n the Old Testament, God spoke to people through various means, the most common, and the most powerful, being the prophets. In the New Testament God still fulfils a large role in the prophet. The prophet still hears the voice of God and speaks it forth. How does a prophet hear from God? Are there specific ways that God speaks? Can a prophet develop a greater capacity to hear the voice of God?

In this lesson I want to deal with prophetic listening to the voice of God; how the prophet hears the voice of God, how God speaks and how it is possible for us to hear and to take heed and receive from Him, especially as the prophets of God, that we may speak forth His words into the earth. We first have to hear, and before we can hear we have to learn how to listen.

Seven Ways of Listening

I am going to look at seven ways that God speaks; seven ways that a person can hear; seven ways that the prophet can hear the voice of God and know what it is that God is saying, and receive instructions from the Holy Spirit. Seven is the number of perfection or completion. I did not plan it that way, but as I waited on the Lord He gave me seven different ways of hearing from Him. It is so vitally important that we learn to hear well.

1. The Spiritual Urim and Thummim

The first method that God used to speak in the Old Testament was the method called the Urim and the Thummim. In that first verse that we looked at it said that, "God did not answer Saul by Urim..." Urim was one of the ways that Saul tried to hear from God. The Scripture says that God did not answer him by Urim. So we need to understand what the Urim is, and we need to go back into the Old Testament and look at a few Scriptures.

These are very vague items and they are not very well described. The Scriptures do not tell us in absolute detail what they were, but the general consensus amongst those who have studied this, is that the Urim and the Thummim were two stones. These stones were either the stones that were embedded in the breastplate of the ephod worn by the priest, or they were two stones that were contained in a pouch that was on the side of the ephod where he could place his hand. Somehow these two stones would give a person direction from God. It was not the kind of direction that says, "What must I do? Where must I go?" but the kind of direction that says, "Should I do this or should I not do that?" And the answer would come either as a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’.

So when they used the Urim and the Thummim to obtain direction from God in those times, they would know which direction they were planning to go. What they would do is to present to the Lord a question. "Lord, shall I do this?" And God would answer back by Urim or Thummim, yes or no. It seems that if you had a Urim the answer was yes, and if you had a Thummim the answer was no.

How did the answer come? That depends on exactly what the Urim and Thummim were. One of the thoughts was, the Urim and Thummim being two stones in the breastplate, and when the person prayed, one of those stones would light up and glow. If it was the Urim that glowed, God was saying, "Yes," but if it was the Thummim that glowed, God was saying, "No." If neither of them glowed, God was saying, "None of your business. I am not talking to you." That is what happened to Saul. God would not answer him.

I want to show you a Scripture that indicates how David used it. In 1 Samuel 23:9 it says:

"When David knew Saul had secretly planned evil against him he said to Abiathar the priest, ‘Bring the ephod here.’ Then David said, ‘O Lord God of Israel, Your servant has certainly heard that Saul seeks to come to Keilah to destroy the city because of me. Will the man of Keilah deliver me up into his hand? Will Saul come down, as Your servant has heard? O Lord God of Israel, I beg of you, tell Your servant.’ And the Lord said, ‘He will come down.’ "

God answered him with a Urim. And so in the Old Testament there was this means of hearing from God, a means of receiving a yes or no answer from God.

You say, "Well we do not have that anymore in the New Testament. We do not have the priesthood, we do not have the priestly garments, we do not have the temple and all of those old things."

Yes, but all of those things have become spiritual in the New Covenant and we still have a Urim and a Thummim.

You might ask, "Where is it then?"

It is in your heart, in your soul, in your spirit. It is within you.

God has placed within you a spiritual Urim and Thummim. He has placed within you a sign, a revelation that will cause you to receive a yes answer or a no answer. You can come to God in prayer still with that kind of question. "Lord, must I do this?" And the answer will come up from within your spirit as a, 'yes, yes,' or a 'uh uh, no way.' You will sense it in your spirit. You will feel it. You will feel it as a surge which says, "Yes, it is good, do it." Or you will feel a check in your spirit. It is a gut feel, an inner thing. It is a very deep thing, and what is actually taking place is that God is speaking to you out of your spirit.

Receiving Out of Your Spirit

In a lot of the teaching that we have presented we have been sharing on the spirit and soul and body. God has made man so that He imparts things into his spirit, and God is speaking in your spirit all the time. The Spirit of God and your spirit are in communication. They are in touch all the time. In order for you to receive what God is saying to your spirit, that revelation, that word from God, has to be communicated outwards from your spirit. As it is communicated outwards it comes out via the soul and the body.

Effects in the Soul

So what comes out of your spirit has to rise up, and the first thing that it is going to be affected is your soul. We all know that the soul contains the mind, emotions and will. That means the influence from your spirit has to create an effect, an influence, on your mind, your emotions and your will. The Urim and the Thummim that I am speaking about causes this influence from the Spirit within you to affect your emotions. It is primarily a feeling.

Going by Feelings

You say, "Well, brother, we do not go by our feelings." Yes you do. You do all the time. Every decision you make in life you make by your feelings. In fact, most of the time you do what you feel like doing. Of course your feelings are involved. Of course your emotions are involved. But if you will learn to submit your soul to your spirit, and submit your emotions to your spirit, then your emotions will come under the influence and be affected by your spirit within.

When that happens and the influence of the spirit begins to rise up, it causes either a positive or a negative emotion, and that is your Urim and Thummim. A positive emotion that creates a surge, an excitement, a yes, is your Urim. An emotion that comes negative, fearful, check, care, concern, watch out for it, it is a Thummim. Your spirit is saying, "No, not a good idea, do not go that way." All you need to do is to submit to the spirit within and hear in your emotions. Some people call it ‘The Peace of God’. Some have called it ‘The Umpire of God’. It is an effect deep within you, a deep feeling in your spirit, in your soul. It goes deeper even than your emotions because it is coming down deep within your spirit and coming out from your innermost being out of your belly somewhere. It comes with this feeling from within.

Using the Urim in Prayer

Sometimes you feel the Urim and the Thummim when you are praying as a prophet. If someone gives you a request, "Please can you pray for so and so, they are sick, they need healing," and you open your mouth and you begin to pray and you say, "Father, in the Name of Jesus I ask you to reach out and..." but you feel like there is something in your mouth. It does not want to come out. You are stumbling over the words and you feel like you are chewing on cotton wool. Something inside of you says, "Uh oh, no, you are praying wrong." That is your Thummim. It is saying, "No, just hold it. You just wait, it is not time yet, you are praying wrong." Stop it right there!

At other times you think of a person and you begin to pray and you say, "Oh Father, I am just thinking about so and so. I pray that you will bless them..." and suddenly something bursts out and it starts to pour out of you. It is your Urim saying, "Go get ‘em! Yes pray, pour it out, send forth the Word into the earth. You are doing it right, you have it." Do you know what I am talking about? If you are a prophet you know what I am talking about. Your spiritual Urim and Thummim is the ability to hear from the spirit within whether you are flowing in the right direction or not.

Receiving in the Mind

We come then to the effects that are created from the spirit within that come to the mind. The problem with the mind is that it is being filled all the time by what you are doing, by the circumstances that you are in, by the environment and the surroundings and activities that you are involved in. All the time while you are conscious and awake your body is pushing input in. It is sending it inwards into the soul and into the spirit. Influences are coming from your five senses, your seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, feeling.

Those senses are picking up impulses in the world around you all the time while you are awake. Then the impulses are fed inwards from the body into the soul and they occupy your mind, so that it is filled with what you are see and hear. If you are sitting at the dinner table it is filled with what you smell and taste and feel. All of these things affect us all the time. But you will find that your mind is a one-way street. You cannot feed inwards and outwards at the same time. It just does not happen. It cannot work. It is a one-way flow. You have to change the direction, and the only way that you can do that is to stop the flow in one direction before the flow can take place in the other direction.

2. Dreams and Visions

There are two ways that you can stop that inward flow and encourage the outward flow from within your spirit, towards your soul and into your mind. You have to be either unconscious or asleep, so that your senses are no longer active. Failing that you have to still your senses, or place them into a condition of suspension so that you are ignoring them. Only then can the influences from deep within your spirit begin to pour out and come up into your mind.

This is all that dreams and visions are. Dreams are the influences that come up out of your spirit while you are asleep. While you are asleep your body is out of action and the senses are inactive. Therefore what is in your spirit can begin to pour out into your mind. So during dreamtime, your spirit is able to start communicating things outwardly. As it does this, it communicates information in the same way that it is fed inwards.

