There is a stranger living inside of you.
You feed your body three times a day. You educate your mind with years of schooling.
But this stranger, the most important part of you, is often left starving, silent, ignored. I am talking about the human spirit.
Today, we are going to solve the greatest mystery of the Christian life.
We are going to answer the question; how do I hear the voice of God?
Is it my mind? Is it the devil? Or is it the Holy Spirit?
Most believers live in a state of constant confusion.
They pray for guidance, but they don’t know how to receive the answer.
They make decisions based on logic, based on fear, or what their friends say, and then they wonder why they end up in a mess.
But the Bible teaches us that you have a built-in guidance system. We call it the inward monitor.
If you learn to listen to this voice, you will never make a wrong decision again.
You will know instantly whether a deal is good or bad.
You will know instantly if danger is coming.
You will have the wisdom of God flowing through you like a river.
I am going to introduce you to the hidden man of the heart. I am going to teach you the difference between your reasoning and your intuition.
And I am going to give you the practical steps to train your spirit so that the voice of God becomes clearer than the voice of your own mind.
To hear the voice of God, you must first understand who you are.
1 Thessalonians 5 : 23 says, I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless.
Notice the order.
Spirit first. This is where the confusion starts. Most people think spirit and soul are the same thing. They are not.
Your body is your contact with the physical world. It has five senses, sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell.
Your soul is your self-awareness; it will contact the intellectual world. It contains your mind, your will, conscience, imagination, your daily choices and your emotions. This is where you reason.
Your spirit is your contact with God. This is the real you, you were a spirit before you became a human. Your spirit is the part that is born again.
The scripture calls the spirit the hidden man of the heart.
1 Peter 3 : 4 says, Let it be the hidden man of the heart. Why hidden?
Because your physical senses are different than your spiritual senses. You cannot see your spirit in a mirror. You cannot feel your spirit with your hands. Surgeons can operate on the brain, but they cannot find the mind or the spirit.
Yet this hidden man is the one who hears God. God is a spirit. John 4 : 24 says, God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.
God does not speak to your brain; it is just a computer. He speaks to your spirit.
Romans 8 : 16 says, The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit that we are the children of God.
If you are waiting to hear a booming voice in your physical ears, you may never hear it, God only spoke to me once in an audible voice and it sounded like thunder and that is because I was homeless and freezing, He told me how to get free from Alcoholism, which is being mentally and physically different from people who can drink alcohol and it will not affect them like it does an alcoholic.
If you are waiting for a logical explanation in your mind, you will miss God.
God speaks spirit to spirit. And then your spirit passes the message up to your mind.
The tragedy of modern civilization is that we have educated the mind, but we have left the spirit in prison.
We spent years in school training the mind to reason. We spend hours in the gym training the body. But we spend almost zero time training the spirit.
As a result, the mind has become the master. The mind bullies the spirit. The mind says, If I can’t see it, it’s not real. If I can’t explain it logically, I won’t believe it.
This is why smart people often have the hardest time with faith. Their reasoning is so loud it drowns out the still, small voice of the spirit. Physical Sense knowledge has become the god of the modern church.
We trust what we see with our physical eyes more than what we sense in our spirit.
But your spirit is older than your mind. Your spirit was created in the image of God. Genesis 1 : 27 says, God created man in his own image. It has a capacity for knowledge that your mind does not have. It is called intuition, one of the senses of our spirit, we have nine main ones
Have you ever met someone and on the outside that looked perfect? They said the right things, they smiled. But deep down, something in your gut said, watch out, he is lying.
That was your spirit speaking. That was the inward monitor. But what did you do?
You let your mind argue with your spirit.
Your mind said, don’t be judgmental, he seems nice, look at his credentials.
So, you ignored the check in your spirit. And 3 months later, that person betrayed you.
And you said, I knew it. I knew it all along. Yes, you knew it. The hidden man knew it.
But you have been trained from living in this world to ignore your spirit.
Today, that stops.
So, what exactly is the voice of the spirit? It has seven when it is born again.
1-revelation, the Lord reveals things to you and a light comes on.
2 The fear of the Lord, the Holy Spirit searches our heart, and convicts of things in it, that should not be there.
3-Reverance- we honor him when we have a walk with him.
