3 Vital Principles To Hearing And Recognizing God’s Voice.

Do you ever wonder is God there? Is He listening? One of the most comforting things I have learned in life is that God is real and that He really does love me. And most importantly, He wants to have a relationship with me. He helps through Divine Guidance, often called revelation. Learning how to recognize this guidance is hard, here are 3 principles to hearing and recognizing God’s voice in your daily life!

The Spirit Of God Often Speaks Through Feelings.

When it comes to getting answers to our prayers we read about fantastic events in the scriptures, voices from heaven, angels, and visions. Sometimes we come expect the same prophetic type of answers ourselves.  Whereas this is how God can speak, it is not the most common way God speaks. Often His Spirit speaks in a whisper or “still small voice.”

The prophet Elijah learned this in 1st Kings 19, where he experienced a strong wind, an earthquake, and a fire. But verses 11 and 12 explain that the Lord spoke not through the strong wind, earthquake, or fire, but through a “still small voice.” (1st Kings 19:11-12) The prophet Nephi taught that we feel the words of the Spirit. When his brothers were rebellious he said “…he hath spoken unto you in a still small voice, but ye were past feeling, that ye could not feel his words…” 1 Ne. 17:45 

“The Spirit does not get our attention by shouting or shaking us with a heavy hand. Rather it whispers. It caresses so gently that if we are preoccupied we may not feel it at all.” Boyd K. Packer

Boyd K. Packer taught that 

Follow The Promptings Even If They Don’t Make Sense.

I served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in New England. While serving in a small town just south of Augusta Maine, I had a prompting one day, we needed to drive across our area and go see Brother C. It made no sense, but I had learned to always follow the promptings of the Spirit.

When we arrived at Brother C’s house, my companion told me “this is all you.” So I knocked on his door, and when brother C opened the door he asked what we were doing there? I replied, “I know we have a lesson appointment tomorrow night, but I felt like we needed to come see you right now.”

Suddenly Brother C started crying.”What had happened?” I asked. And he told us between sobs that he had just been laid-off earlier that day. When he came home he was so mad at God that he started yelling and swearing. He told us that after a few minutes of yelling at God he fell to his knees bawling. In despair he pleaded, how will I provide for my family? What will happen to my kids? My house?  He told us that he asked God for a sign that He cared and was listening.

“How long ago was this?” I asked him. “About 15 minutes ago.” Was his reply. “We were in West Gardner 15 minutes ago planning on spending the rest of the day when I felt that we needed to come see you. We immediately turned the car around and drove across town to come see you.” At this point the spirit was so strong everyone was crying and Brother C knew that his Father cared and listened, he knew God loved him. All because we followed a prompting that did not “make sense.”

Often Your First Thought Is A Prompting.

One of the greatest lessons I have learned about following the Spirit is to always act on the first prompting. As a missionary, I had an experience where I had a thought, “go to Shaw’s (a grocery store in Maine). So I told my companion, “We need to go to Shaw’s.” As we walked around the grocery  store he turned to me and asked, “Are you sure we need to be here?” I told him the thought had popped into my mind.

As we walked out of the store a lady called us over and said, “Are you two Mormon Elders?” As we talked with this lady she told us that she had been praying for strength to come back to the church. She told us that when she saw us walking out of the store she knew it was the time to act. I was blessed to teach her family and her kids were baptized shortly thereafter.

The moral of the story is simple. Don’t doubt your promptings. Joseph Smith taught: “If you will listen to the first promptings, you will get it right nine times out of ten.” (Truman G. Madsen, Joseph Smith the Prophet (1989), 103)