How is information fed inwards into the mind from outside? It can only be fed in from the body via the five senses - seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, touching. Those are the only elements that your mind can understand. It cannot think in anything else because those are the influences that come in. So if influences are going to come up out of your spirit into your soul and into your mind in order to flow outwards, they will be communicated in the same way. They have to be communicated in a form like the five senses.

Receiving Through Dreams

When you dream, what you have received from your spirit in your dreams has to come via the senses. In your dreams you see things, hear things, taste things, smell things, and touch things. All of those senses come out in your dreams. There is no other way that your spirit can communicate outwards through your mind except through the senses.

So as you dream, you need to identify in your dream what is being communicated to you via those five senses. What did you see in your dream? What did you hear? Did you taste something? Did you smell something? Did you feel something? All of these things come out and they are coming out to communicate a message to you. Your spirit cannot speak to your mind in words. Your spirit cannot speak outwards in an audible voice. It has to speak via the senses, and the most common sense is always the sense of sight. So most of your dreams are going to be taken up with pictures, things that you are going to see, and what comes up out of your spirit in dreams is going to take various forms.

Internal and External Dreams

There are two main forms that dreams take. Actually there are three, but only two of these can be used to identify a message from your spirit. The third one is of a slightly different kind. The first form is what I call the internal dream. In an internal dream everything that comes out is symbolic and generally refers to the dreamer alone. That means that everything that you see in your dream is not really as it appears to be. When that happens you need to understand what is being pictured.

Dream Symbolism

The Bible is full of symbols and life is full of symbols. We tend to remember and identify things in life by association. We associate certain objects with certain things in our life. In the Scriptures we also have objects that are used. For example the Holy Spirit is often typified by oil or by water. We have the picture of the lamb of God, speaking of His gentleness and His humility. We have a picture of the lion of the tribe of Judah, the strength and the power. There are a lot of symbols in the Scriptures. So when your spirit begins to communicate outwards to you through dreams, it communicates to you through pictures.

Here is where a lot of people miss it in their dreams. Your dreams will be filled very often with characters and places that you know in real life. After all these are the things that you have been feeding in during your life. These are the pictures that your mind has fed downwards into your soul. And now as your spirit begins to come out it looks for materials. What your spirit is doing is putting on a little play for you, so it looks for props, it looks for characters, and it looks for actors and actresses. It looks for everything that is needed in a play and it builds the stage, and the props, and it pulls out the stars that it is going to use. It decides who is going to play the leading role in this little play, and who is just going to play the extras.

Internal Dreams

All that takes place is this beautiful little play is put on for you, and most of the time you are the star of it. You are right in the middle of it. When you are the star and you participate in the play and take part in it, then usually it is an internal dream. That means that the dream is about you. It is not about somebody else, it is about you. Then the characters that you see in your dream are not actually the people that you see. They are simply characters that have been picked to symbolize an aspect of your life.

So your dream is your life. It is your life being portrayed in a play. You did not know you were a playwright did you? You did not know you could write plays, but your spirit is very good at it. Your spirit creates a beautiful little play that it puts on for you, and it brings all these characters out. And so, when you begin to look at your dream, if you are going to understand what it means as an internal dream, you need to realize that you need to look at the whole picture. You need to look at the stage. You need to look at the background. You need to look at the scene that is being portrayed. You need to sometimes look at the colors that are involved.

You need to look at the characters that are involved. Are they people close to you? Are they people distant to you? Are they total strangers that you have never seen before? What objects appear in your dream? Do you have vehicles appearing in your dream? Do you see the sun or the moon or the stars, or trees, objects that are a regular part of life? Each of these things is a symbol or picture of you, of your life, your ministry, your circumstances, and your spirit is trying to give you a message. Your spirit is trying to paint a picture for you to let you know what is going on in your life.

Internal dreams usually are not prophetic in nature. Internal dreams are not a prediction. They are not something that you need to share with the world. Internal dreams are not something you stand up in church and proclaim to everybody, "God gave me this dream and this is what the dream means." This is because the dream is not about the church, or about other people. The dream is about you.

So often people are confused here. They seem to assume that because they had a dream and it was a very clear one, and it was quite obvious that God was speaking to them in the dream, that this must be a prophetic dream. They assume that it is for the church, the body of Christ, or for Israel or somebody else. Then they begin to pour out an interpretation of that dream that is based on others, when all the time God is trying to do is gain their attention. He is trying to say something to them personally. The internal dream is when your spirit is trying to communicate that thing to you and is trying to give you a direction. It may be trying to give you a warning, a promise, an upliftment or a hope. Whatever the dream is trying to accomplish, it is for you, not for somebody else.

If you are going to be able to interpret that dream then you will to have to learn to interpret the symbols, remembering that the symbols in the dream are going to relate to you and you alone. There are a lot of symbols that tend to recur. In other words, many of the symbols in certain people might mean the same thing, but they do not necessarily mean the same thing to you. You need to assess your relationship with the character in your dream.

The Father Image

If you are dreaming about your father, then the character in your dream represents a part of you that typifies your relationship with your father. Do you have a good relationship with your father? Do you look to him and respect him? Is he your covering and protection and somebody that you admire? If so then your father could be a picture of the Lord in your dream or the Spirit of the Lord, but usually it is the Lord. If you have a bad relationship with your father, he could picture something very different, so I am not going to give you symbols here and say this is what it means in your dream. You must examine it yourself

Spouses

If you are dreaming about your spouse, it is going to depend on what kind of relationship you have with your spouse. If it is a good one, and if your spouse is a good influence in your life, and if there is a harmony and a closeness, your spouse could be a picture of your recreated spirit, or of the Holy Spirit. He is there to assist you, and to guide you and help you, to be with you along the way. If your spouse is trying to stop you serving the Lord, is blocking you, and is standing in the way of your spiritual progress all the time, it might be a picture of the flesh, an obstacle, something that gets in the way. You need to examine the pictures.

Family Members

If the characters in your dream are some of your personal family members like brothers and sisters, what it is that are going to be pictured, is going to depend on what kind of relationship you have with them. If you are dreaming of your own children then they are likely a picture of those things, which you have given birth to. They may be a picture of spiritual ministry, or they may be a picture of spiritual fruit in your life.

Whenever I have dreamed of my three daughters, the Lord showed me that they represented faith, hope and love, the triad of the spiritual forces that we have taught about. In dream after dream it was confirmed that that is exactly what they were; faith, hope and love. So if one of them appeared in my dream I knew what God was speaking about. If the faith one appeared, my dream was telling me about my faith, and depending on what that daughter did in the dream, it would tell me something about my faith.

First Love

Whenever I have dreamed about the first person I ever fell in love with, I have known that God was speaking about my first love, my relationship with Him. There are so many different characters that can come into your dream. You need to understand what they mean to you. You do not necessarily need to go and ask some prophet somewhere to interpret your dream for you, because he does not know about your life. He is not able, unless God gives him a word of wisdom or knowledge, to understand or to know what your dream is saying to you. It is an internal dream. It is a personal little play for you.

Vehicles and Movement

If in your dreams you are running away from monsters, and being chased and backed into a corner, it is a picture of conflict in your spiritual life. It is a picture of the condition that you are in right now. And if in your dream you are dreaming of vehicles, again it depends on what you see in vehicles and what they mean to you. Usually a vehicle is a picture of movement, of going forward. It is therefore often a picture of ministry, of involvement, of activity in life. So for me, when I see a vehicle, it is a picture of my ministry. Maybe it will be different for you. Usually you see the vehicle you like the most. My wife Daphne loves airplanes, so 99 times out of 100 she sees airplanes. She dreams about planes all the time, and when she dreams about them she knows that God is speaking to her about ministry. He is speaking about progress, about activity in the spiritual realm and doing things for the Lord.

Male and Female Characters

Your dreams can indicate to you that there is a negative influence in your life. If in your dreams a male or a female character appears that you seem to be familiar with, but cannot recognize or identify, it often speaks about the masculine or the feminine qualities in you. This is what the psychologists have called the animus and the anima. So the female character in you may refer to those feminine creative qualities, and the masculine character may refer to the logical thinking intellectual qualities. Your dream may be telling you that you are out of balance in one of them perhaps, or that you are being influenced too strongly by one of them, or maybe that you are ignoring it. Whatever it may be, your dream is trying to tell you something. It is trying to get a message across to you personally.

That is an internal dream, and everything is symbolic. Over a period of time if you would just analyze your dreams and start to interpret them in this way, you will begin to realize that over and over again certain symbols will occur in your dreams all the time. Eventually you will find that you can very easily identify what your spirit is trying to say to you from within, as it comes into your mind during dreamtime.

