HOW TO HEAR GOD’S VOICE

Hearing God’s Voice Tell Me Where to Find Lost Money

I went to pick up a check for a job I had done. The customer had left the country on a trip, and they told me where they would leave the check. It was waiting for me where they said, and I was glad to get it because it was for a sizable amount of money. It was a very windy and cold day, about 35 degrees, and raining moderately. With one hand occupied with paperwork and needing the other hand that held the check to get my car keys, I put the check between my teeth and proceeded to open the car door.

I did not have a good enough grip on the check between my teeth, and the wind got a hold of it and sucked it away. It went up and away from me as I helplessly watched it soar further up into the sky. Certainly, it would just fall back down to the ground, I thought. But it didn’t. It continued to climb at a steep 11 o’clock angle over the houses in that rural neighborhood.

I was retrieving the check from a small subdivision in a heavily wooded area. It rose during the next twenty or thirty seconds, I would guess, probably about the height of twelve telephone poles, and then it disappeared from sight. I knew it would be hard to have the check canceled and a new one issued because they were traveling and I had no way to call them to have them cancel the check. I was very angry with myself for doing such a stupid thing as to clench a check between my teeth in the heavy wind.

At first, I decided to run in the direction that the check first started to blow. Most of the houses had fences to climb and many of the yards had dogs that barked in such a manner to suggest they had not been fed recently! The ground, yards, and fields were very soggy, and my shoes got muddy quickly. I swiftly abandoned my attempts at the pitiful chase.

Next, I got into my car to drive toward where I thought the check went. I soon discovered many of the roads were dead ends. After making quite a few turns, I became very lost because I had never been in this area before. I had no clue if I was downwind from where the check went up because the wind constantly was shifting directions.

I was ready to give up when deep in my spirit, the Lord gently asked me, “Why don’t you ask Me to lead you to the check?”

In one of those duh moments, I paused and reasoned why I didn’t think of that and asked for His help. He was just waiting for my invitation!

This was not the first time that I needed the Lord to lead me somewhere. I remembered how the Lord had led me up to the door in Monterrey, Mexico, a city of three million people, when I had forgotten to take the names, addresses, and phone numbers—everything we needed to get to where we were going. He impressed me with all the turns for about 25 minutes until we got there. In essence, this would be no different.

I decided to ask Him and trust Him to lead me to it. That was the easy part. Now came the tough part. Just how would I be led? I reasoned I would have to make the turns according to any kind of leading He would give me. I went for a little while, then sort of perceived I should go left, then some distance, and made another turn in the same direction.

The leadings were not strong and after making about ten turns this way, I was thinking I was just wasting my time. However, since I had nothing to lose, and some big money to gain, I decided I would follow this through to the end.

All of a sudden, I heard very clearly and strongly the voice of the Spirit yell, “Stop!” and I did.

Then just as strong, I heard, “Back up!” and I did. Then another “Stop!”

No longer was it just weak impressions, but now the voice of the Spirit was strong and emphatic. Then silence. That was it, nothing more. I looked to the left, then to the right, where a white object about fifty yards away got my attention. I couldn’t tell what it was from where I was, but I got out, walked through the tall grass, and realized as I approached that it was about the size of the check. When I got to it, I discovered it was the check. Not only that, but I found the check to be dry despite the 20 minutes of drizzling rain while I searched.

I was very excited. There were so many places that the check could have ended up. There were land parcels that had foot-tall grass, several acres of car salvage junk yards, subdivision excavations, and four or five large areas of woods. I was approximately a mile from where I lost it. Finding this check was no coincidence. Trusting God pays—literally. Now my joy was full.

God wants to help us through the issues of life, and he is waiting for us to ask Him. You can see that being led by the Spirit covers every aspect of life. Experiences like this cause me to thank God and desire to be even more efficient in picking up leadings from the Spirit. Would you think that leadings could bring physical healing? They can and did. Read on to see one.

God’s Voice Tells Me How to Receive a Miraculous Healing

I’ve heard warnings about the correct way to lift heavy objects, but have ignored them when I moved pianos. However, the day came when I would regret that I hadn’t paid attention to them. I had to lift one end of an old tall piano to do some work on it. I bent over to reach the bottom of the piano and lifted the back corner of it because there was no other place to grab it.

