Earlier this week, the Holy Spirit woke me up at 4:45 and made sure that I was wide awake. When the Holy Spirit wakes you up, it could be analogous to your little child that wakes up beside you and is ready for the day to begin. They want you to wake up, smile and begin to interact with them. It is not easy to put them back down and tell them to go to sleep, and the Holy Spirit certainly won’t go to sleep on you!
So, I got out of bed and went to my prayer area in the house to see what God was wanting to speak to me. After I prayed the Lord’s prayer, I told God how much I loved Him and decided to then get completely silent. Oh, I also told Him that I wanted to hear from my spirit, not my flesh or my soul.
The bible says in 1 Corinthians 2:9 -11 that, “…no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived— the things God has prepared for those who love Him— these things are the things God has revealed to us by His Spirit. The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except for their own spirit within them? In the same way, no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.” (NKJV)
I have been on a recent journey of trying to go deeper with God. I want to hear God beyond what is on the surface of my mind and heart. I want to hear God with the very core of my spiritual being, just as Jesus did. Jesus only did that in which His Father instructed Him to do. Jesus heard God on a much deeper level than many of us are accustomed to; however, it is not a level that we can not access. Jesus assures us in His word that when He went to the Father, to be seated at His right hand, that His Father would send the Holy Spirit to us. And he assures us in His word that the Holy Spirit will teach us all things, as well as give us counsel and comfort.
Getting back to my prayer time, there were no external noises anywhere in our home at that time. The HVAC was also off, so it was complete silence at 5:00 a.m. The Holy Spirit asked me a question. He asked, “Do you hear all of those noises right now?” I answered, “Yes, I hear those noises, Lord.” He replied, “Those noises are all of the various frequencies running through your home right now. All of these frequencies are constantly passing through your home, and as long as you live in a large metropolitan area like this, you will hear all of those frequencies. They are the very frequencies that try to pull on you to distract you from hearing My voice each day. If you were high up in the mountains, you would not hear these frequencies and there would be much fewer distractions. If you were deep in the woods, you would not hear all of these frequencies that you hear right now.”
Basically, the Lord was teaching me that there is a myriad of frequencies that are passing by and through our minds each day. They range from various cell phone providers, television providers, radio stations, and a variety of others. I think you can get the picture. In order to go deeper with the Holy Spirit and for Him to show us great and mighty things that we do not know (Jeremiah 33:3), we must settle our spirit, soul, and body. We actually have the power to command our flesh (our carnal mind) to be quiet or go to the background of our lives, in a sense. It’s metaphorical. We have the power to command our soul to remain quiet and inactive as we pray. And we have the authority to command our spirit to come to the front of our being and be attentive. We can literally call our spirit to the forefront of our being and tell it to become active in listening for God’s instructions. In other words, you can tell God that you only want your spirit to communicate with His Spirit right now, so that you may get from Him what He is wanting to say to you. This is how you get tuned in to the right frequency, the frequency of God.
When you are trying to tune in to 94.9 on your radio station, you know that 94.8 and 94.7 are close, but they are not going to produce the results you want because you want to hear what is playing on 94.9. When you walk around with your smartphone trying to get in a better cellular range, you are positioning yourself in such a way to maximize your reception so that you can communicate with the other party. This is exactly how you learn to hear God speak. You learn to posture yourself and you learn to dial into the One frequency that you are desiring to communicate through. And it works! Jesus said, “the sheep know My voice” because He wants to assure you that God still speaks to you and me. The real question is, “Are you listening?” Like anything else in life, it does take practice. The more you do it, the better you get. God is the same, but your ability to tap into what God is saying grows. This happens through faith and action. Faith is the step that you take, and action is the process of exercising or practicing hearing from God. Hold the word practice loosely because we don’t technically practice. When we hear from God, it is always for real. It always counts!
