We’re talking about a critical step in the process of overcoming life’s detours—discerning the voice of God.
All too often, the fear of making wrong decisions because we missed God’s voice becomes paramount to us as believers. We all want to be good at discerning God’s voice among all the other voices that we are bombarded with on a daily basis. Being able to discern God’s voice will help us as we make life decisions: Which college should we go to? Should we marry this person? Which job should I take? What career path should I choose? The list can be quite exhaustive.
Detours can show up looking like illness, death, or hardship of any sort that we know we will have in our lives. (See John 16:33.)
Detours may seem like a long, arduous, totally unnecessary route to get us to where we need to go. Using a driving analogy, if we see a sign that says “Detour,” it always means that if we continue going in the same direction, we are either going to get to a point where we can’t go any further, or we may end up going over a cliff or hitting high-level water. We either end up crashing, or the journey becomes longer because we encounter obstacles that we could have avoided or that we were warned about.
We can draw a similar analogy to our spiritual lives and whose voice we are choosing to listen to. I heard a pastor years ago, and several others afterward, talk about spiritual GPS: God’s Positioning System. We can think of hearing God’s voice as listening to our spiritual GPS—our own internal detour navigator.
The key to tapping into this GPS is knowing the character of God and knowing that any doubt, negativity, fear, anxiety, hate, guilt, or shame is not of God. Right away, when those thoughts start to take root, we can flip the switch and turn up God’s promises so that His voice is the only voice that we hear. Philippians 4:8-9 tells us exactly how to do that.
God’s purposes for our lives that He established for us before He created us in the secret place will be accomplished, no matter how hard the devil tries to get us to quit or fail. We can turn up the volume of God’s Word so that we can withstand the darts of the enemy and tune out his lies and deception.
Are you listening to God's voice? Can you discern it from the distractions? If not, it may be time to dive into His Living Word!
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