Hearing God Through His Word

Hearing God through His Word

Let the message about Christ, in all its richness, fill your lives. Teach and counsel each other with all the wisdom he gives.

Colossians 3:16

Six-year-old Hannah accompanied her parents to their weekly small-group meeting and drew pictures while the adults discussed their current struggles. One young woman talked about how she had been in a “desert” and hadn’t heard God speak to her in a long time. Several other adults chimed in that they, too, wished God would speak to them more often. As they spoke, Hannah took all this in. On the way home, she said to her parents, “Don’t the grown-ups read their Bibles? God speaks to us every time we pick up our Bible and read it, because he wrote it! If they would just open their Bibles, I know they’d hear God talk to them.”

Hannah is right. The Bible is the major source of the Lord’s wisdom, counsel, and communication with us because Jesus is the Living Word and the Bible is his love letter to us. When we read the Bible day by day and seek God through the Scriptures, we hear his voice more clearly and grow to know him more and more. Countless times when I have been reading the Bible, it was as if heaven focused the beam of a flashlight on a special verse or passage just so I would notice it, write it on a card to ponder, and pray it back to God. Sometimes I have memorized a passage and then later the Spirit has brought it to my mind for a certain need or moment. How grateful I am that early in my Christian life a wiser, older woman told me that about 75 percent of God’s guidance comes through his Word and if I didn’t stay in his Word, I would miss the very direction, instruction, and help he has provided.

Open your Bible and read today, searching for what the Living Word has to teach you. —CHERI

As I read your Word today, show me, Holy Spirit, how it addresses the situations in my life. Grant me a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Jesus, the Living Word, as I study your holy written Word.

Our private training takes place in the presence of God, through the Word of God. It is here that we learn to hear the voice of God as we keep our eyes on His Person. With our focus on Him, our minds willing and our ears open to hear His loving voice even if it directs us to painful change, we will be taught by God’s Spirit.

—MARTHA THATCHER, AUTHOR AND NAVIGATOR STAFF MEMBER