External Dreams

External dreams are those that are a little bit more prophetic. External dreams are when the characters in your dreams are the real characters that they represent. But here is the difficulty. It is sometimes difficult to know when you are having an internal dream or an external one. This causes problems, because in your dream you may dream that somebody died. Very often a person will wake up in fear because they dreamed that their spouse died and they say, "Oh, the Lord must be warning me that my husband is going to die or my wife is going to die." No, it could be that your dream is saying to you that the things that you are married to are going to die. The things that you have committed yourself to that are standing in the way of your spiritual progress are going to die, and God is going to take them out of your life. It might actually be a very good dream.

Sometimes you might have one of these nasty dreams where there is a dead body in a coffin and you keep pulling it out, or you keep digging up the grave. Have you ever had horrible dreams like that? They are vile. You wake up feeling unclean. Hey, your spirit is trying to say, "Leave the flesh in the grave. Stop digging it up. Stop going back to your sinful past." Every single dream has a symbol. But you see, when it comes to the external dream, the external indicates that you are actually dreaming about a certain person, but it may still be symbolic. There are still symbols all the way through.

Dark Sayings and Figurative Speech

There is what the Scripture calls dark sayings, figurative speech. God speaks in figurative speech all the time, but now the characters in your dream start to become real characters. Perhaps the places that you see in your dreams are real places. They are not symbolic any more. Now you have to start understanding and interpreting.

Differentiating Internal and External Dreams

How do you tell the difference between an internal and an external dream? The first thing to look at is, whether you are the star of this play or whether you are watching it from without? Are you watching it as though you are looking at it on TV, as though you are standing as a bystander, not actually involved in it, but looking at it? Usually that is an indication that your dream is external, but not always. If you are not actively involved in the dream or one of the key players, then it could be that your dream is starting to move more into the external. Then you are likely looking at something that is a little bit more prophetic. The characters in your dream are possibly the real characters that they depict.

Perhaps what the characters do in your dream could be God revealing to you things about that person. Or it could be God revealing to you things that have to do with your relationship with that person. But you will know as you practise, as you begin to get experience, you find that the external dream is actually a vision given during sleep. It is what the Scripture calls a night vision. It is basically the same as a vision, which we will come to shortly. It is a vision given while you are asleep.

You must remember though, that 90 percent of the dreams of most people are not external dreams. They are internal dreams. Everybody dreams, but when you start to move more into the prophetic realm, only then do you start receiving night visions. Only then do you start to receive external dreams, where your dream has an external emphasis and meaning. And sometimes, just sometimes, it is possible that your dream can be both internal and external.

Dreams That are External and Internal

If you look at some of the interpretations that Daniel gave to the king concerning the dreams that he had, they could have been given two interpretations. The first time he interpreted the king's dream he interpreted it as external, but actually it had an internal meaning as well. When the king saw this great big image where a stone came and shattered it and it broke and went away, it was God already warning King Nebuchadnezzar that He was going to break him down and humble him and deal with him. Daniel did not have the courage, perhaps, to tell the king the real meaning, so he gave him an external meaning. The external meaning was that each part of the image, the head and the breastplate, etc., were all different kingdoms that would go down. It had a prophetic orientation pointing towards the future.

Later on the king has another dream where an angel comes down from heaven and cuts down the tree and puts a band around it to keep the tree. And the voice speaks about this person with dew over his head for seven years, etc., and Daniel now gives the interpretation.

"The tree is you, O King. God is going to cut you down. You are going to be driven from men, and you are going to eat grass like oxen for seven years, but your kingdom will be held for you. And when you rise up and look to the Lord you will be brought back and you will be restored to your throne."

You see, it becomes more of a personal internal dream that God is speaking to the person now. In this case it is an internal prophetic dream. So when you come to interpreting dreams you need to learn how to distinguish the two, otherwise you could be led astray.

Healing and Purging Dreams

Finally there is another kind of dream, which is neither internal nor external. It is not prophetic, it is not a message, it is not a one act play. It is a load of garbage. You think maybe it was caused by what you had for dinner before you went to bed. You dream absolute rubbish. You dream things that a Christian should not dream. You feel unclean in the morning when you wake up. You think, "Satan must have attacked me during the night." That is possible, it does happen. But I am speaking about a different kind of dream here.

Sometimes in your dream you feel pain and emotion and joy. Sometimes dream you are fighting somebody. Perhaps you are not the kind of a person who fights much. You are a bit of a pacifist. You are not one to hit back and attack people. But in your dream you are fighting and you are punching this guy’s nose in. You are giving him a black eye. You are knocking his teeth out!

In your dreams you may be suffering severe temptation and giving in to lust. I want to tell you what is happening. All that is happening is all the garbage that you have picked up in your travels and experiences in the world are simply being purged out. You see, everything that you receive while you are awake that is fed inwards via the five senses, is fed inwards to a storage area. It is sitting deep within and your heart is taking that storage of information in order to regulate your life. But when you have the Spirit of God within you, the Spirit of God begins to purge out.

As you begin to fill yourself with the Word then I can tell you, the more you delve into the Word, and the more you meditate on it, and the more time you have spent filling yourself with the Word, the worse your dreams are going to become. You are going to be confused. You are going to say, "I do not understand this. I have just been meditating on the Scripture. I have been praying in the Spirit and speaking in tongues. I have been filling myself with the Lord and spending time in His presence, and yet I have been having the vilest of dreams you can imagine. It must be Satan attacking me." No, it is not.

What is actually happening is that the Word is starting to go into your heart, and when the Word goes into your heart it has to make space. It has to start throwing the junk out so it has space to get in. It is like the bottom of a lake. If you go and look at the bottom of a lake that has been standing still for a while you may see that the water is crystal clear and beautiful. When you look down to the bottom of the lake, everything looks fine. All the junk and the garbage that have been thrown in that lake over a period of time have been covered over with a fine layer of sand. As you look at the bottom of the lake it looks smooth, it looks great, it looks fine.

Now go to the edge of a lake where the water is shallow and take yourself a stick, and put it in and start to churn around and mix the bottom of the lake, and see what comes out. The filth that is lying down there is churned up. The sea does this all the time. We often take a walk down the beach because we live by the sea, and we see all the flotsam and jetsam and garbage that has been thrown out by the sea because it is moving all the time.

When you have a healing dream all that is happening is your spirit is churning things up a bit and saying, "Okay now, make way for the Word. Make way for the new stuff that has just come in. What are we going to throw out here? We can throw out this old tin can, throw out this piece of log. We’ll throw out this piece of junk that’s been rotting there for a while. Let’s throw it out, we do not need it." So where is it going to throw it out to? It is going to throw it into your mind. And out it comes as garbage, and horrible dreams. But they are actually healing dreams.

Perhaps you have had dreams of events that took place a long time ago in your life. You might in your dreams begin to relive experiences, painful hurtful experiences. All that is happening is your spirit is purging out all those bad events of the past in order that the Word can come back in its place and it can be filled with something good.

So you need to learn to discern what is coming from your dreams. Learn to detect what is being spoken out. Learn to hear the pure voice of God when it comes up. Is it giving you instruction or warning, or is it giving you a prophetic word that is for somebody else? According to what your dreams reveal, you are given a course of action to take.

Visions

What are visions? I used to often ask the Lord for visions. "Oh Lord, I want a vision. Oh Lord, please give me a vision." I would read in the Bible how Peter went into a trance and he saw things. Paul had visions and all the great guys had visions. You hear evangelists and the big preachers standing up and saying, "I had a vision of the Lord, and in my vision I saw this and that, and this and the other thing."

So I used to say, "Oh, Lord, I wish I could have a vision."

People close to me began to say, "I had this vision from the Lord." My Dad began to have visions, powerful visions.

"Oh Lord, why can you not give it to me? Why do I not have visions, Lord?"

Then one day the Lord showed me that I had been seeing visions for a long time, but I did not know that visions do not always take the same form. What is a vision? A vision is simply, as I said earlier, an influence coming up out of your spirit and coming into your mind. The difference is it takes place while you are awake. It is really just a dream while you are awake depending on whether that vision really is a play like a dream. And if it is a play like a dream, then it will come to you just like a dream, except while you are awake.

Trance Visions

Now sometimes in order for that to take place, your natural senses have to be put into a state of suspension. That is what the Scripture refers to as falling into a trance, or a trance vision. A trance vision is simply an influence that is so strong on you, that your natural senses are suspended so that you do not see or hear anything that is going on about you. You are taken up with the vision just like you would be with a dream.

