HEARING FROM GOD (Part 1)



HEARING FROM GOD (Part 1)

Dr. D. K. Olukoya

The first passage I want to read is the popular passage in the book of Job. 42.5, it says. "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear but now my eyes seeth thee". I have some questions for you.

THE ENCOUNTER

Do you have an encounter with the Lord? Could you really say that you have met the Lord? Everything starts from there. Have you had an unforgettable encounter with the Lord? The question I am asking is not how many churches you have been to so that you can open your mouth and say, well, I was born a Methodist, then I became an Anglican, from there I went to Elijah Apostolic church and then to Wesleyan Qua-Iboe, and so on and so forth. That is not the question. You could circulate yourself round all the churches and still not meet God. That is not the question. Have you had an unforgettable encounter with the Lord. I am not asking whether you are a Pastor or which important post you have held in the past or whether you are from a Christian home, that is not important. Can you honestly say to yourself like job said? May be you have been hearing of him before by the ear but now can you confirm that your eyes have seen the Lord? Have you met the Lord? If your answer is yes, how did you meet him? Was it when somebody was singing or preaching or praying? What date was it? Do you have the record in a diary at home? I am not asking for your birthday. A person could be 70 years old, if he got born again last year, he had spent 69 years serving the devil. So the 70 years birthday that he is celebrating is like, he is marking the day that he started committing sin. The day you got born-again, is your correct birthday. Every other thing is not relevant to the Lord because a thousand years in His sight is just like a passing night. Therefore that 70 years of God is only 1/100 of a second. So how did you meet him? Do you have a record? Can you really point to an instant in your life when you can say, "yes". I met the Lord. I knew when it happened to me and nothing can remove that meeting, from my memory or from my spirit. I knew the time I heard the voice of God. I knew the time, God took me to heaven; I knew what I saw there; I knew when I got born-again; I knew that my life was completely reversed: I knew that everything I was doing then, I couldn’t do again; I knew that my friends changed, Amen" So have you met the Lord? It is a very important question, because if you have met the Lord you will know the day it happened. The situation is very simple.

There is no way somebody can come across the Almighty God and something will not happen to him. If nothing happened to your life, then it is doubtful whether you have meet the Lord. It is like somebody may ask "have you received the baptism in the Holy Spirit? You now answer and say "yes, I received the baptism, by faith." No, it will manifest, everybody will see that something has happened to you, there is this testimony about a friend of mine who was preaching in one church. As he preached that day and took the first alter call, a woman dashed to the front crying. My friend begged the woman to keep quiet and told her that since she has come to Jesus, everything should be okay. But, she kept on crying bitterly. After sometime she said, please let me talk to the congregation, I have a restitution to make. "She took the microphone and said. "Do you all know me in this church?" The congregation said yes we know you madam, you are our treasurer. "She said, "well what I want to tell you is this for the past 5 years I have been stealing money home, every Sunday. Today, I met God. That is what happens, when you meet the Lord, your life will be reversed; you will undergo a complete overhaul; a new thing will

 

THE DAY YOU GOT BORN IS YOUR CORRECT BIRTHDAY

Begin to happen. When you meet God too, you will know your position as that woman did. The Bible says that the word of God is like a mirror. You could look at the mirror and find out that your powder was heavily applied on your forehead whereas in other places, there is no powder. You could decide to look at the mirror and say, "well I like the way my head is grey at the front," and you went away dancing. The fact remains that the mirror has shown you the correct situation. So when you meet God, you meet the greatest mirror, because He is a spiritual mirror who tells you what you are. You will see yourself very clearly and nobody needs to describe this to you. When Peter encountered Jesus, he had fished all night and caught nothing, just like many of us fished and caught nothing before we came to the Mountain of Fire, because we were fishing in the wrong waters or at the wrong time, or with the wrong net. Peter was there doing what he thought he knew how to do best. He didn’t know that in the book of God in heaven, what was written there for him was fisher of men. He was fishing on the day he met the Lord and had toiled all night and caught nothing. The Lord said, throw your net to the right. He said, Oga, I have been doing this business before you were born. Anyway, according to your word I will obey. So he did and when he had a big catch of fish, he exclaimed Ah, just depart from me, a sinner. He saw himself a sinner. When you meet the Lord, your argument will cease. All those who encountered God in the Scriptures had a permanent mark in their lives. Have you met the Lord: When you come to the Lord, stubborn spirits will leave; Something will happen. Isaiah saw God and he said "Woe is me". Ezekiel saw God and fell on his face. Daniel saw God, and said, "I was like a dead man. "Moses saw the appearance of the Lord. John, who wrote the book of revelation, saw the Lord, and fell down also like a dead man. When Paul too came across the Lord, the effect on him, never wore off.

