“My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me.” -John 10:27

Knowing the Lord’s voice and hearing Him speak to you can be a complicated thing for Christians, especially when we get caught up in the world and lose sight of what God has in store for us or wants us to do. Personally, for awhile I’ve not been focused on listening to the Lord. That’s why I’m writing this article; to show give a practical guide to others about what I’ve learned in the few months that I strayed from being a listening sheep. First and foremost, any believer should know is that God always speaks privately. He will never try to confuse you by speaking through someone else. When we try to put the world and the Word at equal volumes, we will always end up confused. Either we turn up the world and turn down the Word, or we turn up the Word and turn down the world. Both cannot be right. It’s dangerous to ever think about doing the former and ignoring the latter. While there are times God will speak to us even without us knowing, I think it serves us well to mention how God will tell you something right the first time around. Having complete access to a sin filled world, Satan will always try to confuse you with lies, by always telling you something opposite of what God said. But he does it in steps. The earliest example we see of this in Scripture is in the Genesis account.

“Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?” (Genesis 3:1). First, Satan will always spread seeds of doubt. He knows that if you have not trained yourself to truly listen to the Lord’s voice, then he can get to you and cause you to sinfully doubt God; doubting God makes us unstable and causes Him to withhold things from us. The second and obvious thing Satan will do is outright contradict God. Eve told the serpent that God told them they will surely die, the serpent responded “you shall surely not die” (Genesis 3:4). This only opens us up to more lies and confusion along the way. Being patient is a common area in human life where we all struggle and fail. You couldn’t wait to get what you knew was yours, but you acted prematurely. Then you just can’t help but think to yourself “If only I had just waited.” (This hurts especially when it comes to possible relationships). What can we basically learn from taking the time to listen to the Lord’s voice? You’ll never be proven wrong because you’ll be listening to someone who’s infallible.