Most people do not have trance visions. If you are a prophet and you have not had a trance vision do not worry about it. Do not say, "Well I must be a second-rate prophet then because everybody else has trance visions and I do not." No, it could be that you are able to hear from your spirit without having your senses knocked out.

I have heard folks say, "Well I went forward for prayer and everybody was knocked out under the power except me."

Have you ever wondered why people fall under the power? I love the description that was given by the first evangelist that I ever saw manifesting that in his ministry, and it happened while I was still a youngster years ago. He was an American evangelist that came traveling around years ago, a healing evangelist, and when he prayed for people they would fall under the power.

He said, "I do not know why this happens. It just started to happen in my ministry." This was long before the days when it began to happen everywhere. He said, "I can only come to one conclusion. When you go to the doctor and he operates on you he puts you under anesthetic first before he can operate." He said, "I can only conclude that this is God's anesthetic. God has to put people under anesthetic so that He can operate on them. So if I pray for you and you go down don’t worry about it, you are just under anesthetic. When God is finished operating on you, you will come round. You will be fine."

I loved that explanation. I still do love it. I think it is brilliant. I think if you have to fall under the power there is something that has to be knocked out. Some people do not need anesthetic. I remember going to the dentist and he would use psychology on me. He would say, "You are a big boy, aren't you? You don’t need an injection!" Not that I could argue with him. Oh, I used to hate the dentist, because he did not give me an anesthetic and I would feel all the pain.

Well, maybe you do not need an anesthetic. Maybe you are open enough to the Spirit of God that He can speak to you without having to knock your senses out. Maybe you are able to hear from within your spirit. Maybe you have the kind of control where you can close your eyes and shut out your vision, where you can shut out your ears. Hey, if you have a lot of kids, you should have learned how to do that by now. It is easy! You just pretend you do not hear them when they make a noise.

But you see, not everybody has to go into a trance vision in order to receive such a strong influence in their spirits. And not all visions are active little plays. Visions can be stills as well. They can be slides. They are not always movies. You can receive a vision that is simply a picture that is printed on your mind, and it may be an active picture, but it may just be a still picture. It is still a vision. It is still an influence that has come up from within your spirit.

Every one of us, not just the prophets, has the capability of receiving those pictures. If you will just close your eyes and calm your thoughts and worship the Lord, and let your mind go freely, you will be amazed at the stuff that comes up into your mind. Some people experience that as they are going to sleep at night. It is like they have started dreaming before they have fallen asleep. Have you ever had that? Have you ever started dreaming before you fell asleep? Your mind goes mad, it goes wild, and all these pictures start to roll through it. Where do you suppose that is coming from? It is coming from the same place your dreams come from. It is coming up from within you.

A lot of the time what comes up are pictures, symbols, sometimes spiritual symbols, sometimes even revelation from the Lord, and you may not even realize it. You probably thought, "I wish I could get a hold of my mind. Man, you should see some of the things I am seeing. I have never thought of things like this before. Where is this coming from?" It is coming from inside you. Stop and listen. Say, "Hold it. What is going on here?" You might have been seeing visions and did not even know it. You would be amazed at the pictures that come up out of your mind.

Try it sometime. Sit down with a pen and paper, and let your mind just tick over and let it go. Then write down every picture, every symbol, every vision, every thought, everything that comes up into your mind. Write it down, and you will be amazed to find as you look through them how many of them actually have spiritual significance and could be interpreted just like your dreams. It could be God speaking to you internally.

As you learn to develop this, recognize it, still your mind and your thoughts, and shut out what is going on round about you, you will learn to perceive the pictures that come up from within. Then you will learn to do it while you are praying with people. You will learn to do it while you are praying for somebody in intercession. You will learn to develop this capacity to where eventually your inner vision becomes so clear and distinct that it is as clear as if you were having a dream.

For many folks the visions that they see are so clear and distinct, that it appears that they have gone into a trance vision, but actually they have not. They are simply able to shut out the external influences and draw into themselves. And often those who experience this tend to be people who are more introverted. They are not outwardly expressive. They tend to be very much loners and draw into themselves. They tend to live in their thoughts and live in a daydream world a lot. They have developed this capacity of living in a fantasy world.

People like that very often have a greater capacity to receive vision and to shut out what is going on round about them. We tend to reprove a person like that by saying, "Come on down out of the clouds!"

I remember my folks saying to me, "You are too heavenly minded to be of any earthly good. Just get down and come here! Come and join us." But they did not know what God was preparing me for. He was teaching me to ‘switch off.’

Sometimes people misunderstand me when I switch off. They say, "You are ignoring me."

And I say, "No I am not, I am just ignoring you!"

I am shutting out, shutting in, coming to the place where I am listening to what is going on in my heart, what is going on in my spirit. Sometimes you need to be alone somewhere to do that. Learn to shut it out, learn to listen, learn to look and see the visions that come up out of your heart.

Open Visions

There is one other kind of vision and this vision is even more powerful in a sense, in that it is imprinted over the natural senses. It is what the bible calls open vision. Open vision is when you can look at your surroundings, and you see something else superimposed on your surroundings. Many of those who have seen a vision of the Lord Himself have seen that kind of vision, to the extent that they have actually seen the Lord sitting in a chair next to them. They have seen the Lord standing in the corner. They have seen everything round about them and superimposed on top of that is the character, or whatever it is that your vision is revealing.

That is the open vision. It can happen. It depends on the individual. It depends on how sensitive you are. It depends on how you can shut out your senses, and whether God has to knock you out or not. You are able to receive that influence in your mind in dreams and visions.

3. Prophetic Utterances

The third way of hearing from God is through prophetic utterances and tongues. You have within you a wellspring of wisdom. You have the Word that has been stored within you. You have the Spirit of God that is within you. In fact you have everything. The Scripture speaks about us having within us a spring of life. Jesus spoke about that well springing up and pouring out of us. He said, "Out of your innermost being will flow rivers of living water."

We need to tap into that inner wisdom. So what we have to do is create a link, a channel, for the flow to begin to take place and flow outwards. One of the ways of doing it is through the faculty of speech. We have seen that the Spirit can communicate outwards via the soul. As it communicates outwards via the emotions we have our Urim and Thummim. As it communicates outwards via the mind we have dreams and visions. How does it communicate outwards via the will? It communicates through speech. The speech center is linked directly to the spirit, and when you open your mouth by an act of your will to speak forth, then you speak forth what comes up out of your spirit.

Have you ever noticed that as you speak and pour forth in speech, sometimes just talking about anything and everything, something just slips out that you did not expect. It just pops out, and you say, "I wonder what made me say that?" Psychologists call it a Freudian slip. Something just popped out while you were not thinking about it. Now often that happens when you are counseling somebody. I am going to be dealing with that a little more shortly as we look at some other methods of hearing from God, but speech is a means of pouring forth what is from within you.

Other Tongues

So God has given us the means of tapping into the wisdom within using speech, both speech in the natural tongue and speech in other tongues. As you pray in tongues, what actually happens is you begin to tap the resources that are within your spirit. So the Scripture says, "He that speaks in an unknown tongue edifies (or builds up) himself." How does that happen?

Have you ever noticed that when you pray in tongues for a while something begins to take place? When you get down to pray and you open your mouth and start to speak in tongues, your emotions may be completely dead. Your mind may be preoccupied with all sorts of things that are not spiritual at all. You are not even thinking about the Lord. But by an act of your will you open your mouth and you start to speak. It is a choice. You choose to speak in tongues.

What is happening is you tap the resources of your spirit by an act of your will and you begin to pour out. The Scripture calls that praying with your spirit. It is not praying in the spirit, but praying with the spirit. And as you pray with the spirit you are praying with other tongues. Paul says, "When I pray in other tongues my spirit is praying." It is your spirit that is now in control. It is your spirit that is pouring forth and the words that are coming out of your mouth are not coming from your own understanding. They are not coming through your mind at all, but out of your spirit.

As you continue to speak in tongues and pour forth out of your spirit, after a while it starts to break through. The flow begins to take place through your soul, and your emotions start to churn and you begin to feel something happening within. Your thoughts start to come into focus, you start to think about the Lord, and you begin to think about spiritual things.

Now most people do not pray in tongues long enough for it to go any further than that. Very often people will only speak in tongues when their emotions are churned up, when they feel the anointing on them, when they feel good spiritually and when they want to worship and praise. Speaking in tongues is for you to tap the resources within when you do NOT feel like it, when your emotions are down, when your mind is dull, when you need to hear from God desperately. It is for when you need His power, when you need to hear His voice right now!

