Sometimes, suddenly you will understand a particular passage of scripture that you had not understood before.  This will be the Holy Spirit teaching you directly.  I love it when the Lord communicates with me in this way.  I almost always read from the Psalms in addition to whatever else I am reading.  The Psalms are an incredibly rich source of "prayer scriptures."  Often the Lord will quicken a verse or section of a Psalm to me and direct me to pray it back to Him about a particular situation in my life.

Sometimes the Lord will communicate to us through an experience in the spiritual realm.  We Christians call these experiences visions or dreams.  A vision is an episode when we suddenly receive clear vision into the spirit realm, but occasionally we may confuse such an experience with a dream.  Experiences in the spirit realm are real, and must be dealt with as such.  Any threat from the demonic realm, for instance, must be immediately dealt with through Jesus Christ.  We must not just ignore it and assume it was a dream.  Experiences in the spirit realm are outside of time, because time does not exist in the spirit realm as it does in the physical realm.  In the spirit realm we may be taken back to the past or forward into the future as the apostle John was when he received the experience he wrote down in the book of Revelation.  We will be aware of the fact that what we are seeing and hearing is not from the physical realm.  Visions may occur while we are awake as well as when we are asleep.  When they occur during our sleep they will come to us as a memory after we wake up.  Many time experiences in the spirit realm come to us as a memory and we don't know exactly when they happened and were not consciously aware of these experiences at the time they happened whether we were awake or asleep.

Not ALL dreams are from the Lord, or have some deep meaning.  Don't get lead astray by thinking that you must find some significant meaning to all your dreams.  Most dreams are just that, crazy and mixed up.  They don't mean anything.  Tormenting nightmares come from demons.  (If you are being tormented by nightmares, you need to anoint and cleanse and seal your living quarters.  I have written how to do this in the booklet titled Protecting Your Fortress.  Sometimes you will need to take your case into God's court room to get the nightmares to stop.  I have written about this in the book Standing On The Rock.  Both books are available through our web site bookstore.)  Experiences in the spirit realm during our sleep are different from dreams in that they are vividly clear and logical.  We usually have a clear memory of an experience in the spirit realm.  We often do not have a clear memory of a dream, and dreams rarely make much sense.  Dreams from the Lord are much more clear and logical than normal dreams.  Sometimes we are clearly conscious and aware that we are in the midst of an experience in the spirit realm, but more often it will come to us as a memory.  We do NOT have experiences in the spirit realm whenever we want, we do NOT control what happens during these experiences, except in the case where we must rebuke a demon in the name of Jesus, and we are usually not aware of the passage of time in the physical realm during the experience.  Dreams from the Lord sometimes need interpretation, but experiences in the spirit realm are usually clearly understood at the time.  We do NOT have experiences in the spirit realm or dreams from the Lord regularly, or when we want them. Usually they are infrequent; some people have such experiences or dreams much more frequently than others.  BUT THE KEY IS, THEY ARE ALL ALWAYS UNDER THE CONTROL OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.

Some people have visions and dreams much more frequently than others.  If you do, be careful.  The more you have experiences in the spirit realm, the more Satan will petition the Lord for time to deceive you through such experiences.  Always be sure that you experience lines up with God's word before you accept it as being from the Lord.

Next time I will write about the things that hinder us from hearing from the Lord.  Rebecca.