He was blinded on the way to Damascus, and by the time his eyes were opened, he was a different Saul. Were you different when God touched you? The encounter is very important. Ask yourself can you say, I have encountered the Lord. You can encounter a church, but have you really met God?

 

THE SECOND HAND CHRISTIAN

Many churchgoers are second hand Christians and disciples. What does this mean? Those of you who are married know that you are married. If you are not sure, it means that you are not married. When you were going to get married to your wife, you didn’t send somebody to woo her or say "you just help me to be talking to her because I don’t want to see her." You will be a second hand husband if you did that. You talked to the woman and got to know her. How much more God? You will not be satisfied if someone is just telling you about her, you want to know her yourself, this is the way it is with the Lord. It is one thing to have someone tell you about the Lord, it is another thing for you to have a personal encounter with Him.

Majority of people who call themselves Christians are the second hand type of Christians because for you to have an effective power in your life, your contact with God must be a first hand matter and not second hand, Christianity is not a ritual of books services, ceremonies, processional and recessional hymns. We read about an interesting story in Acts 19:11," And God wrought special miracles by the hand of Paul: So that from his body were brought unto the sick handkerchiefs or aprons and the diseases departed from them, and the evil spirits went out of them. Then certain of the vagabond Jews, exorcists, took upon them to call over them which had evil spirits the name of the Lord Jesus, saying, we adjure you by Jesus whom Paul preacheth. And these were seven sons of one Sceva, a Jew, and chief of the priests which did so. And the evil spirit answered and said, Jesus I know, and Paul I know, but who are you? And the man in whom the evil spirit was, leaped on them and overcame them, and prevailed against them, so that they fled out of that they fled out of that house naked and wounded." The sons of Sceva were sons of a priest, but they only had a second hand knowledge about Christ so they were no match for the evil spirits. It is interesting to know that the demons even knew better than them.

So second hand Christians beloved are always overpowered by first hand evil. The impotence that we experience today is due to the fact that many Christians are second hand. For the name of Jesus to exert power it must be through a first hand knowledge of Him.

YOUR HEAD ON THE ROCK

You must have your own personal encounter with Him. How do you do that: For you to be a first hand disciple, your head must be on the rock. What does it mean for the head to be on the Rock? In Gen.28:10 "And Jacob went up from Beersheba and went towards Haran. And he alighted upon a certain place and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; so he took of the stones in that place, and put them for his pillows and laid down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven, and behold the angels of the Lord, ascending and descending on it. Look at verse 3-13 very interesting "And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father and the God of Isaac; the ground wherein thou lieth, to thee will I give it and to thy seed. God talked to Jacob there. So, what does it mean, that your head has to be on the rock: For you to be a First hand Christian, you must be able to hear from God. When you begin to hear from God you begin to grow. Every Christian can and should know how to hear the voice of God. If you do not hear from God, your spiritual life will be stunted; you won’t grow the way you should grow. If you are only going to rely on somebody always, to tell you what the Lord is saying, then it is very sad. When people come to me, with a long list of names, especially mothers because they are the worst offenders, and say excuse me sir, this my daughter wants to get married and there are about eight people here. Help me pray sir, so that I will know which one of these men is good." Whereas the Bible says that when God created everything in the beginning, everything was good. I therefore tell such women, "sorry I don’t do that, bring your daughter herself to the church, because it is not you who wants to marry, it is her and God should be able to talk to her on what she wants to do.

