Priscilla Shirer: Learn to Hear from God through His Word!
Learn to Hear from God through His Word! | Praise on TBN
Be encouraged and inspired as Priscilla Shirer gives practical tips on how to dive deep into God’s Word and hear His voice in your life!
“We pray because our own solutions don’t work and because prayer deploys, activates, and fortifies us against the attacks of the enemy. We pray because we’re serious about taking back the ground he has sought to take from us.”
― Priscilla Shirer, Fervent
I know you’ve got a tangled mess all around you in your family and in the culture and in your marriage with your Children and on your job and in your finances and your health and your aging parents or whatever it is that you’ve got going on.
I know it’s a whole big tangled mess.
But if you will just get back to the one thing, you’ll find that focusing on that one thing untangles everything I wanna share with you what I call the five P’s of Bible study like the letter P.
So, you know, if you like to take notes, I want you to get the notes out app on your phone or get a pen or a pencil, I want you to write these five ps down.
These ps have changed the way that I relate to God through his word.
And I say the word relates specifically because it’s not just about reading a book y’all.
This, this just ain’t no book.
It’s not just a regular um book filled with pages and papers and bound by leather.
It’s so much more than that. This book is alive.
The Holy Spirit makes it so that He shines a spotlight in the place where we most need to be fed, where we need guidance and direction.
So that God’s present word leaps up off the page and gives us exactly what we need for the circumstances that we are facing right now.
Don’t no regular book do that. This book is alive.
And so as we engage in it, we can relate to God through it because He speaks to us through his word.
So these five p have transformed my relationship with the Bible and with the, with God himself and I wanna share them with you.
Because what this means is that after today, on a regular Monday, regular Tuesday, on a regular Old Wednesday or Thursday or Friday or Saturday, you’re not sitting around twiddling your thumbs waiting until the next time a pastor preaches to you or a spiritual mentor um helps to uh give you opportunity to rightly divide the word of truth.
You thank God for those shepherds, but you’re not twiddling your thumbs waiting on them.
You know that you can have the privilege to go to God in His word and hear Him for yourself.
The first p of Bible study is to position yourself to hear from God real simple.
In fact, all five ps are 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. OK?
I mean, this in a spiritual sense.
But I also mean it in a physical sense, I wanna tell you about both when you come to God through his word that you’re gonna 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 gonna 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 uh 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 psalm is to 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 down cast. Man.
Accept 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 and expectation that God is going to come through on my behalf.
The prophet Habakkuk 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 Habakkuk is Habakkuk calling out to God, mostly him calling out to God and saying, Lord, how are you gonna let this go on?
He’s looking around him at the destruction that he is seeing happening in his culture, in his nation. Man.
If that don’t speak to us right now, I don’t know what it is.
You and I can’t flip past all that’s happening on our Twitter feeds, our Instagram feeds the news channels that we’re watching and not see the vortex of chaos that is swirling our all around us.
Habakkuk 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 Habakkuk bears it all.
Chapter two, he says, now I’m going to climb up on the watch tower and I’m gonna wait to see what it is that my king is going to say to me how God is gonna respond to me?
Do you see that? He positions himself to hear from God?
He says, I’m gonna climb up on a watch tower.
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 watch tower position himself above ground level circumstances.
In other words, he was saying, there’s too much chaos swirling around down here.
I won’t be distracted if I keep myself positioned here.
So I’m gonna climb up on the watch tower 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 e 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 clear view and there’s nothing to distract me, position yourself, spiritual expectation and anticipation, but not just spiritually like Habakkuk position yourself physically.
Do you see that? He climbed up somewhere?
He went to a place where there was some silence and some solitude.
There’s a whole lot of noise in life, isn’t it?
You’ve got your to do list and I’ve got mine, we’re trying to check the things off that we gotta do on our list.
When it comes to our kids and our marriage and what we’re cooking for dinner tonight and the demands of the job that we have and the ministry assignments that are before us and all of the things that we have to do that go into the regular rhythms of a 24 hour day.
There are so many ground level circumstances that aren’t unnecessary, they’re critical.
We gotta keep going from day to day, but there’s gotta be a moment of time where you decide I’m gonna climb up on the watch tower and have some space where there’s silence and solitude.
So that for just a few moments, there is nothing standing in the way of me seeing the king who is coming to respond to me, of me hearing clearly what it is that God has to say to me.
Now, this can be difficult. I know it because your house is probably busy like mine is many of you or you’ve got, you know, your phone buzzing and ringing and beeping and all the things that all of our devices do.