You say, "I wish God would speak to me. I have prayed, but He won’t speak to me. I can’t hear anything. I do not hear anything in the Urim and Thummim either. He is just not there. It is dead."

"Well, can you pray in tongues?"

"Yes, …well I don’t feel like it."

"I didn’t ask if you feel like praying in tongues. I said, ‘Can you pray in tongues?’ "

If you have received the gift of tongues then you can pray in tongues. All you need to do is open your mouth and start, by a choice, and by an act of your will to pray in tongues

I shared my experience when I gave my testimony on how God led me to spend long periods praying for an hour in tongues, and how I hit a second wind in the Spirit. Do you know what happened when I hit that second wind? It started to gush forth and suddenly pictures started to come into my mind. Suddenly my emotions became churned up to the point where I was so excited I did not want to stop. It was just pouring forth.

So very often just praying in tongues will cause to come up out of your spirit influences, visions even, pictures into your mind. Your spiritual Urim and Thummim and all of them start to come to life as you spend long periods praying in tongues. And then you are also in a position now to begin speaking in your native tongue because you do not understand what you are saying in tongues. You may be seeing pictures in your mind. You may be feeling a sense of positive and negative in your emotions, but you still do not have any instruction, because you do not know what you are saying in tongues. You do not know what your spirit is saying in tongues.

Interpreting Tongues

So Paul says, "If any man pray in an unknown tongue, let him pray that he can also interpret." Do you realize that as you pour forth in tongues, you are tapping the wisdom that is within? It is the wisdom that your spirit has, because it is in contact with the Holy Spirit? Do you want to know the will of God? Do you want to hear His voice? Do you want Him to speak to you? He is doing it all the time. All you need to do is learn to hear the voice of your own spirit, because your spirit is going to tell it to you. If you are going to hear the voice of God, do you know what it is going to sound like? It is going to sound like you.

I found that as I began to help people move into these things, and to understand the voice of God and the revelations that were coming to them, that there would be times when the Spirit of God would move and God would show me and reveal things to me. And I would say, "Now, God has put something in your mind. Come on, share it with us. What do you see?"

The person would say, "Well, I kind of thought this, and I thought, ‘Hey, it is just me. I am making it up.’ "

Of course it was you. It came up out of your spirit because the Holy Spirit is going to speak to your spirit and it is YOUR spirit that is going to communicate it outwards.

That is the voice that you have learned to hear throughout your life, the real you, the inner you, the spirit within you. That is the voice that is going to come out. That is where God is going to speak through. That is where the influence is going to come from. If you can learn to speak out in tongues, you can then learn to interpret your tongues. And if you can learn to interpret your tongues, you can know what the Spirit is saying.

So you can pray, and you can speak in tongues, and you can interpret your tongues. You can develop to the capacity where God will then begin to speak to you, where the anointing of the Spirit of God will rise up within you and you will speak in tongues and interpret your tongues. You will speak in tongues and you will interpret your own tongues.

When God first began to show me that I could do this, I thought it was heresy at first. But the anointing of the Spirit of God showed me that it had to be real. It was God. I could feel it, I could sense it. It was powerful. I began to speak in tongues and interpret my tongues, and God began to give me direction. He began to give me prophetic words, words of wisdom and words of knowledge. He began to give me direction concerning the future. He began to tell me His plan for my life and what He had in mind for me.

Eventually I kept a tape recorder handy, and I recorded it. Every time I felt the urge to speak in tongues I put the tape recorder on and I would speak in tongues and then interpret my tongues. I ran out of tape! It went on for hours. Eventually I began to transcribe some of the recordings, write them down and keep a log of them. I began to look at them over a period of time to see whether I had made all these things up or whether it was God. It began to fall into place like a jigsaw puzzle. Something would happen in my life and I would go back and read something that God had said to me, weeks, even months before. And there it was, in writing right there. The Lord was warning me and telling me that things were going to happen, that changes were going to take place so that when this happened I was not to be surprised because it was of Him.

Then as I would pray for people, not knowing what their needs were, I could pray in tongues, and I could interpret what I prayed in tongues and know what the wisdom of the Spirit is, and what it is that I should pray. Every single believer who can speak in tongues has the ability to tap into the wisdom that is in their spirit in this way.

Prophecy

Prophecy is speaking without tongues. I shared in my testimony of how I would practice over myself and prophesy over myself. You will find as you do this that it works the same way. You have developed the capacity now where you do not need to pour out in tongues to get the water flowing. You have prayed in tongues for long periods. You have set up the channel. The pipe is sunk, the flow is there, and you can close your eyes and the Lord is there. When you open your mouth to speak, His Spirit is there. You sense that urge rising up within you, and you begin to speak forth in prophecy.

Very often, it will happen while you are praying. I found out that as I would pray with people concerning their needs, it would slip out. I would say something while in prayer like, "Lord, we pray for this person, and Lord I pray that you would do this..." And the spirit of prophecy would rise up and say, "Yes, that is it. This is what I am going to do, and..." out comes a prophecy most unexpectedly. Why? Because I learned to tap the flow from within my spirit by the faculty of speech.

Now you might be one of those people who do not talk much. You might be introverted and quiet, and you are wondering why God never uses you in prophecy. You are like the person who is standing there saying, "Oh, I wish I could speak in tongues. Oh Lord, I want to speak in tongues. Lord, please make me speak in tongues." I know, I was one of those when I first received it. I sat waiting for the Lord to give me tongues. I sat waiting for him to give me tongues and He did not seem to give them to me. But do you know what? Even if He gave them to me I would not have known it, because I was not talking. How can you tell if you can speak in tongues if you are not speaking? You have to open your mouth and say something before what comes out is tongues. You have to open your mouth and get it going.

It is like a boat on the water. You can place it in the water and you can sit and play with the rudder all you like. It does nothing to the boat. The boat just sits there. But get the boat moving, push it out and set it in motion, and the moment you move that rudder the boat is affected immediately. You have to open your mouth and speak. And if you want to prophesy, or hear from God in prophecy, then you are going to have to practice this. If you are afraid to do it in public, then you must do it the way I learned by doing it in your private prayer closet. You do it by learning to pray in tongues and interpreting your tongues and by learning to prophesy over yourself. The more you do that, the better you will become at it, until eventually you will have the confidence.

As you begin to pray over people that you know, that are near you, you start to hear for them while you are praying with them, and you start to prophesy over them as you pray for them. You become an instrument to speak the Word to them. It is the function of the prophet to speak the Word of God to other people. But if you are going to do this then you must develop that capacity and exercise it, and make it available to the Lord so that He can use it. Then when He wants you to speak a Word to somebody, He does not have to shake you and put you in a trance, or put you under the power, He just needs to give you that gentle prompting that says, "Now." It is a gentle prompting that just gives one or two words, one or two thoughts, a little picture pops into your mind, and God says, "Okay, now. Speak it forth."

"What do I speak?"

"Speak it forth!"

"But what do I speak?"

"Speak it forth!"

You are saying, "Lord, move the rudder."

The Lord is saying, "I want to move it. Get the boat going."

Two Types of Prophecy

You open your mouth and you launch out, and as you do it He steers the rudder. You speak and He will give you the words to speak. And as it comes out, it is going to come out in two forms. It is either going to be general prophecy, or it is going to be personal prophecy. General prophecy normally falls under the standard gift of prophecy that Paul speaks about in 1 Corinthians 12. It is a prophecy that is given to the whole group. That word of prophecy could be a word of encouragement or exhortation, and it could apply to more than one person that is in the group. So several people could leave the meeting saying, "The Lord spoke to me tonight."

General Prophecy

Thus one prophetic word covered all of them. In order to do that, the prophetic word needs to be general. It needs to cover principles of Scripture, so very often general prophecy will involve quoting the Word. What it is actually, is a spontaneous little sermon, an unprepared little sermonette that the prophet gives. He simply stands up and God gives him an idea. God gives him the main points of his message, and he stands up and preaches it by the Spirit. It is just a quick, short, sharp little Word to the group. It is like the preacher standing up and sharing. Sometimes it is a confirmation of the sermon that is being preached that night.

Personal Prophecy

Personal prophecy is when you are speaking only to the person that you are praying with, and you are giving a specific prophecy. You could say, "Thus saith the Lord to you, my brother/sister..." Personal prophecy becomes a little bit more intensive, a bit more direct, and it becomes more directive. You cannot give directive prophecy to a group. You cannot stand up and say, "Thus saith the Lord, You have pondered changing jobs. This is of Me. Go ahead and do it." A whole lot of guys are going to go and pack up their jobs and get into trouble because they were mad at their boss.