The thing one must realize is that God really has some brilliant ideas for you. He has some brilliant instructions for you. He has some brilliant plans for you. Trust me, they are way better than your own plans. God gives people inventions through partnering with Him in prayer like this. God gives people entrepreneurial ideas and new businesses to start through partnering with Him in prayer like this. God gives people marriage advice supernaturally, and just about anything else that you can imagine. But remember this from reading the scripture above, you can’t even imagine some of the things that God has prepared to tell you or show you in prayer if you will listen to Him.
Most of the time, Christians simply do all of the talking. We treat God like He is just sitting up there in heaven and we throw all of our petitions up to Him. We are such a need-based culture. There’s nothing wrong with petitioning God, but there is so much more to our relationship with God than merely petitioning His every day. Just think if all your children ever did was ask you for things. Their only communication with you was to ask you to meet a need of theirs every time that one came up. Sooner or later, you would become frustrated with your child because of their lack of desire to have a conversation with you. You would be floored by the fact that your children did not want to ever ask you for any advice or wisdom. You would be frustrated at watching them fail repeatedly and avoid coming to you for any instruction on how to do better and have success. This is how we treat God when we relegate our prayer life to daily petitions.
That same morning, as I was listening to God speak to me, He was instructing me about who to pray for that day. But there was one particular name that stood out to me because I had not seen her or thought about her for 35 years! She was a friend from high school. She was never my girlfriend, nor did we have any kind of emotional ties. There was simply no reason for me to have my own carnal thoughts about this lady in my prayers. So, I prayed for her as the Lord instructed me, knowing that there was a specific need for this prayer. Later that evening, I decided to look her up on Facebook and see how she was doing. When I saw her profile, I noticed that she was married to a guy from the same high school that caused me much grief at that time. He bullied me and I backed down from him, and he did other things to my dad and our property that made me want to go back to that town and seek revenge on him one day. The problem with that thought is that I am not in the revenge business. I am in the forgiveness business. For a long time after high school, I really wanted to bad things to this guy, but I let that go after I got set free from bitterness and unforgiveness by the power of Jesus Christ, in 2001. So, I saw this girl with her husband who bullied me in high school, and I prayed for him too.
God’s thoughts are so much deeper than ours, and He wants us to listen to Him so that He can show us great and mighty things that we do not know. He wants us to pray about the things that He instructs us to pray for, in addition to our own petitions. He wants us to do things during the day or during the week that He has shown us in intimate conversation with Him because He knows better than we do what we should be doing with our time.
Last night, I used this method of prayer with a group of 10-2 people who were gathered with me for prayer. At the end of our prayer time, I asked if anyone had personal prayer needs that we needed to pray for. There were several, but one particular story I want to point out deals with a lady who is dealing with a very serious issue involving her young child. She loves her young child and she is a super mom, but something happened a few months ago that is threatening her own ability to be a single mom to her young child. I am being a little vague to protect the identity of this wonderful young lady. After we had all prayed, there was a teenage girl, around 14 years old, who told this young lady something quite profound. She said to her, “While we were praying, I saw that you were holding a precious gem (which would be her son) in your hand and someone was trying to steal this gem out of your hand. But Jesus was right there with you and He clenched his hand around yours to protect your gem from getting snatched out of your hand.” This teenage girl had no knowledge of what was going on in the situation; however, God did! The Holy Spirit spoke to this teenage girl to give that mom a message that He had her in His grasp and He was going to protect her and her son. That’s what I call hearing God speak!
In closing, I want to encourage you to meet God in the silence. We live in a world of chaos. Some people always have to have music playing. Some people always have to have a television on. Some people always have to have their smartphone right beside them. I am here to tell you that God wants you to go on a journey with Him through this life. He wants to speak to you. He wants communication with His children. He is a living God. In fact, He is the only living God. He is the great “I Am.” And because of this, He wants you to stop what you are doing and come to him. He tells you and me throughout the entire Bible that He desires us to “seek His face” and to “draw near to Him”. Silence is golden. I can’t wait for you to hear how much noise there really is in the silence, yet the Holy Spirit will allow you to tune in to Him so perfectly that He will show you how to go deeper with Him in your spirit.
