Getting familiar with God’s voice
Bible Reading: 1 Samuel 3: 1-10
If you know the exact sound of God’s voice, then it will be easy for you to recognize it whenever you hear it. Do you agree?
When believers say God spoke to them, have you ever questioned further to know how it sounded when they heard him?
Some of the Christian movies I’ve watched have portrayed God’s voice to have a very loud, husky and croaking baritone sound. So you can imagine what came to my mind when someone told me God spoke to him/her. Besides, God had been speaking to me all the while but I always disregarded it because it never sounded like what I heard in the movies. However, my story changed when I read 1st Samuel Chapter 3, where the bible gave an account of how the Lord called Samuel three times and he thought it was Eli calling him.
I asked myself the question – if the voice Samuel heard was unusually strange like what I hear in the movies, would he have gone to Eli? I don’t think so because he went to Eli three times saying ‘thou calledst me’. He didn’t say ‘I heard a strange voice’. Could it be God speaking to me during those countless number of times that I’ve been saying “Something said to me?” What exactly do I mean when I say ‘something told me’? What is that thing?
I began to study my ‘heart messages’ i.e. what I was told by this “Something”. I observed the way it came. I wrote them down. I obeyed some of them and evaluated the final result in the case where it was an instruction. I compared these messages with God’s word before making a move. I made inquiry from many matured believers. I studied some books. I also observed the trend in the bible.
What did I get from all these? First, the emphasis is not on the sound of God’s voice but on the state of heart of the recipient of a message. What do I mean? Sometimes it is loud, other times it could be a still small voice. It could also appear to be that you are talking to yourself. But amidst all, there is usually a conviction in the heart. The second thing I learnt is … I am now getting familiar with how God often speaks to me.
– tope aladenusi