You have to be careful. You do not give directive prophecy to a group. But when you are prophesying over an individual you can speak directive prophecy by the word of knowledge, by the word of wisdom, a specific word for that individual. God will give the words as you speak them forth. But you have to learn to develop that capacity before it is going to flow out of you as a prophet.

4. Angels

The fourth way you can hear from God is by the agency of angels. In Acts 27:23 Paul says:

For there stood by me this night the angel of God whose I am and whom I serve, saying, "Do not be afraid, Paul; you must be brought before Caesar; and look, God has given you all those who are sailing with you."

Messenger Angels

The angel of God appeared to bring him a message. I shared in our teaching on angels and demons in the Way of Blessing, how that one third of the angels of heaven are the messenger angels, the angel Gabriel being the main one. Their responsibility is to come and bring a message from God.

You say, "Yes, but that was fine in the Old Testament when the Spirit of God was not within people, when a person could not hear from God for themselves in their own heart. Yes, God would use angels then."

That is why I picked a verse from the New Testament because I knew you were going to give me that argument.

The great apostle Paul said, "The angel of the Lord appeared to me tonight and brought me a message from the Lord."

You find many occurrences of this in the Old and New Testaments. There are messenger angels. God did not make a third of the angels of heaven to sit around and do nothing. They have a job to do, and their job is to bring a message.

Angelic Influence

The way they bring a message is often a lot stronger. Do you know why? Because angels can produce an influence from without. The angels can produce an influence directly on your mind without coming via your spirit, because very often people do not hear their spirits. They do not listen well to their spirits, or they are too preoccupied and too busy to hear from their spirits. So God brings an external influence, a messenger angel, maybe as a confirmation. God uses angels to bring messages.

In vision you might see an angel coming with a scroll in his hand, and he is bringing a message from Almighty God. Perhaps he is bringing a decree that you are meant to take and speak forth into the earth as a prophet. He is saying, "Here is a decree. God has issued a decree and He wants this Word to go forth in the earth. Here it is. I am giving it to you. You are God's prophet. You have the authority. You have the responsibility to speak this forth, to speak a Word of creation. Now you take the decree and you speak it forth."

When you see an angel coming to you in the Spirit like that, this is what is happening. I have seen angels come with a scroll that is sealed. In most cases the scroll is a picture of a declaration which has been made concerning my own life and ministry. Then as the angel gives me the scroll, the instruction comes from the Spirit; "Break the first seal." Usually when I see a scroll like that each seal typifies a stage in God’s plan.

So if I see a scroll with three seals on it I know that God is giving a three-stage plan. And He is saying, "The first stage must now begin. Break the first seal." As I break that first seal something begins to happen in my life and in my ministry, and God begins to put together something. Then further down the line the word of instruction comes and God reveals the scroll again and He says, "Break the second seal."

Messenger angels come to bring a Word from the Lord. They come to bring a decree and a declaration from the Lord, for you to take up and to put in your mouth, and to declare and decree into the earth as the prophet of God.

Guardian Angels

We all have guardian angels. You may have more than one, depending on what God’s purpose is for you, what needs to be accomplished, and how dangerous you are to the kingdom of darkness. I realized once that my guardian angel was bored. I never gave him much work to do. He was following me all around doing nothing because I was not using him. I was not speaking forth the Word of God. I was not acting in faith. I was not giving him the licence and the opportunity to do what God put him there for.

God put him there to wait on me, to minister to me and to help me. I think the first time I became aware that my guardian angel had a bigger role to play in my life was when I was lying under the car struggling, and I could not get a stupid bolt to come off. I just could not get this dumb car to work, so I cried out, "Lord, I wish there were somebody here to help me. I have to battle with this car all on my own."

He said, "There is. You just cannot see him."

I saw this vision of my guardian angel taking the wrench out of my hand and loosening the bolt. Well it did not work exactly that way, but I began to realize, "Hold it! This guy probably knows more about cars than me. Hey, he is an angel. I am sure he is pretty intelligent. I know you do not have cars up there, but he’s been around me for a while. He should have learnt a bit about them by now."

I began to use my guardian angel. I said, "Father I need help. You have given me an angel. Now angel of God that is with me, help me with this thing." I kind of expected him to take the wrench from me, but he did not. But suddenly I found that I had more strength than I used to have. Suddenly I found that after battling to put this stupid thing in for hours, it just went ‘click’ and dropped into place.

A thought came into my mind to try something that I had not tried before, and it worked first time. Well, why didn’t I think of that before? Do you know why? Because somebody put an idea in my mind.

You say, "Did the Lord put the idea in your mind?" Well, yes, but I think He used an angel to do it. Do you think I am getting carried away with angels? No, the Scripture says that angels are given to be ministers, servants to wait upon the heirs of righteousness, which is us. God has given us guardian angels to take care of us. He has given us guardian angels to go and organize finances for us, and to arrange circumstances for us in our life. They open doors for us, and assist us, and help us to be all that God wants us to be, and to succeed in this world.

Now I am not advising you to get into a situation where you want to see your angel in the Spirit and talk to him. You could end up in deception as I shared once before in my testimony. What I am saying is that you need to be aware that help is there. Be aware that you are not alone. Yes, the Lord is there, He is omnipresent, He is everywhere. He is in you, in your heart, and in your spirit. I like to think of the Lord Jesus sitting right there next to me and I talk to Him. But I also have somebody who has been given the job of taking care of me, and I have learned to use him.

Very often God will use the angel, the guardian angel or the messenger angel, to put thoughts in your mind, to give guidance and direction. You might be riding along and a thought suddenly pops into your mind out of nowhere. Where did it come from? It could be an angel of God sent by the Lord to bring you a Word, a message from the Lord. It gets your attention. He put that thought in your mind. Maybe it is a warning thought that says, "Hold it. Turn left at the next intersection. Don’t go the way you normally go." You have to be sensitive to hearing that voice and to understand where it is coming from.

5. Journaling

This fifth method of hearing from God is a very important one. It leads on from some of the things that we have already looked at. I want to show you a passage from the book of Habakkuk Chapter 2:1. The prophet Habakkuk says:

"I will stand upon my watch and set myself upon the tower, and will watch to see what He will say to me, and what I will answer when I am reproved."

Then the Lord answered me and said: "Write the vision and make it plain on tables, that he that reads it may run."

I spoke earlier about how words release the spirit within; how that while you are speaking, things pop up out of your spirit without you being aware of it. Sometimes the things that pop up out of your spirit are a source of wisdom. You might be speaking to somebody about a problem that they have and suddenly you find yourself saying something that you had never planned to say, something that you had never ever thought before. As you speak it you know that you are speaking the solution to the problem. It occurs to you suddenly and unexpectedly. You just see it, and it pops out.

There is a branch of psychology called Rogerianism, formulated by a man called Carl Rogers, who discovered this. Rogers discovered that most people have within themselves the resources and the ability to solve their own problems. They have just never thought it through properly. They have never identified it in their spirits. So he formulated a means of counseling that does not counsel. In fact his method of counseling is so marvelous that you can program a computer to do it.

I used to have a program on my computer called Doctor Eliza way back in the old DOS days. And Doctor Eliza would start out on your computer screen by saying, "What is your problem?"

You would write down, "I am sick of my mother-in-law."

The program would come back and say, "Tell me about your mother-in-law."

And every time you said something the program was designed to pick up certain words and phrases and throw a question back at you again to make you think some more, and think some more. That is all the Rogerian counselor does. He asks questions.

"Well, tell me about your mother-in-law."

"She is always interfering in my business and telling me what to do."

"So what do you do? How do you react to this?"

"Well, I get mad and I slam the door and I stomp out."

"So, what happens then?"

"My wife gets all mad at me because I am getting on her mother’s case, and we have a big fight."

"I see. And what do you do after that?"

It goes on, and on, and on until somewhere in the middle of the counsel suddenly the counselee comes up with a solution, "Oh yes, I have it! I know exactly what I’ll do. I’ll buy a gun and shoot her. That is it." You see you solved the problem yourself. You did not need counsel. NOT!

Okay, that is extreme. But what actually happens? I used to think that Rogerian counseling was a load of nonsense. It has become one of the most popular forms of counseling today because it does not take much training. You do not have to learn anything about problems and counseling to help people in their problems. All you need to learn to do is be a mirror to reflect their questions and their statements back at them again. You never give counsel, you just ask questions. And eventually, in the process of conversation, when the person has talked, and talked, and answered questions, talked about their problem and thought about solutions, as they talk, up out of their spirit pops a solution. They solve their own problem without even being counseled. They do not feel that anybody has imposed on them and told them what to do because it was their idea. Hey, my idea is always the best isn’t it? Do not question my idea. Question everybody else’s.