Marriage is not a five minutes contract, but an eternal one. It is not something you hand-over to another person to do and he just closes his eyes and does a guess work and finish. Is that how you get married? So, it is important to hear from God; if you don’t your spiritual life will be at low level. This is what makes educated and enlightened people servants of illiterates. Somebody who failed primary six is standing at the bar beach and shouting that he is hearing from God, after he had tried to make it as a mechanic and failed. He then sewed some white garments and stood at the bar beach vibrating and screaming that God is talking to him. You park your expensive Car by his side, in spite of all your overseas degrees expecting to hear God through this questionable character. Hearing from God, is not something for spiritual giants alone. Jesus said, "my sheep know my voice and a stranger they will not follow. "John 10:4-5 God wants us to experience daily communion with him. In fact it is abnormal for a Christian not to hear the voice of God because He is the Shepherd who will eventually blow the last trumpet. The good news of the new covenant is in Hebrews 8:11 "And they shall not teach every man his neighbor and every man his brother, saying know the Lord; for all shall know me from the least to the greatest. So, all of us have the capacity to know the Lord. You may ask, "how do I hear from God then, "God speaks to your spirit, not your brain. The greatest problem of people wanting to hear from God is sometime their brain. When you want to hear from God, sometimes your brain might have to be switched off. Some medical doctors in our midst, who first thought that science was the solution to everything, have changed now because they have seen strange things that are not in the medical books and a powerful hand reversing situations. But if the brain was going to function, it will say, "this is impossible, this is not what medical books say. "God will speak to your spirit and not your brain. When you come to God, forget your university education it is useless before Him because He created the university.

 

THE BUSY MARKET

The human mind is often like a busy market or sometimes like a radio turned on full blast and you have to deal with this one too. We hear from God from our inner-man deep inside. Naturally, there are many ways you can communicate with a person. You can speak to a person, you can use your hand to signal, you can nod at the person and you can make some facial expressions. These are all different kinds of ways of communication. God too can communicate with us in a variety of ways. So the most important need of every child of God is to hear clearly from God. The problem is not that God is not speaking but that we are dull of hearing. We are not hearing, but He is speaking. If you are hearing God occasionally, intermittently, once in two years or once in two weeks, it is not that God is not talking all along, the thing is that you are not hearing. God is a great Communicator. He says, "behold I stand at the door and knock, if any man hears my voice and then opens the door, I will come in and sup with him, Rev. 3:20. So the fact that you are not hearing from God does not mean that he is not speaking. Many people are spiritually deaf. However, God is under no obligation to speak to rebellious people. If you are a rebellious child, how do you expect Him to be talking to you? He says that my sheep hear my voice and not my goat.

If you are a sheep-Christian listening to the Lord you will hear him. If you are a goat-Christian the only time you listen to God is when He bashes your head against the wall or allows a serious problem to come your way. If you are not born again, you do not expect God to be talking to you like a child.

PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING:-

God does not speak to your brain,

He speaks to your spirit.

You have to deal with the human

And which is sometimes like a busy market.

God can communicate in a variety of ways.

The fact that you are not hearing from God does not mean

That He is not speaking. You may be missing what He is saying.

God is under no obligation to speak to rebellious children.

There are always three broadcasting stations or three voices speaking all the time.

The voice of man, your own very personality.

The voice of the devil trying to confuse and derail.

The voice of God.

Who you tune the radio of your spirit to will decide on the type of information you receive. You may vibrate your body while praying from night till daybreak and still be hearing from the devil. Something happened in a white garment church where I was invited to preach. After the message, somebody started to prophesy, vibrating seriously he said, "Thus says the Lord, open to the Book of Daniel 28, or so, and somebody said Prophet, the Book of Daniel is not up to 28 chapters" The Prophet then replied, no it is the Book of Daniel in heaven not the one you are carrying in your hand." I then exclaimed "Aha, trouble, which book again in heaven. "For your information, the book of Daniel has only 12 chapters, and he wanted to open to chapter 28. This means that the voice of the devil can quote the Bible or didn’t the devil tell Jesus, jump down, is it not written, that He shall give His angels charge over you. On their hands they shall bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone. "Three voices are always broadcasting.

 

RECOGNISING GOD’S VOICE

How do you recognize which one is God’s?

You must commit your life completely to the Lord. If you are half committed, then half of the time may be you will hear a little bit from the Lord and the other half from the devil or yourself. Complete commitment to the Lord is the only way. If you are not completely committed, then God will not be able to be talking to you like a friend. Do you know that God can hold up to one hour of conversation with you? This happens when you are completely committed. If it is God speaking it will cause you to love Him more. Anything contrary to what I have explained is not God’s voice. Matthew 7:13 says, Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. You shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit" Verse 20 says, wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them." The life of a prophet must match his words. When somebody is speaking from the Lord and his life does not match the message, so that what the Bible is saying is different from what you see, then something is wrong. For example, how can a child of God sit down in a place where he went to greet a pastor and as he was about to shake his hands, his juju dropped from his (pastor’s) pocket and he picked it up and said sorry and put it back in his pocket, yet you still knelt down and said, "pray for me" , Something is wrong somewhere.