So this is going to take some intentionality on your part.
It’s going to take you being proactive, it’s gonna take you, you know, setting your alarm to get up a little bit early or when you’re in your car deciding that at this particular hour because I’m running errands all the time that I’m gonna turn off talk radio or I’m gonna turn down the music just a little while.
And I’m gonna use that opportunity while I’m sitting outside of my kids’ soccer practice.
I’m gonna use that as the 10 or 15 minutes or half hour that I’m going to devote to having some silence and solitude, pushing aside in my mind’s eye, all of the demands that I have so that I can have an opportunity to have a clear perspective on what it is that God wants to say to me.
So we position ourselves not just spiritually and expectation, but we position ourselves by prioritizing some space in our life where we can actually have a clear opportunity, more clear opportunity to hear the voice of God.
I wanna encourage you before we move on to the next p of Bible study to know that this does not mean that you have to have a specific place in your home that you go that is just devoted to prayer.
Sometimes, you know, we can look at people’s Instagram feeds and man, their quiet time looks so perfect, don’t it?
They’ve got their little white couch and their little white coffee cup and everything is so beautiful and amazing and immaculate.
It looks like the most beautiful photo shoot you have ever seen in your life.
That could be discouraging to regular folk who have, you know, like dinner dishes sitting over there from last night that we didn’t get to or we’ve got all the toys from all of our toddlers sitting around it or all the homework papers from our teenagers that are still scattered across the kitchen table from all the online schooling or we got the laundry sitting over there every single load that, you know, we washed and dried, but we dumped it out on the floor hoping that somebody was gonna come fold it at some point.
But there it still sits, still waiting on us and we look at the chaos of our life and we think, can I really have quiet time in here?
Can I really expect God to speak to me in a space like this? The answer is yes.
The enemy always wants you to think and me to think we’ve got to have something different about our space or different about our lives in order to actually meet with God intimately and personally ourselves.
But listen, if the bathroom is the only place where you can find some sil silence and some solitude, I gotta be honest with you and tell you that for many years when my Children were younger, I would sit on the edge of the bathtub, I would close the bathroom door.
I would lock that door and I would sit there and that’s where I would have time with the Lord.
I have a friend when her Children were young, she used to tell me that she would go into her closet like she made her actual closet, her prayer closet and she said, listen, I would sit right under the blouses where the blouses were with a flashlight.
That’s the only space that I could find to have a little silence and a little solitude for many of you.
It’s, it’s in your car. I mean, you’re in your car anyway.
Why not make that car a sanctuary a place where you can meet with God because you’re in that car anyway.
And you’re by yourself there. Why not make that an opportunity where you can make that space, a sacred space to meet with God.
You’ve seen people who are doing that.
You know, they’re driving down the freeway and you just see them worshiping God and you see their hands outstretched and you see they’re having a whole prayer meeting, a whole church service by themselves in the car.
They have made their car a place that can be a watch tower where they can meet with God around his word.
Position yourself. Oh, more now than ever. Brothers and sisters. We’re gonna have to prioritize positioning ourselves.
We’re getting a word from everybody else from the newscasters, from the media, from the politicians, from our friends, from opinion makers.
We’re getting news from everybody else.
We’ve got position ourselves, not just to hear them, but we’ve got to prioritize positioning ourselves to hear a word from God.
So once you position yourself and you’ve got your Bible or you know, you’ve got your electronic Bible in front of you and you’re looking at a particular passage of scripture, I wanna encourage you to choose a passage, not just you know, one verse here, one verse there, here, verse there, verse everywhere, verse, verse mm mm It taking little verses out of context like that can be incredibly dangerous.
But what you can do is take a whole book of the Bible, start it verse one and go all the way through.
Took me about two years to go through the book of John.
Like this, I would take one verse or two verses a day and I would make sure that I read right through.
So as to not take anything out of the context, not only of the chapter that it’s in, but the book that it is in because the story that God is telling um is linear meaning not, not only is every word and every verse God breathed, but the way it is located in the Scriptures is also God breathed.
So take a whole book of the Bible, maybe one that stood out to you recently that your pastor preached from and it was from the book of Ephesians or the book of John or the book of Habakkuk.
And just decide you’re gonna start right at the beginning.
And the second p actually has two P’s in it.
I want you to pour over the passage and paraphrase the major principles, pour over the passage and paraphrase the major principles.
When I say pour over the passage.
I mean, that real specifically, I mean, that as in opposition to scan the passage when I say poor, I mean, to meditate on it, to read it, not just once but to read it twice to read it in two or three different translations so that you can see different nuances of words that maybe need to stand out to you in a different way.
