Discerning the Voice of God | Women of Faith

Priscilla and Jerry Shirer join Matt and Laurie Crouch on TBN’s Praise to discuss how to discern the voice of God. Listen as they discuss the different ways that you can listen to God’s guidance, with the primary understanding that the more you know Him, the more evident His voice will be in your life.

Good Morning Family Prayer For Today Heavenly Father, thank You for another day to see Your goodness in my life. Today, I take off the limits and embrace the dreams You’ve placed in my heart. Empower me by Your Spirit to fulfill Your plan for me in Jesus’ name. Amen. Keep God First……………

You do not know until hindsight that what you heard was the voice of God.
And the reality is that there is grace and mercy to cover our missteps and that the Lord in his graciousness toward us, his knowledge of our frailty and our humanity for the willing heart who desires to do his will, even when we make mistakes, he allows them to become our greatest teachers for hearing him correctly in the future.
He does not hold it against us because we’ve misstepped along the way.
Why is this subject matter? Something that is really important.
It is important because this facet of our faith is what separates our faith from every other so called faith on the face of the earth that our God lives.
He’s alive and he speaks to us, we have an actual relationship with him and that that’s so casually thrown around this whole relationship thing.
But what good is any relationship?
If nobody’s talking to each other, if there’s no communication, if there’s not a connectedness that is ongoing and continual.
So this issue of discerning the voice of God, first of all believing that he does speak.
But second of all trusting in the fact that as his kids, we have the privilege to actually discern and uh have a distinction of his voice between all the other voices that also want to get a word in edge wise.
That’s something that really can change and transform the trajectory of your entire Christian experience. OK.
Let’s, let’s lay a little bit of the ground rule in your, in your world where you’re our guest today, you and Jerry, uh Jerry jump in any time you want to, you’re much bigger than I am.
You can do that and you know, you’re a miracle worker that you got him on the show.
Jerry doesn’t come on. You’re just gonna have a good, we’re gonna, we’re gonna discern the voice of God.
Let me ask you a question in the Priscilla Jerry world. Uh Does God speak audibly?
Does he only speak through his word? Does he speak?
How, how, what are the different ways that you certainly know of that God speaks to you?
Um I’ve never heard the audible voice of God, babe. Have you?
I have not, no, no, not yet, but I think there is something internal in you that you, that you feel the presence of God and it lines up with scripture which confirms, OK, this is what I’m hearing.
That’s right. So the Holy Spirit of God Alumin scripture, the book is alive and he causes the, the old presets of scripture to have a now and a newness that applies and intersects with our personal experience.
So as Jerry mentioned, the Holy Spirit in us, confirms and corroborates and connects with the, the, the word of God and causes it to intersect with our experience.
So that, that verse that has something to do with David and Goliath.
All of a sudden, it’s not about David and Goliath, it actually applies to what you’re facing right then in your life.
And you understand it as a directive straight straight from God.
And then there’s the conviction, you know, the conviction of the Holy Spirit that, that green light of ease and peace that says, go that, that yellow light of warning and uneasiness that says hold up a minute till you get clarity and then that red light that is a straight up, no, there’s no peace, there’s confusion, there’s dissension, that’s the Holy Spirit’s way of telling you.
No, don’t go there. There’s a better. Yes for you. If you’ll just wait and be patient.
Have you ever heard the still small voice of the Lord in a phrase?
And an impression, what describe some of what is in discerning the voice of God, how, how the Lord speaks or how this conversation unfolds with you.
Yes. Well, most of the time, most of the time God speaks to me through his word, it is exactly what I described.
It is reading through a portion of scripture and on that day, it’s like the Holy Spirit has taken out a highlighter and it has highlighted this verse.
You have seen a million times before, but on that day, it leaps up off the page and it grips you.
That’s the only way I can really describe it is that it grips you in the depths of your soul and causes you to pause for a moment because it, it seems to be literally speaking to something that’s happening in your life.
Most of the time that that is the voice of God, we have discounted.
I think the power of scripture because if we say we want to hear from God and we never actually read the love letter that he wrote to us.