 

WAYS GOD SPEAK

All believers must have at least one way that God talks to them regularly. This will make us now look at the ways God speaks.

THE SCRIPTURES

God’s Words is his will. It’s his Holy Spirit that inspired those who wrote the Scriptures. The reason why some people find it difficult to understand the Bible is because without the Holy Spirit bringing those words to life in your life it is more like reading a novel or story book. So by the help of the Holy Spirit, the Word of God will be able to bear fruit in your life. You are hearing the word now, you can read the Bible to see what God is saying. God himself will come and show you things and speak directly to you. So through his Word, (the Scriptures), God speaks. You may be reading the Bible and God brings certain things there to your spirit and you will know what to do after the Holy Spirit has interpreted them to you.

 

PEACE OF MIND

Through the peace of mind. One common way in which God speaks is by giving peace of mind to you, when you have prayed about a situation confronting you whether you should go ahead with your plan or not and you can’t find any peace in your spirit, the best thing is to hold on and not to go ahead at all. So in prayer, while seeking God for a direction, He will speak by His peace. When you pray and notice a sudden lack of peace in your spirit or a caution inside you or something is checking you deep down, God is saying to you, no, something is wrong somewhere. Sometimes when some people pray, they find that deep down their spirit they feel uncomfortable yet they still go ahead. Failure will definitely be the result. He has spoken, but you didn’t understand. That is why I say God speaks in a variety of ways. He can shout at a person and say stop! Or he can just wave you down. It is still the same thing depending on who you are and how close you are to the Lord.

 

JOY IN THE HEART

Through Joy. When you hear from God, the joy in your heart will confirm whether it is his will or not. For that joy to manifest you must first of all have what we call the joy of salvation; you must be saved. A believer who is saved and knows that he or she is saved will be a kind of Christian that will always be happy no matter what he is going through, because he knows that his name is written in the book of life.

 

DREAMS

Through Dreams. This is where we have many experts. Does God really speak through dreams? Yes He does and the Bible confirms this in Joel 2:28. "And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith the Lord, I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams and upon my servants and my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my spirit and they shall prophesy." So God speaks through dreams and there is nothing wrong if God speaks to a person through a dream. If you have read the book of Genesis, you will find that Joseph was a dreamer. That is Joseph Number on Joseph Number two father of Jesus, was also a dreamer. You can see that God gives dreams for several reasons. A dream can be an instruction or teaching. A dream can also be prophetic, that is, God speaks to you about something that is coming to happen to you in your life. A dream can be a warning as in Job 33:15-18. There, God uses the dream to warn men of impending dangers. There are many other examples in the Bible. However, if God does not speak to you at all, at least you sleep. It is a major disaster if all you do is to lie on your bed and sleep until the alarm clock sounds or the cockcrow’s or somebody shouts, then you wake up. If that is what is waking you up or the vendor, something is wrong somewhere. You should really go for a serious deliverance, because the devil has closed up one major avenue, by which God can talk to you. And you know in this our environment, the only quiet time is sometimes the night because all the sellers and the buyers have gone to bed. So if you lose that time, then you have a problem.

 

VISION

Through Vision: Ps 89:19 says "then thou speakest a vision unto thy Holy One and said I have laid help upon one that is mighty; I have exalted one, chosen out of the people". A vision is something you see in the spirit when you are sleeping. The Bible tells us about three kinds of vision that people can have. There is a vision we call OPEN VISION - that is, you are not sleeping, you don’t even close your eyes and yet you are seeing things. Suddenly you stop seeing what other people are seeing and you begin to see something else. There is an example of this in Acts 10, where Cornellius saw an angel who told him that his prayers and alms are accepted, but they will not save him and he should send for Peter. He saw an angel without sleeping, the angel moved in and talked to him. There is another one we call CLOSED VISION. May be when you are praying and you close your eyes you begin to see things. Sometimes the things you are seeing are just still, and not moving, and sometimes it is like you are watching a television programme over there in the spirit. That is seeing with the eyes of the spirit; you remain conscious of your surrounding but you are seeing a true-life programme with your eyes closed. That is what we call the closed vision. The third one is the TRANCE. At least for some seconds or minutes your physical senses are suspended and you begin to see things, just like Peter saw something being dropped from heaven and a voice said unto him, "arise, kill and eat. "He said, "no it is unclean, I don’t want to eat it. "This happened three times like that, after he had just finished praying. These are the three kinds of visions that we have. The Bible talks about dreams to the old and visions to the young. It is sad that these days, it is the reverse that we see.