I mean, that you open up opportunity for you to have space and time to think through what it would be like.
If you were the woman that was caught in adultery in that passage that you just read, see how it would feel to have God speak over you.
Jesus say to you go and sit no more. It means you mule over it for just a little while.
Now. What this means at least what it means for me is that if I’m really gonna pour over a passage, not just scan it but meditate on it and think about it and wait for the Lord to speak to me through it.
That means that I can’t do that with a chapter or two at a time.
It means I can’t be more interested in quantity than I am with just quality time with God.
Remember it’s not about finishing. This is about you having a friendship with God so that you can be in sustained and encouraged and sense the presence of God in a practical way.
Not in theory, but know a friendship with God where you feel and know that he is speaking to you through his word.
So most of the time that means one verse or two verses, and I read those two verses and then I read them again and then I might underline whatever words seem to leap up off the page, then I might look those words up and I might think through the scenario that is surrounding them, the context around them.
For example, in Joshua chapter one, when Moses has just died, and the Children of Israel are now being led by Joshua into the promised land.
God says to Joshua over and over again, be strong and courageous.
He says, be strong and courageous, be strong and courageous.
And then he says, be careful not to let the word leave your mouth, but keep it close to your heart and close to your mind and meditate on it, day and night.
Meditate means to ponder it meditate actually means to press your mind upon it, to think through it, to evaluate it, do whatever you have to do to spend a little time, not just saying, well, I read a verse a day and you know a verse a day keeps the devil away.
This ain’t a checklist. This is you developing a friendship with God who is longing to speak to you.
Once I pour over a passage, a verse or two, then I’ll paraphrase the major principles.
I usually just have a notebook that’s sitting nearby or I’ve got the notes app on my phone or however you wanna do it.
And I just, for each verse, write down a sentence or two that paraphrases exactly what that verse said.
Now, I want you to resist the urge to try to be deep or to try to make it rhyme or sound clever.
You’re not trying to be clever.
You are literally just taking the words right out of the verse and writing down a paraphrase of what that verse says.
Usually when I get to this point in the five pieces, I will close my Bible and I’ll put it aside.
And now I’m just sitting and I’m looking at the paraphrased rendition of what the verse actually says.
That takes me to the third p, pull out the spiritual principles.
This is where I prayerfully look at those paraphrases.
And I look to see what spiritual principles are hidden in the paraphrase.
I ask God to show me, is there something he’s revealing about his character?
Is there a promise here that I’m supposed to heed? Is there a directive I’m supposed to follow?
Is there insight that I’m supposed to uncover? What is it that the verse says that’s the paraphrase?
But now I’m asking, what does this verse mean?
You will often find that there are spiritual principles that are hidden, you would not have uncovered.
This is the way God begins to speak. You won’t uncover it until you ask yourself, what does this mean?
Is there a direction that I’m being given? Is there something about God’s character that I’m supposed to believe?
And that I’m supposed to trust and prayerfully pray and ask the Holy Spirit.
This is what the old preachers used to call alum in the word.
Ask the Holy Spirit to illuminate and you will find that there are spiritual principles tucked there that begin to direct you.
Now, I wanna tell you really quickly here on this third piece, I want you to be encouraged to know that every single time I sit down to have my quiet time, which by the way, as much as I want it to happen every single day, sometimes it doesn’t because, you know, life happens.
But every time I do sit down, I want you to know that each time it doesn’t mean that I just find um God’s word spoken over my life just leaping up off the page every single time and it feels vibrant and fresh and on fire every time.
No, sometimes I’m reading along and it’s about the bu sites who were fighting the sites and the rights and the Canon nights and the other, I ate those.
Its and it just seems like a waste of time.
What in the world does this have to do with my personal life right now?
The crisis that I’m facing or God, what you want me to do with what I’m dealing with my child or my financial situation or my health, or the grief or the longing in my heart?
What does this have to do with that?
But I find that even those portions of scripture are vital to us because if nothing else, you’re still gonna ask yourself, what does this teach me about the character of God?
What did he do? What did he not do? What did he say? What did he not say?
What did he allow? What did he not allow?
It shows you who your God is and getting to know his character is what this is all about.
A friendship develops. Intimacy develops, the more we know, think about your regular friends, the more you know that person, the more you know, the nuances of who they are and how they think and what they say and what they wouldn’t say.
Then remember in John chapter 10 when Jesus said the sheep know my voice.
He says they do not respond to the voice of a stranger.