4-hope, the Holy Spirit is prophetic and shows us the plans he has for us.
5-Faith, faith is a fruit of our spirit, that comes to us when we can hear his voice, at first and foremost what the Holy Spirit reveals in the written word (the Bible) that is legal ours.
6- worship, we worship the Lord with our spirit and become aware of his presence.
7 intuition- we know things in our spirit, that our mind will often object to, until it is renewed.
8-prayer which is a two-way conversation, we talk to the Lord, and he answers through spontaneous thoughts, feeling about something the way he does where we sense His Spirit in the feeling. 9-first love, we learn how to love him with all our heart and put him first in our life.
When your spirit is born again, it receives the nature of God. It becomes a safe guide.
An unsaved man cannot trust his conscience, because his spirit is fallen, it is darkened, our conscience must be renewed.
But a born-again man has the life of God in his spirit.
Proverbs 20 : 27 says, the spirit of man is the lamp of the Lord, searching all the inward parts of the belly.
Your spirit is God’s lamp. It is the lamp He uses to light your path. He doesn’t light your mind; He lights your spirit. And your spirit illuminates your mind.
When the Holy Spirit speaks, It usually comes as a check, a stop signal, or a witness, a green light. It is rarely a sentence; it is usually a knowing.
You are about to sign a contract, and suddenly your peace disappears. You feel a check on the inside. It’s not logical, the deal looks great, the money looks great, but the warning is there. That is the voice of God.
He is trying to save you from a trap. We must learn to distinguish between the voice of the mind, reason, and the voice of the spirit, intuition.
This is the battlefield where most guidance is lost.
Reason is noisy, it is argumentative, it rushes, it panics, it pushes, it says, we must do this now, look at the deadline, look at the money, everyone else is doing it.
Reason bases its decisions on physical sense knowledge, what it can see, touch, and calculate.
Intuition, the spirit, is quiet. It is calm. It does not argue. It simply speaks, and then it is silent.
It says, don’t go there. Or it says, give this offering.
The reason the mind is so noisy is because it is terrified of being wrong.
The spirit is never terrified, because it is in contact with the Father.
Think about Elijah in the cave. 1 Kings 19 : 11 say, There was a great wind, but the Lord was not in the wind. There was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. There was a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire, a still small voice.
Why does God speak in a small voice? Because He is inside you. He doesn’t have to shout.
The person closest to you is the one who can whisper.
If you are busy, distracted, watching TV, scrolling social media and worrying about bills, your mind is like a construction site. Jackhammers, drills, shouting. You will never hear the whisper of the inward monitor in that noise.
You must learn to be still and know that I am God you must shut down the sense-knowledge faculties to let the revelation-knowledge rise up.
The greatest enemy of spiritual guidance is often common sense.
Now, common sense is good for crossing the street, but it is fatal for walking on water.
Common sense is based on past experience, it is based on the laws of nature, but God often leads us against common sense.
Common Sense told Peter, you haven’t caught any fish all night. The fish aren’t biting. Don’t lower the nets again.
But the voice of the master said, launch out into the deep. If Peter had followed his reason, he would have missed the miracle.
Common Sense told Philip, stay in Samaria. You are having a massive revival. Crowds are getting saved.
But the voice of the Spirit said, “Go to the desert”, to a lonely Rd.
Reason said, That’s stupid. Why leave a revival to go to a desert?
But Philip obeyed the inward monitor, and because he did, he met the Ethiopian eunuch and opened up the entire continent of Africa to the gospel.
Your reason will always try to talk you out of the leading of the Spirit.
Reason wants security.
The Spirit wants obedience.
When you follow reason instead of the Spirit, you step out of God’s protection.
So, practically, how do you tell them apart? Here is the test.
First, the voice of the Spirit always agrees with the Word.
The Holy Spirit wrote the Bible. He will never lead you to contradict it. If a voice tells you to leave your wife for another woman because God wants you happy, that is not the Spirit, that is your flesh.
The inward monitor is bound by the written Word.
Second, the voice of the Spirit requires faith.
Reason usually leads you to the safe path where you don’t need God.
The Spirit usually leads you to a path where if God doesn’t show up, you are sunk.