As I tried to straighten my legs, I felt and heard a loud snapping sound come from my right knee. The searing pain let me know something bad had happened. I tried to ignore it, thinking it did not amount to anything and hoping the pain would go away in a day or two. I thought it would just heal up on its own, but it didn’t. It just changed. It no longer was searing pain but a bad ache that turned into stabbing pain when I moved my knee or walked on it.

As time went on it got worse and worse until I was limping and could not hide it. Strangely the side areas of my knee went numb, and I could poke it with something as sharp as a pin and could not feel it. It got to the point that just rolling over in bed caused so much pain that it woke me out of deep sleep.

I didn’t make much of it, but Carol started noticing something was going on. I guess I was doing the macho thing that we guys do to look manly. Some of my customers would notice my cover-up attempts and ask about my problem. What really bothered me was when a couple of my nurse customers began to tell me that I had torn a ligament, tendon, or something that would not heal on its own but would require surgery.

Being self-employed and having only major medical insurance, I was not the least bit open to surgery and the costs that would have to come out of our pockets. Also, I could not afford downtime for healing after surgery. Customers would just move on to another tuner, and I would lose clientele.

Therefore, I prayed and believed God for healing with scriptures like Matthew 8:16-17, “When evening had come, they brought to Him many who were demon-possessed. And He cast out the spirits with a word, and healed all who were sick, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, saying: ‘He Himself took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses.’” and Matthew 21:22, “And whatever things you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive,” and many other similar healing scriptures.

I was not receiving that healing fast enough, so my frustration grew because it was so hard to walk, move that leg, or sleep with the pain. If I sat at the desk or watched TV, I would prop it up on a chair, hassock, or anything to make the pain less.

It had been several months since the accident and my condition was getting progressively worse. As I sat at the desk trying to work on income taxes (that will make anything worse), I said in my heart, “Lord, I don’t know what else to do but just thank You for my healing.” I wasn’t in an I’m-praying-right-now mode, but halfway between a mutter to myself and a conversation with the Lord.

Suddenly, the Spirit spoke and said to me, “Have Carol lay hands on your knee and pray, and you will receive your healing.”

I was startled. That was about the last thing I was expecting to happen. That sounded good to me! I called her and told her what the Lord said. She laid her hands on my knee and prayed a short to-the-point prayer for the healing to be manifested. We both thanked the Lord and went on to do what we each had been doing.

Do you know what happened? Nothing obvious. I could not detect any improvement; the pain continued to throb like usual. My leg was propped up on a stool under my desk, and I continued taxes for another two hours.

Finally I finished my desk work so with both hands, I reached down to lift my leg off the stool. I did not feel any pain. Then I stood up, bent the leg, flexed it, and still felt no pain. Then I put my weight fully on it, did knee bends, and did every maneuver I could think of. No pain. I thought I should poke the side areas of my knee with a pin to see if the feeling there had returned. It did because now I could feel that pin prick especially well.

Sometime in those two hours, the Lord repaired my knee and I was not even aware of it. All because of that leading from the Spirit and both of us being obedient to do what the Lord said. It’s been many years now and I have never had any problem with that knee. It works so well that the only way I can tell which knee hurt is to look it up in the written records I have kept for many years. It was a very dramatic healing.

Don’t get discouraged if things don’t happen right away. I had prayed for my knee for months but still had knee problems. Jesus’ disciples had fished all night and caught nothing. Then Jesus comes along to tell them to cast their nets into the water on the opposite side of the boat, and they make a massive catch.

The prophet tells Naaman to dip in the dirty River Jordan seven times and he would be healed. Naaman wasn’t the least bit interested in dipping one time in the dirty Jordan, much less seven times. However, at his servant’s wise advice, finally relented and did, and was healed.

Sometimes things don’t always go the way we expected, and we exhaust ourselves trying to do everything we can think to do. If we’re not careful, we’ll be so tired or frustrated that we miss it. But how often might the Spirit have spoken to us and we didn’t catch it?

Do you think the Holy Spirit might have whispered into your spiritual ear and told you to do something, but you didn’t catch it? You can sensitize your spirit to hear what the Spirit says. And hearing His voice can save lives!

