Priscilla Shirer: Are You Hearing From God?

He says, I would have despaired. I would have been hopeless. I would have been down.
My countenance would have been downcast man. Except that I expect that I’m going to see God.
I expect that I’m gonna hear God so I can wait patiently on Him because I have an anticipation and expectation that God is going to come through on my behalf.
I want to tell you this before I share with you some principles that actually have transformed the way I spend time in the word of God.
The enemy wants to convince you.
He wants to convince me that God has some sort of hotline connection between He and certain people that it’s just our spiritual leaders, our pastors, our Bible study teachers, the folks that are on staff, the people that are in full time ministry, the folks that have, you know, a microphone on their jacket, the people that are in the spotlight, the folks who we go past their Instagram feed and we are admonished or encouraged because they are teaching and preaching to masses.
The enemy wants you to think that it’s a seminary degree that is required before you can actually have a fervent ongoing relationship with God where you yourself can open up the word of God and know that the Holy Spirit can Illumina scriptures and give you guidance and direction and insight and clarity and encouragement and comfort.
He wants you to think that that kind of fervent friendship with God is only for certain people because He knows that as long as you and I are not convinced that we can hear a fresh word from God for ourselves.
Then at best we’ll be handicapped in our faith because we’ll always be waiting on somebody else to spoon, feed us the word of God instead of knowing that we can have confidence in our friendship in our relationship with God himself.
And I want to share them with you. Position yourself to hear from God.
I’m gonna say it again, position yourself to hear from God.
There is power in your positioning in your posture. Okay. I mean this in a spiritual sense.
But I also mean it in a physical sense.
I want to tell you about both when you come to God through his word that you’re going to meet with him through the pages of scripture.
So this is your own personal quiet time.
You know, you maybe have just sat up in bed and you’re gonna have 10 or 15 minutes that you’re spending with the Lord or you’re going to come out of your room into the kitchen table, maybe in the quietness of the morning or in the quietness of the evening, when all the activity in your house has died down just a little bit, you’re gonna position yourself over a portion of scripture.
And I’ll tell you in just a few moments how you can choose a portion of scripture to dive into.
But when you make that commitment to posture yourself, to position yourself, I mean that in a spiritual way, meaning the position of your heart has to be in a perspective and a frame of reference that is eager to hear and expects to hear the voice of God speaking to you.
It’s a w Tozer, a great theologian that put it this way, the person that does not expect to hear.
God won’t because every single time God speaks, they’ll just discount it as their own idea.
They’ll think that it was just a coincidence.
They will attribute it to anything and anybody else except what it is.
God’s breathed word coming to life through the power of the Holy Spirit to speak to you, to give you guidance and direction in your own personal life.
And so you have to have a heart, I have to have a heart that is filled with expectation that I am one of the sheep of God’s fold.
And I can hear the voice of God. John chapter 10, Jesus said my sheep, hear my voice.
Listen to that again. He basically says the default position for anybody who’s a part of the fold the flock, the family of God.
What my sheep do is hear my voice.
It’s one of the schemes of the enemy to get you to think that you need to be something more, be something else.
Have a different perspective or a different personality or be someone other than you are to have excelled in some way to not have made the mistakes that you’ve made.
It’s the scheme of the enemy to get us to think that we have to be anything other than a son or daughter to have this right, this privilege to hear God speaking to us through the word.
So we have to pray and say, Lord, would you carve away anything in my heart?
That is a roadblock that’s keeping me from having an expectation that in my own regular quiet time while I’m in my pajamas or in my jogging suit, while I’m in my house shoes, whatever I’m doing.
And no matter what I look like, I have the privilege to keep company with you that you want to cultivate Lord Jesus.
Thank you a friendship with me that you want to speak with me, that you gave me a love letter so that I can hear your voice and know you and know who you are.
Thank you Lord for that privilege.
And if my heart doesn’t expect it, would you begin to mold in me a holy expectation that desires and anticipates that I have the privilege to hear the voice of God, posture, your heart with expectation.
The saw must put it this way in Psalm 27.
It’s one of my favorite verses, verse 13 and 14.
He says, I would have despaired unless I believed that I would see the hand of the Lord in the land of the living.
Did you see that expectation? There? He says, I would have despaired. I would have been hopeless.
I would have been down. My countenance would have been downcast man.
Except that I expect that I’m gonna see God.
I expect that I’m gonna hear God so I can wait patiently on Him because I have an anticipation, an expectation that God is going to come through on my behalf.
The prophet Harbach spoke to this as well.
If you look at his little book that is named after Him in the Old Testament, you’ll see that the entire first chapter of Harbach is calling out to God, mostly Him calling out to God and saying, Lord, how long are you gonna let this go on?
He’s looking around him at the destruction that he is seeing happening in his cult, in his nation, man.
If that don’t speak to us right now, I don’t know what is you and I can’t flip past all that’s happening on our Twitter feeds, our Instagram feeds the news channels that were watching and not see the vortex of chaos that is swirling all around us.
Harbach knows exactly how you feel.
And he calls out to God and says, how long Lord it seems like you’re just sitting back idly letting all this go on.
And so Lord I’m going to vocalize my concerns to you. My cares to you. I’m gonna be authentic.
I’m not gonna hold back and that’s the privilege we have in relationship with God.
He lets us ask our questions voice our concern.
He knows that in our humanity, we have some worries and some issues and some fears and he lets us come to hear him and bear it all.
But after Harbach bares it all, chapter two, he says, now I’m going to climb up on the watchtower and I’m gonna wait to see what it is that my king is going to say to me how God is going to respond to me?
Do you see that? He positions himself to hear from God?
He says, I’m gonna climb up on a watchtower back in biblical days, there was a stronghold or a citadel that would sit at the front of a, of a city and it was designed so that a soldier or a watchman could climb up to the top of this watchtower position himself above ground level circumstances.
In other words, he was saying, there’s too much chaos swirling around down here.
I’m gonna be distracted if I keep myself positioned here.
So I’m gonna climb up on the watchtower where I’m up above ground level distractions.
And I’m gonna position myself here because from this vantage point, I’ll have a clear view to the horizon and I expect that God is coming.
I have expectation that there is someone coming who’s going to deliver an answer for me.
And so because of that expectation, I’m gonna position myself in a place and in a posture where I can hear God where I can see his hand where I have a clear view and there’s nothing to distract me.
Position yourself, spiritual expectation and anticipation, but not just spiritually like a box position yourself physically. Do you see that?
He climbed up somewhere? He went to a place where there was some silence and some solitude.