The Spirit challenges you. He stretches you.
Third, the voice of the Spirit brings peace, even in danger.
Reason brings anxiety. What if, what if?
The Spirit brings a peace that passes understanding. It might be a scary decision, but deep down, there’s an anchor. You just know it is right.
Colossians 3 : 15 says, Let the peace of God rule in your hearts.
The Greek word for rule there actually means act as an umpire.
An umpire decides if the ball is safe or out. Your peace is the umpire.
If the peace leaves, you are out. Stop. If the peace stays, you are safe. Proceed.
Now, how do we make this voice louder?
How do we train the hidden man so that he takes command over the mind?
There is a specific curriculum for training the human spirit. Just like you go to the gym to build muscle, you must do specific exercises to build spiritual sensitivity.
If you do these three things, your inward monitor will become sharp as a razor.
Exercise 1, Meditation on the Word. This is not just reading, this is eating.
Most Christians read the Bible to satisfy their mind. Oh, I read my chapter today.
That does nothing for the spirit.
Meditation is taking one verse and letting it soak into your spirit until it becomes part of you.
You must learn to feed the hidden man.
Matthew 4: 4 says, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.
When you meditate, you are shutting out the world and tuning in to God. You are quieting the mind.
And in that quietness, the word transforms from information to revelation.
Exercise 2. Practice instant obedience.
This is the hardest one.
When the inward monitor speaks, you must obey instantly.
Do not argue, do not wait, do not ask for a second opinion.
If the Spirit says, Go apologize to your wife, do it now. If the Spirit says, don’t watch this movie, turn it off now.
Every time you obey, the voice gets clearer. Every time you hesitate, the voice gets dimmer.
This is how you avoid a seared conscience.
1 Timothy 4: 2 warns of those having their conscience seared with a hot iron.
If you keep ignoring the alarm clock, eventually you stop hearing it. You sleep right through it.
If you keep ignoring the check in your spirit, eventually your heart becomes hard. You lose the sensitivity.
The only way to get it back is repentance and instant obedience in the small things.
Exercise 3, Praying in the Spirit.
1 Corinthians 14 : 14 says, For if I pray in an unknown tongue, my spirit prayeth, but my understanding is unfruitful.
This is the treasure of the Spirit. When you pray in tongues, your mind is on the bench, it is inactive. Your spirit is doing the heavy lifting. It builds up the hidden man.
It sensitizes you to the frequency of heaven.
Why is this so vital?
Because God wants to make you a master of circumstances.
He doesn’t want you to be a victim of the economy.
He doesn’t want you to be blindsided by the devil’s attacks.
The Holy Spirit has future knowledge. John 16: 13 says, He will show you things to come.
Imagine if you knew what was coming next week.
Imagine if you knew which investment would boom and which would crash.
Imagine if you knew where the accident would happen so you could avoid that road.
That information is available.
It is broadcasted by the Holy Spirit 24/7.
But you need the receiver turned on.
There are stories of businessmen who learned to listen to the inward monitor.
They avoided crashes, they made fortunes, not because they were smarter, but because they were connected.
The inward man is wiser than Wall Street.
The inward man is wiser than the best doctors.
Your spirit has the mind of Christ. So today, I am challenging you to change your leadership structure.
Fire your mind from the position of CEO, demote your mind to manager, and promote your spirit to CEO.
Your mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master.
Let your spirit, guided by the Word, make the decisions and let your mind figure out how to execute them.
From this day forward, stop saying, something told me.
That is disrespectful to the God inside you.
Say, My spirit told me. My inward monitor told me.
Start listening to the warnings. Start trusting the quiet peace.
You are one idea away from your breakthrough.
You are one instruction away from your miracle and that instruction is waiting for you in the still, small voice.
I want you to make a confession with me to seal this truth.
Place your hand on your belly, your spirit. Say this out loud.
My spirit is the lamp of the Lord.
I have the mind of Christ.
My inward monitor is awake.
I refuse to be led by my five physical senses.
I refuse to be led by fear.
I am led by the Spirit of God.
I obey instantly.
I hear clearly.
I know the voice of my shepherd, and the voice of a stranger I will not follow.