It means that this capability has been built into man because it works in unbelievers as well as believers. Unbelievers still have a spirit, but it is dead to the Spirit of God. So the counsel and the advice and the solutions that will come up out of them are not going to be godly solutions. They are not going to be based on the Scriptures and on the Word. But for a believer it is different. The Scripture says that, "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks."

Through Normal Speech

If as a believer you have been filling yourself with the Word eventually the Word is going to start to come out. And as you are speaking, suddenly into your mind will pop a promise, a commandment, an instruction, something from the Word that you read years ago. You forgot that it was there, but in the process of conversation, while you were pouring out within your heart, suddenly it pops back into your memory and you see it, you just grasp it and you know it, and you say, "That is the answer." The solution is right there.

Now, you can develop this. I spoke earlier about developing this in speaking in tongues and in speaking in prophecy. If you are a child of God you have the ability to tap that inner resource. If you are a prophet of God this capability has become highly magnified. You are more sensitive to the realm of the Spirit. You are more capable of hearing from the Spirit and therefore you are more capable of tapping the resource that is in your spirit through speech.

Now if you are going to receive wisdom from the Lord, you cannot go about muttering to yourself all the time. It is known as the first sign of madness in many quarters. You might have somebody reporting you. They may arrive with handcuffs. "The guy needs to be locked up to protect himself." If you are going to do this you are going to have to be alone. But, it is possible for you to speak without speaking. And how do you do that? By writing. What does a dumb person do if they cannot speak? You can still communicate outwards what is in your heart through writing, where you write on paper, or type on the computer, whichever form of writing you are going to use. When you are writing you are putting speech down on paper, or whatever other medium you are using.

Speaking Through Writing

So it is possible for you to speak by writing. And as you do this you can enter into a conversation with the Lord. As a prophet of God you can come into a place where you can speak to the Lord, and where He can speak back to you again. This is what the prophet Habakkuk was doing. He was saying, "I'll stand upon my watch, and set myself upon the tower, and I will watch to see what He will say to me." He is speaking about coming into a position of hearing the voice of God.

We have spoken a little bit about this already. It means coming to the place where you quiet the senses. It means coming to the place where the body senses are stifled. It means coming to a place where the things that you see are not going to distract you. It means coming to the place where there is no noise and where there is quietness, because where there is noise the sound on your ears is going to distract you. It means keeping away from nice smelling things. It means do not be near the kitchen when somebody is cooking. You have to put all the senses down and bring them under control and come to the place where you are just in touch with the Lord and where your spirit is communing with Him.

As you do that you begin to hear the voice of the Lord coming from deep within. How do you do it? You concentrate on Him, you speak in tongues and you get the flow going. Close your eyes and concentrate on Him, get into worship, and if you are going to visualize anything imagine the Lord standing right there in front of you, and you are speaking with Him and having a conversation with Him.

Writing Your Dialogue

Then pick up your pen and paper and write down your conversation. You write down what you are saying to the Lord. You write down, "Father, I need direction at this time. Lord, what is Your plan and purpose for me today? What would You have me to do?"

Then you pick up your pen and you write down His answer to you. Well how are you going to know His answer to you? You are going to hear it from deep within your spirit. You are going to have impulses and thoughts cross your mind. You are going to have pictures come into your mind. It is going to come just like prophecy. There may be a thought, there may be a phrase, there may be an idea. But as you let your mind free and let your spirit bring that influence up from within, thoughts begin to flow and you begin to write them down.

You know the amazing thing about writing? It is the same as speaking. I do not know about you, but if I am speaking on the phone and somebody else interrupts and tries to talk to me while I am speaking on the phone I get confused. I have great difficulty listening to the guy I am talking to on the phone, and speaking and listening to somebody else at the same time. You can only do one thing at a time. It is like a one-way street, you see. So, while you are speaking there comes a control that pulls your thoughts and your emotions and everything in tune and in flow with the Spirit.

When you write it becomes more powerful because you are concentrating on what you are writing, and what you are writing is what is coming up out of your speech center, out of your heart and it is being poured out in writing. While you are busy doing that you cannot be easily distracted. You cannot have other thoughts coming to your mind. What is going to come into your mind is the pictures that are going to pour up out of your spirit while you are pouring forth that speech. What you are going to feel is the emotion that is stirred up as you are pouring forth that speech.

So as you begin to write a flow takes place and you find yourself saying things you did not think you were going to say. Perhaps you asked the Lord for direction concerning a certain issue in your life, and in your mind you are thinking, "Well, this is the way I’d like to go. This is what I’d like to do. I really hope that this is what God wants me to do."

Then you start to write. And as you start to write a flow begins to take place, and you find yourself writing down a word of instruction and direction that is totally different to anything that you have thought about. It is totally opposite to the way you thought it was going to go. You can be sure that it is coming from deeper than your mind, because your mind is taking the other route. Your spirit is taking a completely different route. Your spirit is pouring out a direction from the Lord.

As you write and write and pour forth, you find it starts to flow like a fountain, starts to pour like a stream, and as you write down, you write down the very prophetic word of the Lord. As you learn to develop this you will find that you can learn to use this while writing to people, especially if you are writing by email which is so common these days. As you begin to share and minister with somebody in writing, suddenly the flow begins to take place, and up it comes out of your spirit.

"And yes, the Lord would say to you... God says this, and God says that..." and you begin to prophesy even while you are writing. You have developed that capacity to pour forth from your spirit.

How To Use Journaling Daily

Do you realize that every day you can sit down and use this resource? Hey, it is a lot easier than speaking in tongues, translating it, recording it and transcribing it. It is a whole lot easier to write it down straight, and you have a permanent record immediately. I do this all the time. I have learned to tap the wisdom that is in my spirit.

There have been times where I have had people come round for counseling, and the counseling appointment has been arranged, and they are coming to me to give them counsel and advice. I know the Word and I know the counseling principles, but I do not know their circumstances exactly. "So what do I say to them, Father? What exact direction do I give them? Lord, what is happening in their life, You know? Lord, please give me direction."

So I begin to write down in my journal. I ask the Lord these questions. Then I begin to write down His words to me. "Les, this is the situation. These are the circumstances in their life. These are the problems that they face. This is the situation that you need to address. This is the way you must advise them, and this is the way you must counsel them, and this is My plan and purpose for their life." I sometimes receive an entire breakdown of what kind of counsel and direction I need to give them.

They arrive and I begin to counsel, and I begin to follow it through. And oh yes, the Spirit was right. It was right and it begins to flow. I begin to question them and they come out with some of the very things God revealed to me in my journal. Then I begin to counsel and advise exactly in accordance with what God gave me in my journal.

When it is all finished and they have been ministered to and are uplifted, and they have victory, I say to them, "I just want to show you something." And I pull out my journal and I give it to them to read. I say to them, "I wrote this before you came. I asked God to give me wisdom and direction today as I counseled you, and this is what God said to me before you came." Their eyes get big.

"Wow, you must be a real man of God."

"No, just an ordinary prophet. I am just a servant of the Lord. I have just learned to hear His voice. Hey, this is not my wisdom; these are not my ideas. This is not my brilliance. I am just an empty vessel that has learned to let His wisdom come up and flow out of me."

You are able to do it, prophet of God. You are able to tap the inner wisdom. You try it. Now do NOT sit down and think, "What am I going to say?" Remember the illustration of the boat and the rudder. As you start to write you get your boat in motion, and as you write you find yourself writing things you did not plan to write, because somebody is there steering the rudder, and you are going in a different direction to what you expected to go. That is the way it must go. I find often as I offer people dream interpretations I begin to interpret what I think is the interpretation, and as I write suddenly I find myself saying something different. Pictures pop into my mind and different thoughts arise, and I am led and directed.

You try it. Sit down with a pen and paper and just write. Do not think what you are going to write, just write. Write the first thing that comes into your mind. You say, "What if I am making it up?" That is fine. The first five or ten words you might make up, then something else is going to kick in. You just get the boat moving and the motor will start, do not worry. Just get moving. Practice it. Do it again and again. Do it every day. Eventually you will find that you can come to the place where at any time all you need is a pen and paper. "Father, what do I do here?" You begin to write and wisdom pours out from within. Direction pours out from within. You are hearing the voice of God coming up out of your spirit.

6. The Inner Voice

The sixth method of hearing from God is what I call the inner voice. In 1 Kings 19 we have the account of how Elijah, after he had run away in fear from Jezebel, sat down and wanted to die. He went to a place where God spoke to him.

