Hearing His Voice #121

Dear friends, do not believe everyone who claims to speak by the Spirit. You must test them to see if the spirit they have comes from God. For there are many false prophets in the world.

1 John 4:1

When we turn on a radio, we have to tell the radio which signal to pick up. There are lots of signals out there, but we can only tune in to one at a time. That means we have to reject the ones we don’t want and focus specifically on the one we do want. We have to be discriminating.

Radio signals may be a matter of preference, but God’s voice isn’t. There are messages that actually come from Him and many others that don’t, and we can’t afford to get them mixed up. The hearing ear is in constant need of tuning in spiritually—of finding the right signals and rejecting all the others. Not every message we hear is from God, regardless of what its source claims. Preachers don’t always preach the truth, prophetic voices aren’t always tapped in to God’s Spirit, and even the Bible itself can be read from the wrong point of view or interpreted through false perceptions and motives. Sometimes the voice is clearly not from God, but other times the errors are more subtle. It’s possible for the words to be true but to come from the wrong spirit. We have to become well acquainted with spiritual nuances.

That doesn’t mean we need to be so “discerning” that we rule out everything that might possibly be God’s voice. Nor does it mean everything that sounds unusual to us must not be from Him. In fact, we can expect His words to stretch our understanding. He specializes in that. But if we test the spirits—ask for confirmation from God and measure it against what we know to be true from Scripture—He will lead us into truth. His ability to guard us from error is greater than our ability to fall into it.

Lord, give me a discerning spirit and help me to recognize false voices. I trust Your ability to lead me. I want to embrace every word that comes from You.