The only way to be able to detect the voice of a stranger is if you know God well enough that when the enemies chooses to speak fear over your life or when your ego tries to get a word in edgewise, or when your pride is trying to sneak in there, or when the opinions of the culture in the world sound true.
The only way you’re gonna know if it ain’t God is if you’ve come to know his character so well, that you can detect the voice of a stranger a mile away.
You know, my God would never say or do that.
My brother Anthony, um, is named after my dad.
So I got Anthony Senior and Anthony Junior and they walk alike, they talk alike.
Uh There’s so much alike about the two Anthony’s and I’ve seen my brother use this to his advantage and kind of fool people.
I remember when we were growing up, people would call the house and so he’d answer the phone.
People thought they were talking to pastor Evans and so they’d give him the whole story of whatever they were calling for.
He’d get all the juicy details before saying dad, somebody’s on the phone for you.
I remember one time he went up to the ticket counter at American Airlines so that he could get his ticket to get on the airplane.
And he said, well, my name is Anthony T Evans and he showed the license, it said that he was Anthony Evans.
So they pulled up my father’s profile and my father had executive platinum status because he flies so much.
So immediately they upgraded Anthony gave him first class treatment.
Put him in first class, let him eat the meal that first class because he got all of that because he was able to confuse people because they are so similar to each other.
But let me tell you who he can’t confuse me and other members of the family.
If the phone rings in the first two minutes of the conversation or two seconds rather of the conversation I’m having with either Anthony, I can tell you exactly which Anthony I’m talking to because no matter how similar they sound, I have known them for so many years and been a part of their life and them, a part of my life in so many specific ways that they cannot confuse me.
Because I know the two Anthony.
Do you see the more you know God, the more clearly and easily you’re going to be able to put a finger on the voice of the enemy when he comes by trying to play you for the fool.
So you pull out the spiritual principles.
Once you pull out the spiritual principles, here’s the fourth p pose, the question. OK.
This is where you turn the spiritual principle.
You just pulled out, you turn it into the form of a personally directed question, man.
This is where the rubber meets the road.
This is when the Holy Spirit starts speaking because you say to yourself, am I living in a way that’s congruent with that spiritual principle that I just wrote down?
Am I heeding that promise? Am I behaving in that way? Is my attitude adjusted to that?
Have I forgiven that person? Have I been committed in my ties? Have I submitted to that authority.
Maybe that verse said that I need to be still and see the salvation of the Lord.
Have I been still or have I frantically been trying to figure out everything on my own? Lord?
What is it that you’re asking me to do? Ask yourself a personally directed question.
And when you start asking honest and authentic questions of the text, you will find that the Holy Spirit starts giving you the answers.
He starts shining a spotlight on the areas of your life and mind that I didn’t even existed that I need to get right with God that I need to line up so that I am in line for the favor and promises of God to be experienced in my life so that I have fresh revelation of God’s truth so that I can see clearly where in the culture or in the opinion of my friends.
Actually, that is antithetical to what it is that God is saying uh in His word and listen, there are two answers to every question God’s answer and everybody else’s and everybody else is wrong when they are in contradiction to what it is that God has said.
So as the Holy Spirit starts answering in your spiral notebook, you write down what it is that he’s been saying in your notes, write down the parts of your life that are coming to life like the palmon psalmist said, search me, oh God know me find out if there’s any way in me that ain’t like you so that I can get back to being in right relationship with you and having the opportunity, Lord to experience everything you have for me.
And after you pose the question, plan, obedience and pin down a date to obey.
Now, the reason why that’s critical is because we seem to plan for everything else except obeying God.
We’ve got a plan for our physical health.
We’ve enlisted a trainer, we’ve got our meals planned out for the week. We’ve got a membership at a gym.
We plan for our financial security.
We got a financial advisor to make sure that we can retire at the age that we want to so that we can save the way we want to.
We’ve planned um for the project that’s due at our job to make sure that we are working incrementally and progressively to make sure that the segments of the project are each done.
Well, we plan for everything except honoring God as God makes clear to you what he’s asking you to do, forgive that person or write that blog post that was on your heart to write or move forward in starting that business or stepping out in faith from the place that you’ve been employed, whatever it is, God’s asked you to do, make a plan.
I mean, on paper, be obedient to God intentionally and deliberately and then enlist accountability so that you can have some people around you.
This is what church and family, the family of God is all about.
Put some people around you who will challenge you and ask you and get all up in your business and say, did you do what God has asked you to do?
Make a plan to be obedient to God?