And God said, "Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord." And the Lord passed by, and a great and mighty wind tore in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice. So it was, 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 a voice came to him, and said, "What are you doing here, Elijah?"

The still small voice. This is something that is even deeper. Remember, what is being communicated from the spirit outwards, as it is communicated into the mind, it is communicated via the senses. The still small voice is God communicating outwards, not in pictures, but in the hearing. Not everybody is able to receive and to hear in the Spirit. But most of us are able to hear the still small voice.

You are going to hear this still small voice when things are still. You are not going to hear it where there is noise. That is what God was trying to show Elijah. There was this great big wind and earthquake and fire - the glory, the power, the anointing, the revival power, the river of God. No! The still small voice, not coming from without, not external, but a deep internal voice of God. It is speaking, not shouting, but speaking gently, whispering almost.

You can learn to hear the still small voice if you will quiet your heart before the Lord and wait in His presence. I think the Lord had a plan when He told Elijah to go and climb the mountain. It wore out all of his physical resources. He was physically tired by the time he came to the mountain top. His mind was probably boggled from just seeing rocks in front of him all the time. Whatever it was he came to place where he was totally still before the Lord. Then God could speak to him in that still small voice.

You are also able to hear the still small voice of the Lord. The still small voice of the Lord is a very quiet, deep, inner voice, and it comes out in words. The Lord will speak to you and you will actually hear His voice speaking deep within you. Now this is a difficult one. This is one that takes a mature prophet of God to use. I’ll tell you why. Because the still small voice comes up into your mind. And your mind is the battleground that Satan can use and attack and Satan can bombard you from outside.

So this is a way of hearing from God that takes a seasoned prophet. It takes a man of God who knows the Word. It takes somebody who recognizes deception and will recognize and can discern if that voice is of God and if it is not of God. But you will find that you can come to the place where you enter His presence in silence and God will begin to speak up within you. There will be no journaling, there will be no prophesying, there will be no speaking in tongues, there will be no noise. It just bubbles up deep inside of you, the still small voice of the Lord rising up into your mind, and God begins to speak to you.

Very often God will speak to you this way when He wants to speak to you things that are secret, when He wants to tell you things that are not meant to be known to others. They are not meant to be made public. Satan cannot zero in on that one. He can read your journals; he can hear you prophesying. He can have an idea of what God is saying to you and what God is doing in you, but when God speaks up into you in the still small voice you are the only one that can hear it. God will speak to you, and He will share secrets with you. He will give you direction that is not for public hearing. There are things that God wants to say to you alone. That is what God did with Elijah at this time. He gave him instructions on what he was to go and do, who he was to anoint and the plan that he was to follow through.

The Audible Voice

The audible voice of God is where God’s voice actually sounds the same as somebody speaking out loud. Not many people hear the audible voice of God. Those who do hear it hear what to them sounds like an audible voice, but usually when they hear it, nobody else around them can hear it. It is the same influence that is coming up from within. It is not an actual tangible sound wave that is coming out there that is actually striking their ears. It sounds like that to them because the sense of hearing has been so superceded by the Spirit that it has come up and come under control. It is almost like a trance vision if you like, where the voice is being heard, and it is being heard very distinctly and very clearly.

You say, "Why doesn’t God speak to me in an audible voice?"

"Well, are you able to hear the still small voice?"

"Yes."

"Then why must He speak to you in an audible voice?"

Is it necessary? That is up to the Lord. I know He has never spoken to me in an audible voice so I cannot identify with this one. I know His voice within me has risen up at times so loud that it almost sounds audible, but I would not say that I actually heard it with my ears. I heard it with my spirit.

7. Face to Face Relationship

Now we come to the final way of hearing from God, and that is the face-to-face relationship. In Numbers 12:5 it says:

And the Lord came down in the pillar of cloud and stood in the door of the tabernacle, and called Aaron and Miriam. And they both came out. Then He said, "Hear now My words: If there is a prophet among you, I, the Lord, will make Myself known to him in a vision, and will speak to him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so, who is faithful in all My house. With him I will speak mouth to mouth, even clearly, and not in dark speeches; and the form of the Lord he will see. Why then were you not afraid to speak against My servant Moses?"

It was a face to face relationship. Moses saw the presence of the Lord. He saw that manifestation of the Lord that is called the Angel of the Lord, a theophany. He saw God in a physical form and he spoke to God face to face. Is it possible for us to experience that today? Is it possible for a prophet to enter into that kind of relationship with the Lord that he can speak to Him face to face? Yes it is. I know because I have experienced it myself.

You say, "Well who are you going to see in the Spirit?" The Scripture says, "There is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." Jesus said, "No one cometh unto the Father, but by Me." We do not have to speak through the Angel of the Lord any more. We have One who was God manifested in the flesh. We have One who sits on the throne of heaven. We have One in whom we are and who is in us, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. And it is possible for us to enter into a face to face relationship with Him in the Spirit where we can speak to Him as man to man, as person to person, as friend to friend, face to face and mouth to mouth.

Entering into the Love Relationship

How do I know this is available to us? And how does it become available? It becomes available when you enter into a love relationship with the Lord, where the love of God becomes your consuming passion, and where it permeates your very being. Paul tells us about it in 1 Corinthians 13:9. He says:

For our knowledge is limited and our prophecy is limited. But when that which is perfect has come (or when maturity has come, or when love has come) then the limitations will be removed. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things.

He is speaking about growing up. The Scripture says 'Love is the bond of perfection.' The Scripture speaks about being 'perfect or mature in love.' Paul says:

For now we see through a mirror, a puzzling image, but then we will see face to face. Now I know partially, but then I shall know just as I am also known.

Spiritual Maturity

When is now and when is then? Now is when you have not been perfected in love. Then is when you have been perfected in maturity and in love. It means that you begin to move into a love relationship with the Lord. You begin to move into spiritual maturity. You begin to move more and more into a face to face relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ to where you can say, "Before I saw through a puzzling image, but now that I am in maturity and walking in love, I can see Him face to face. Before I only knew partially. Now I know as I am known."

What does it mean? Paul says:

Where there are prophecies, they will fade away; where there are tongues, they will cease; but when that which is perfect has come, that which is in part shall be done away.

What is he saying? He is saying, "Before, I needed to receive a revelation. I needed to obtain a word of wisdom or a word of knowledge. I needed to receive a prophetic word from the Lord. But now what has happened is I have come into a relationship with the Lord Jesus where I do not need to hear from Him. He does not have to send an angel to me with a message. I can speak to Him and ask Him myself."

This means I come into such a relationship with Him that I speak to Him and I say, "Lord, tell me about such and such a person." And the Lord says, "What do you want to know?" I ask Him my questions and He answers me and says, "This is the problem. This is what I want you to say to him. This is how I want you to advise him. I want you to tell him this for Me." Then I turn to him and I say, "This is what the Lord says." I go back to the Lord again and I say, "Lord, what must I do here?"

I am walking down the street with Jesus at my side and there is somebody lying there sick. I say, "Lord, what do you want me to do? Can I help on this one?"

The Lord says, "I want you to go and lay your hands on him, and I want you to speak to that sickness and disease and command it to be healed."

"Okay, Lord, let’s do it."

"In the Name of Jesus, be healed!"

It is quite easy really isn’t it?

You say, "But you did not have the gift of healing. You didn’t have the gift of faith."

Hey, I have the Lord Himself. He is all of those. You can enter into a love relationship, and it only comes by a love relationship, and that is what Paul is speaking about. It comes when you enter into that close relationship with the Lord where you can speak to Him face to face. It is where He becomes more real to you or just as real to you as any other fellow human being. When you can come into that relationship as the spokesman and the servant of God, then you will find that your whole approach changes and you speak forth what He tells you to speak. You are going to find that you do not have to battle to hear His voice any more because He is speaking to you directly.

Conclusion

All of these means are available. Any believer is able to hear from God in most of these ways. It is not only restricted to the prophet. But as I said before, prophets have a very special ability to hear. They have been gifted to hear better, to have a greater capacity.

If God has given you that opportunity; if He has given you that privilege and taken you through that horrible preparation that has qualified you to be His spokesman, you need to be using all of these methods all of the time. So whatever circumstance you are in, whatever the situation demands, you need to be able to hear from God. Then you can speak forth His Word into the earth. You can speak forth His Word to people. You can speak a prophetic word, a word of encouragement and exhortation to lift up the body of Christ and to build up the church, to help people identify their ministries. Everything that God has called the prophet to do, all of these you can do, when you have learned how to hear His voice by listening in these seven ways.