Hearing God’s Voice Stops a Murder

God can influence people for our benefit. He even influences them when they are not aware of it. You may pray about a situation, and He pushes someone to do something as an answer to your prayer. You might pray about not being able to afford a car, and God impresses the seller to inexplicably drop the price even though it is contrary to their normal behavior.

This is not what is usually meant by being led by the Spirit, but God can influence people even if they are not aware of it. Being led by the Spirit though is a very practical operation of the Spirit of God for the believer in Jesus. It is part of our inheritance as sons of God.

What you are reading are excerpts from Steve Jackson’s new book, Getting Direction from God: How to Know What God Is Saying in Your Daily Life. In the book, Steve teaches you how to hear God’s voice and respond!
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Many people have called me to tune their pianos and say things like, “I don’t know why I picked you out of all the tuners in the Yellow Pages.” Sometimes they have an awareness that they were supposed to be calling me but didn’t have a clue as to why. Others open their door to me and blurt out problems like they are going through a divorce, their teenager is on drugs, their adult son had just been put in prison, someone in the family just committed suicide, or they are going to kill their spouse. This has happened to me many times.

I even had one person tell me to forget the piano and just sit down and talk with them. They said they would pay me a double piano tuning charge just to talk with them. People are in desperate situations and God is looking for Christians who are available and ready to do His will. He wants to use each of us the same way. How many times do you think you missed the opportunity?

Once I had barely entered the house of a woman in her late 30s when she blurted out, “I’m going to kill him! I’m going to kill him!” She continued to repeat that three or four times. I thought she was just speaking flippantly as people sometimes do, but she was too angry about that. I figured she must have had a fight with someone, or she was just blowing off steam because something had gone wrong.

At first, I was going to do what I was called to do and mind my own business. I never push myself upon my customers—unless the Lord tells me to. And this was one of those times He told me to. He told me to involve myself. So I did. This was another time when I needed to be sensitive to what the Spirit wanted me to do.

I asked her what was going on. She looked stunned at my question, and matter-of-factly just said, “I’ve bought a gun, some ammunition, and I’m going to kill my husband.”

I still thought she was kidding or that I misunderstood what she was really talking about. I inquired, “You are going to kill your husband?”

“Yes,” she bluntly replied with no emotion, just cold determination. After a few minutes of conversation, I finally found out what the situation was. Her husband was an executive for a company, and he flies a lot to Sweden for work trips. His trips were becoming more frequent and longer and she was beginning to suspect something.

She hired a detective who discovered her husband was having an affair with a woman in Sweden and was covering it up with a well-woven story that his employment was the reason for his frequent trips. His work was the reason at first. His employer did send him on regular trips for the company, but at some point, he met a Swedish woman and became attracted to her. Trips to Sweden became more frequent and most of them were not scheduled by his employer.

Not only did she discover the affair, but my customer also noticed that their joint savings and retirement accounts had been dwindling. It turned out that her husband had taken out a huge amount of money and put it into a joint account in Sweden under the names of this woman and himself.

Needless to say, when my customer found out through the detective’s investigation about the affair and the missing money, she was furious and had determined what she was going to do. Her husband was soon going to be back from another business trip, and she and her gun were waiting for him to arrive at the house. Here I was, just before a murder!

That situation for me that day was a hot potato, and there was no one else to throw it to! I did not want to be there. I picked up leadings from the Lord on what to do and said what He gave me. It was not the way I would have thought to go.

As she began to cool down, I told her, “If you kill him, that ends the affair, but you will go to prison for what will probably be the rest of your life. Is that a very smart thing to do? Wouldn’t it be better to go through legal channels which bring a better conclusion like destroying the affair, keeping you out of prison, and getting financial restitution and a settlement so that you could go on with your life?”

Reason and sanity finally prevailed. She broke down and realized she was on a bad path. She said she knew what I said was the right path to take, but it took my saying it for her to have the reality check she needed. The poor lady had already contacted a lawyer but stopped working with them because of losing her grip on the right way to do things.

Sometime later I checked with her, and she had taken the legal route to deal with matters. Following through with those spiritual leadings we get from the Holy Spirit can and does make huge impacts on people’s lives, more so than we will ever know. Can you see yourself as a minister of reconciliation? Being led by the Spirit is an exciting and satisfying realm. Why don’t you start it today?