We don’t want to really hear from God and we rarely will because the canon of scripture is not only it not only provides the boundary into which everything God says to us will fall because he’ll never say anything that manipulates the scriptures or his character as revealed in the scriptures.
So it not only gives us the boundary, but it also provides for us the number one mechanism through which we have the privilege to hear Him in the first place.
Beautiful. So what the voice of the Lord sometimes feels like to me is like I’m remembering a conversation, not like I’m talking and, and going, hello Lord and he says, well, hello Matthew.
It’s nice to have you here with me today. Yeah, it’s been you know, OK.
So I’ve never had any kind of an experience like that at all.
Every time I felt like volumes of information get communicated in a, in a, in a snap of a finger and then it just feels like you’re remembering when we’re done with this conversation today and we’re out of this studio, we’ll be able to remember this conversation and we will be able to ultimately think back on it.
That’s, that is a way the Lord has communicated.
I have heard the still small voice say one word to me or two words, one time Hill song channel.
Six months later, the Hill Song channel was on the air. OK.
Uh We’re sitting here today, Laurie and I um you know, have often heard the story but just, just because of what we’re talking about and I wanted to set a little bit of the stage and by the way, what a thrill to have you guys.
Seriously. I mean, it’s like I’ve known your parents and I was like, what’s the matter with us, man?
I mean, so we met actually at TD Jakes church not long ago, uh behind us and made us laugh through the whole, I’m sorry for that.
I was cutting up and thank you for sharing.
Thank you for that because they were like, OK, when is this gonna be over?
You realize you’re making fun of a TD jake service.
It was a fantastic kids in church. For three hours.
They were, they were glad Matt was Uncle Matt was and just so that they wouldn’t freak out.
I gave him a little money too, you know, kind of bribing them anyway.
Uh, so for me, one, ok.
So one of the, the things that I think is pretty interesting about discerning the voice of God.
Again, it’s our love gift. Uh, this month gift offer this month is my mom and dad were working for somebody else in the sixties.
It was a TV station.
And after one very successful night, they were leaving the parking lot and the Lord said, I’ve released you from your work here.
Now, my parents believe it was almost like one of these moments where you look in the back seat, make sure that somebody not in the back seat, but they were in their car and my dad didn’t recall it as being an audible voice, but it might as well have been because he looked at my mom and said, you’re not gonna believe what the Lord just said to me.
And she said, no, I will. He said the same thing to me. He’s released us from our work here.
Very, very unique thing. They quit that job. I’m 11 years old.
My dad doesn’t go to work anymore.
This is, you know, here in southern California in the early seventies and then uh a few months later praying, the Lord said, had to say these words somehow because my dad heard call Angel Lerma was a gentleman that owned a TV station here in.
So he called and he said, uh, he said to, uh, Angel, he said, uh, I’m just calling you today, checking on your channel.
And there was a long pause on the phone, Paul, I just came from the board room.
We just had a board meeting just now. We just voted to sell this channel. Did you know that?
And he said, no, sir, I didn’t know that.
But based on that, I’d like to come see you.
By the end of that day, there was a deal worked out, which was the birth of TV.
N which was this channel here in Los Angeles.
Channel, 40 channels actually changed now because of digital, but that was channel 40 back in the day.
So here’s the, here’s the thing we’re sitting here today because of a couple of moments that the Lord was wanting to communicate to someone to see if they would respond to it.
Ok. So now 40 something years later, we’re sitting here, there’s 31 television networks on the air in 13 or 14 different languages.
And we are literally ultimately uh now communicating to the globe as we’re sitting here. OK.
So if everyone can realize it’s kind of an important subject that we’re talking about, OK. OK.
And so if everybody moved on something that God spoke to them, there is, you know, take another generation.
What would that become? What God had done if we would have obeyed that? And we’ve had that.
We’ve had that in our, I’m thinking about when we first got married, babe, where you’ve had these, these moments where like you said, there is almost like a huge conversation that has already happened and the wealth of it, it just downloads to you in an instant.
Um And, and one of those things happened when we were married for our very first year of marriage.