 

STILL SMALL VOICE

God can speak to you through the still small voice as in 1 Kings 19:11, "And he said, go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. And, behold, the Lord pass by, and a great and strong wind rend the mountains, and break in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind; after the wind was an earth quake, but the Lord was not in the earth quake. And after the earth quake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire and after the fire a still small voice.

And it was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle, and went out and stood in the entrance of the cave, and behold there came a voice unto him, and said what doest thou here O Elijah? The still small voice is like you put on headphone, which is speaking directly in to your ears. God speaks to people like that. You will hear a still small voice, warning you or giving you instructions, like telling you to keep quiet or to sit down, or to take another direction.

 

AUDIBLE VOICE

God can also speak to you through an audible voice. The voice sounds distant to you and you may even feel that others around you are hearing, but no, just like the voice that spoke to Saul, He and his traveling companion heard the voice but saw no one; they didn’t know who was talking. You can hear God like that. It was the same way God wanted to start speaking to Samuel, when he called him. The Bible says, "But Samuel didn’t yet know the voice of the Lord’s so he ran back to his master, did you call? He said no. He came a second time, and Eli said okay it is the Lord, you just sit down and say speak Lord for thy servant heareth. And Samuel went back and God gave him a whole breakdown of what he was going to do in the land of Israel. The first time I heard the voice of the Lord audibly in my ears, I ran out of the room, checked the windows and the doors, but didn’t see anybody. It was around 1 a.m. so I ran back inside. The voice continued, I ran out again, I did this because in the church I was attending then nobody taught us anything about hearing from God. Then suddenly, the Spirit of God brought the case of Samuel to my mind, then I went back inside and stayed there while the voice continued, like mighty thunder. I pray that you begin to hear from God, and when you do, things will begin to change in your life.

 

ANGELS

Through His angels. You see, there are angels amongst us all the time. The reason most of us don’t recognize them is because the Colonial Masters gave us the idea that angels are white. Also our teachers in the primary schools told us, that angels have wings and so you are expecting to see somebody with wings to talk to you no, they are not like that. They are exactly like you , dressed exactly like you, and they talk to you even in your language, sometimes cracking jokes. Many people have been rescued from danger by angels like this, and they won’t know that it was the angel of the Lord that rescued them. There was this testimony of a sister who said that she went to buy clothes somewhere, and somebody slapped her. She didn’t know what was happening again until she found herself in a place where, they were killing human beings but the people couldn’t touch her. An angel of God rescued her from that place and dropped her near Moremi Hall, Unilag and disappeared. So, angels are around us all the time; they don’t look extraordinary. He may even be sitting close to you, that is why you must never insult anybody. You might just finish abusing him and he gives you a little punch, then you wonder what has happened to you. We have many examples like this in the Bible. Angels of the living God can go directly to a person, sometimes may be not directly during a discussion, and he will be the only one who is speaking sense to you there while others are talking rubbish. Sometimes when there is riot on the streets and people are helpless God can dispatch his angels to rescue his people. A brother said that he was going to church one day and was arrested at Yaba railway crossing people started shouting thief, "Before he could say Jesus is Lord, they had put tyre on his neck. He pleaded his innocence but they accused him still and the mob brought petrol and matches to lynch him. The brother was lamenting, "Is this how I am going to die, Lord help me. They shouted him down, and suddenly somebody turned up and said, "well, it won’t be nice if we take the law into our hands. May be we should take him to the police station. Does he have and identity card? The brother too doesn’t have one so they dragged him to the police station and immediately they entered there, the policeman at the counter knew this brother and that was what saved him. By the time he looked back to thank the person who saved him from the mob and brought him to the police station, He was gone, an angel of the living God. You see them but you cannot recognize them. I pray that God will open our eyes in Jesus name.

 

PRAYER POINTS

1. Lay your right hand on your head and pray aggressively, the following prayer points.

2. I command spiritual cataract to clear out of my spiritual eyes in the name of Jesus.

3. Everything blocking my ears from hearing from God, clear off in the name of Jesus.

4. Hindrances to Divine communication clear out of my life in the name of Jesus.

 

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