Priscilla Shirer: God’s Word is in Your Heart

Priscilla and Jerry Shirer join Matt and Laurie Crouch on TBN’s Praise to discuss the first step to hearing God. Listen as they discuss how God’s word is in your heart and it’s always been there, we just have to learn how to tune into it.

“The spirit of complaint is born out of an unwillingness to trust God with today.
Like the Israelites, it means you are spending your time looking back toward Egypt or wishing for the future all the while missing what God is doing right now.”
― Priscilla Shirer

The Holy Spirit, what He does is turn your desires so that they are in alignment with God’s will.
So you actually want what it is that God wants you to want.
That’s what I believe the psalmist meant when he said that he gives you the desires of your heart.
So John 10:27 to me is the most concise and comprehensive verse in scripture about hearing god.
It is when Jesus says my sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.
He says, you gotta be my sheep to hear my voice. So you said new Christians. Listen.
That relationship right there is the the connector that allows you access to the voice of god.
So so to me, the first step is actually believing that as an adopted son or daughter grafted into the family of god, that you have the capacity innately because you’re part of the family to now hear the voice of god.
It’s like, we were growing up in our house, I don’t know about you guys, but we didn’t have access to a whole lot of cable television.
My parents didn’t get cable. They didn’t get, you know, whatever DirecTV, all that stuff.
We didn’t have any of that stuff. Right. And I I felt a little mad about that.
I really wanted to have more channels than my parents chose that we could really only the cosby show on Thursday at 07:00 and then a different world.
So it wasn’t until we were we were getting ready to get married. I moved out.
I remember the day I had the cable guy come over, hook up the cable.
And after he did all that hooking up, he said, here’s the remote control, push the guide button, and I pushed the guide button.
At I had never seen so many channels in my life on the screen.
I had no idea all those channels were there. Now all those channels didn’t just get created that day.
They had always been there. It’s just I didn’t have the right hookup so that I could tap into them and bring them and draw them down into my experience.
The Holy Spirit is the hookup. Yeah.
When you place faith in Jesus Christ, if he’s just chapter 1 says the moment you believe, you receive the hookup.
The Holy Spirit. Now you are able to draw down divine channels. It’s not that you created him. No.
They were always there. God speaking. He wants to reveal himself. Now you have the the opportunity to hear them.
So really the first step, especially if you grew up in an environment where this concept is sort of, unique and different and new for you, It’s to believe that as a as a privilege of being a son or a daughter, you can hear from god.
Here. It is the deception of the enemy to cause us to think we have to have a seminary degree.
We have to have some special hotline connection with god like somebody we may admire.
That we as regular men and women can’t hear from God. That’s what the enemy wants you to think. Right.
He doesn’t want you to know it’s your birthright.
And so believing that you can is the first step to hearing god.
So, 1 of the things I love about the Holy Spirit work in us, and this is in regards to hearing god, but his work in us is to sanctify us.
Sanctification is the process by which we are molded into the image of Jesus Christ.
It is the process by which our mind changes, our ambitions change, our desires.
We start wanting stuff we’ve never thought we want. We stop wanting things.
We never thought we’d ever not wanna want to to separate ourselves from.
All of a sudden, we find ourselves unnerved by jokes that we use to laugh at or company we use to keep.
It just doesn’t work for us anymore. That’s the work of the Holy Spirit.
So in regards to discerning the voice of god, if anybody’s ever concerned or afraid like I have been that, oh, god might say to me something I don’t want.
The holy spirit, what he does is turn your desires so that they are in alignment with god’s will. Yes.
So you actually want what it is that god wants you to want.
That’s what I believe the psalmist meant when he said that he gives you the desires of your heart.
He doesn’t give you what you want. He actually puts his desires.
In your heart so that you want what he wants.
Let me tell you, a practical application of that.
When we were first married, And before we had children, we lived in Orange County, California.
I grew up in Newport Beach, California. So, LA County was more like enemy territory.
We, you know, we we didn’t really under stand the big city of Los Angeles.
If you live in a suburb of Orange County, LA County, LA. It’s it’s real different.
It’s
just a real different environment. And and then the lord called us to Hollywood.
So we packed up our little kids and we went to Los Angeles, bought a home in LA, and lived there for 15 years.
Lori told me that I’m so used to Orange County.
When I need grocery shopping, I’m gonna get my kids, put them in my car.
I’m gonna drive back down to Orange County.
How far a drive was that?
35 40 miles.
K. Yeah.
And I’ll do my grocery shopping and then come back. We had planned that.
So we bought a house that felt like this kind of sanctuary up on the side of a hill, and and we were very protected, and it felt really good when we were at home, but we just were very, you know, the the surrounding was not gonna work for us.
Within days, the changing of our attitude and the Holy Spirit that we fell in love with this area, we started It was when god called us to Hollywood, he changed the very inside of who we were.