What happened? We were at a uh a family reunion on my father’s side of the family.
And uh I remember one of my cousins said, Jerry, do you realize that if you and Priscilla don’t have any boys, the Sharon will die with you.
I’m like, and I looked around and I’m like, wow.
And at that moment, I felt like Laura said to me, you, you have nothing but boys.
Wow. And so I looked at Priscilla and I told her what I said, you have nothing but boys.
We have nothing but boys. And uh I remember when our first son was born, Jackson, a boy.
Uh the second son, Jerry Junior, a boy. And it was so funny.
The third child, everybody, you know, oh, the way she’s carrying it, it’s a girl. It’s a girl.
I’m like, no, it’s not. It’s a boy.
And everybody asks me how confident was I that I knew that I was a boy.
And I told him years ago, the Lord told me I had nothing but boys because what he’s doing is starting a new generation of Shire men.
And uh I remember being in the delivery room and uh uh when, when, when Jude was coming out and his head was out, uh I said, oh, I bet you $1000.
That’s a, that’s a boy. The doctor said we haven’t seen everything yet.
I said, if that’s a girl, she’s gonna be with me for the rest of her life, that’s a boy.
But you know what, and, and some of the details of that that you have to know is that some of the, well, most of the men in Jerry’s legacy um did not live well, they didn’t honor God, they didn’t stay with their wives, they didn’t honor their kids nothing.
And so in that moment where he felt like the Lord said that to him, he really felt like the Lord was saying, I’m doing this on purpose.
I’m going to, I’m going to change what it means to be a shire man um through this legacy.
And he looked at me just barely into our first year of marriage and said, we’re gonna have boys.
God’s doing this on purpose and here we are 18 years later with our three boys.
And so we have high expectations that God’s got a plan for them.
Um And you don’t have any plan for any more kids. We actually do not. No.
She says, you know, she always says she always says from this stage, our youngest is Jude because that’s as close as she can get the revelation because it is finished.
It, it is finished. That’s the end of the line right there. Oh, gosh. Ok.
So start us out on. Um, because I know so many people wonder, oh, you know, how can I hear God’s voice for ourselves?
And I know or trust or trust it, how can I trust God’s voice when I do hear it?
Is that really Him? Is it me? Is it?
Well, let me, let me just start by putting a little grace over this entire situation.
The reality is that sometimes you do not know until hindsight that what you heard was the voice of God.
And the reality is that there is grace and mercy to cover our missteps and that the Lord in his graciousness toward us, his knowledge of our frailty and our humanity for the willing heart who desires to do his will, even when we make mistakes, he allows them to become our greatest teachers for hearing him correctly in the future.
He does not hold it against us because we’ve missed stepped along the way.
So um uh just grace for those of us who have ever heard God wrong and I wish we could get it, get it right.
One of the people I sort of interviewed when I was first writing that book many, you know, over a decade ago, uh now I interviewed He Henry Blackerby who wrote Experiencing God.
And I, you know, had my notebook out my pen.
I was gonna take a seminary class from Henry Blackerby, you know, and I said, how do you know when you’re hearing God?
And he gave me lots of incredible answers to that question. But really, he summed it up this way.
He said, the more you know God, the more clearly you can hear God.
There was really nothing for me to write down because it boiled down to Priscilla. It’s simple.
He said, the more you know Him, the more clearly you can hear Him.
So the reason why we go to the scriptures, the reason why we have quiet time, the reason why we fellowship with other believers who are gonna help us remain encouraged in our faith is because we’re just trying to get to know God when you know his character, when you know the nuances of what he does say and what he wouldn’t say because of how he spoke to our forefathers because of how he handled circumstances previously with people in the scriptures who were going through some of the same scenarios we’re going through.
Now, when you see his personality and his character, then you know, when you hear the voice of fear, uh uh that don’t sound like my God.
When you hear the voice of your ego, pride, jealousy, divisiveness, stepping in all that stuff that in our flesh is also trying to get a word in edge wise.
We can quickly, quickly pinpoint the voice of a stranger because if we know God, the more clearly, we can discern and divide his voice from a stranger.