Hearing God And Obeying God Walk Hand In Hand

As a young man pursuing the things of God and an entrepreneur, I have come to realise that a lot of us in the body of Christ and even in the corporate world desire the voice of the Lord. However, it is worth noting that hearing God opens the channel for you to obey His glorious voice. When God comes to you, He always does so with an assignment, a mandate or a ministry. I have had many experiences where God spoke to me and my response was to obey exactly what He told me. I will share one of them with you but first, let us take an example from Abram in Genesis 12:1-4.

“Now the Lord had said to Abram: ‘Get out of your country, from your family, and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing: I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you: and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’ ”

Once he heard the voice of the Lord as recorded above, Abram, in the 4th verse, obeyed by leaving his country, family and father’s house. “So Abram departed as the Lord had spoken to him, and Lot went with him. And Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.” Later in his life, when God had changed his name to Abraham, he heard God’s voice instruct him to sacrifice his son, Isaac (Genesis 22). Immediately, he got up to obey the divine instruction. Thankfully, God saw Abraham’s genuine heart of obedience and intercepted this sacrifice in the nick of time.

One night, I remember I saw in a dream that I had given a pastor an amount of one thousand euros. In the dream, immediately after giving him the money, I began to get phone calls from old and new contacts about opportunities and contracts. As soon as I woke up from the dream, I knew what it meant. God was calling me to sow a seed in the life of a man of God. I obeyed and things began to play out as I saw in the dream.
God enjoys speaking to us and is looking for men who will be ready to move immediately when they hear His voice. Sadly, many of us ignore the voice of the Lord when we hear Him. All the more so when the voice comes with a task. If you desire to hear the voice of the Lord, then you must equally desire and be ready to obey His every dictate. You need to begin to pray for a heart that can discern the voice of the Lord and a spirit that can obey Him.

God’s commandments are not burdensome (1 John 5:3). Nonetheless, when it comes to hearing from God, obedience can be a very difficult task for two main reasons. Firstly, you hear from God, most of the time, out of your intimate relationship with Him. It is an affair between you and Him and therefore, there is no third party to oblige you to obey. You need to have the personal conviction and willingness to obey. No one else might motivate you to obey God because they have no idea what God told you personally. Secondly, there are many times you hear the voice of the Lord but are unsure whether it is the Lord or your mind. This uncertainty can make you hesitant to obey.

To deal with it, you can always ask for a sign that proves if it is God. For instance, in a situation where you hear God telling you to give a certain amount of money to the needy, you can ask Him for a sign. One of the best ways is to ask Him for a scriptural confirmation. You might later hear Proverbs 19 or specifically, Proverbs 19:11 which says, “He who has pity on the poor lends to the Lord, and he will pay back what he has given.” This can be a sign but always be in tune with the Spirit. The sign might even come from a radio programme you chance upon in which a donation to an orphanage is spoken about. You can always ask for a sign.

In Judges 6, when God spoke to Gideon about a battle, Gideon asked for a sign. “So Gideon said to God, ‘If You will save Israel by my hand as You have said-look, I shall put a fleece of wool on the threshing floor; if there is dew on the fleece only, and it is dry on all the ground, then I shall know that You will save Israel by my hand, as You have said.’ And it was so. When he rose early the next morning and squeezed the fleece together, he wrung the dew out of the fleece, a bowlful of water. Then Gideon said to God, ‘Do not be angry with me, but let me speak just once more: Let me test, I pray, just once more with the fleece; let it now be dry only on the fleece, but on all the ground let there be dew.’ And God did so that night. It was dry on the fleece only, but there was dew on all the ground.” (Judges 6:36-40)

Furthermore, hearing God comes with a responsibility so desire to know what the responsibility is. Many people receive various revelations in their dreams about their family and friends. To some, God even gives foreknowledge about things that will take place in their families before they happen. When you have such revelations, they come with the responsibility to pray and stand in the gap, as an intercessor, for your family and friends. An intercessor is one who pleads the cause of others before the Lord. I will speak about the ministry of an intercessor in another blog post. Always dreaming about people is a call to pray and stand in the gap for them just like Ezekiel 22:30 says: “So I sought for a man among them who would make a wall, and stand in the gap before Me on behalf of the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found no one.”
Finally, I encourage you to desire to hear the voice of the Lord because by desiring it, you will get to know His will for you in this life. The voice of God gives you access to God’s blueprint for your life. In the year 2018, I embarked on a 40-day fast to hear God concerning my life. In that fast, I learnt a lot about my assignment in this life. I started this blog because Jesus Christ appeared to me in a dream and commissioned me to start a blog called Glorious blog to tell the world about how He has led me and continues to lead me in my ministry and life.

Jesus Christ, our prime example, always had full access to the voice of His Father whilst on earth. By that, He was able to accomplish His mandate. In John 5:19, He said: “… ‘Most assuredly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner.’ ” This tells us that when Jesus walked on the earth, He walked constantly in obedience to the voice and blueprint of His Father. It means that every single step or move He made was according to a vision or directive from God.

May God anoint us and give us grace to walk in such strong dimensions of vision, hearing and obedience! You can kindly share in the comment section any assignment or mandate God has spoken to you about.