When God speaks to you directly, it will be evident that it was God because it will scare you a bit. If God wants you to do something it will come as a surprise that feels out of left field to what your own mind can conceive. If you are skeptical, test God, and he will flesh it out enough for it to make sense, at least enough for you to take the next step of faith. When you walk in that faith out of obedience, there will be a peace about it.
There is an intuition that seems common to the natural world, that is different than this. Any time I have used my own intuition there has been an aggressive nature about my steps. Hearing from the Holy Spirit always comes in tranquility and out of a deep feeling that moves you. It comes form a different place than a fleshly intuition or desire. It is a practice form of being in God’s presence through quieting noise, silencing the voices around you, to listen to God in prayer. It is far more than a feeling or a sense, it is a supernatural knowing.
This knowing will never go against God’s word, and it requires each individual to not be holding on to fear and control. In essence, listening to the Holy Spirit requires you to know yourself. Feelings and emotions can be linked to your own hearts desires. In order to listen to God’s desires for you, to be obedient to God’s will, you need to understand your own soul’s motivations. This requires a deep sense of knowing who you are.
Listening to the Holy Spirit is about faith. But faith, in the Bible, is about humility. If you want to know what faith is, Hebrews 11:1 tells us, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”. But if we read a little further, more insight into faith is shared, “through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear”.
In the same way there are things we are feeling and experiencing that are beyond our natural world and the things we can see. Intuition is void of the spiritual world and the reality of the Holy Spirit. Listening to the Holy Spirit requires a deep understanding of the Holy Spirit’s ways.
Listening to the Holy Spirit has to do with understanding God’s way and the story he is painting about you. Alasdair Mcintyre said, “I can only answer the question, ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”
Before you can understand now, you must know what came before. You need the knowledge of the Word to be in tune with the Holy Spirit and have context for the Words of God.
You must be aware of God’s presence. God’s presence is wrapped into the triune God. God is writing the drama of the world, creation, and everything in between through the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In the beginning of the Word, God outlines Genesis and sin enters the world through Adam. It becomes God vs humanity, God vs the self and soul, and God vs the spiritual realm. God has brought solutions through his three persons to confront each of these straight on.
- God vs humanity -> God as Father, restores lost children into His adopted family.
- God vs self/soul -> Jesus, God’s son, is our picture to believe in and place faith in, to relate to God and know our true identity.
- God vs the spiritual world -> The Holy Spirit is a person, a being, fighting our battles amidst the very real presence of light and darkness, good and evil.
God’s sacrificial love through Jesus is how God restores the world’s problems in humanity. Has God forgotten us? No, we so often cry out for deliverance and have not heard from the Lord.
Even in the Bible there were people waiting for Jesus to redeem God’s people, the Israelites. There were different groups looking for Jesus to come a certain way. Their way of understanding God’s kingdom was in their own wisdom. And yet God came in a different way, in a way that required first, waiting, and second, believing in the person of Jesus before you understood why or even how.
This is the way of the Spirit. We do not understand why or how, we simply believe in the person of Jesus. We believe in the person of the Spirit, knowing that the Spirit is God’s presence walking with us.