Great rest is available as we rest on the Word of God. When I work with people who are struggling to hear God’s voice, I encourage them to focus their attention on what God has already said. This helps prime their hearing to the frequency of God’s voice in their hearts.
There are many times where we can’t seem to hear Him or a seasons feels dark. During those times of uncertainty, I find myself looking to what the Scriptures say as a home base for balancing my sense of peace and sanity.
The Word of God Has Power
My kids have been learning the Scriptures and my wife and I have been using different ways to teach them the power found in God’s Word. During this process, I am astounded at how we can take something that is so life giving and powerful and reduce it to a dull book of stories.
God’s Word is spirit. It’s living. It discerns, cuts and conquers every counterfeit thought. It illuminates and provides direction when everything seems dark and cloudy. During our most turbulent storms, we need the authority of the Word of God to guide us into a place of rest.
If you can’t find rest in God’s voice, find what He’s already said to provide stability.
Applying a Strategy
If you’re looking for a new strategy, there are some simple things you can do.
Find a place to read and keep reading until something jumps out at you.
When helping people with depression and discouragement, I encourage them to read the Psalms from the beginning until something speaks to their heart. Then park there for a while and connect to what is being said.
For those with fear, anxiety or chronic worry, dive into 1 John 4 and meditate on what it means for perfect love to cast out your worries and anxious concerns.
Find a person in the Bible whose journey you relate to the most. Connect to their situation and learn from their journey. Find the promises that got them through and pay attention to the overall theme of God’s nature revealed in their life.
Reset the Powerless Rituals
If Bible reading has become mundane, boring or fruitless, then switch it up. Maybe you need to switch everything up. Create a new routine to give you fresh eyes.
For some people, their reading of the Word is so filled with religious condemnation, legalism and guilt, that every time they read it’s a punishing experience. Who would want to return to that?
For those people, I often suggest they take a break from reading the Bible for just a little while.
What Mark?! Are you crazy?
Why push someone to read who cannot hear the heart of the writer? If you cannot sense God’s heart, it can be so easy to take things out of context and to become condemned. God’s Word is never meant to beat you up into a pulp, but give you illumination and instruction for a life-breathing experience with God.
So you may need a reset. Then come back to the Word with fresh eyes. Ask God to give you new ears to hear and new eyes to see.
I Want the Truth
During a very challenging season of transformation, I wanted God’s truth more than I wanted to live comfortably. My pain, brokenness and struggle was so deep that I was humbled to search for more.
So I prayed one of the most dangerous prayers ever:
God, I want to be changed to a greater extent than I have ever been. I want to see monumental transformation in my life. So if your Word says it, I want to believe it, act on it and see it reproduced in my life. I choose to not be afraid of what your Word says, because even if you correct me, I know you will do it because you love me. If truth is there, illuminate my eyes to see it and my ears to hear it. My heart’s desire is to experience what I am reading in Your Word. So if it’s truth from You, I want to live it. Let me see it. Bring it on!
A Fresh Start
I am not sure I was ready for this prayer to be answered. The only way I can explain what happened is that a veil over my eyes came off. I read the Bible like it was my first time ever reading it. Passages I read hundreds of times with no connection came alive like never before. I began to see things I never saw before.
For years, I read the Word of God in ritualistic fashion with no power. It was like holding a nuclear weapon while yawning at the same time. I wasn’t connected to the power available to me!
Yet as I clung to what God said, I was able to hear His voice and experience more life. The end result was more rest and less garbage flowing through my life. I experienced a personal revival and never looked back.
For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do. Hebrews 4:12-13