Do you really believe in God and trust Him to take care of you? Do you think you have to figure out your life and make all your plans and then ask God to bless them? If that’s how you think, you might want to re-think some things. There is a difference between thinking and hearing from God. You hear God with your spirit, not with your mind. If you’re thinking, then you’re not listening.
You need to locate your spirit. It’s somewhere near your stomach region, near the center of your being. You know how the Bible talks about your heart and your bowels of compassion? That’s talking about your spirit. If you try to learn more and grow spiritually through your mind, you are using the wrong instrument. The Bible tells us to have the eyes of our heart enlightened, not the eyes of our mind enlightened. If you are trying to gain spiritual knowledge by feeding from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil instead of the tree of life, you will inevitably go in the same direction as Adam and Eve and be turned away from God rather than toward Him.
Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God, but you can’t hear the Word unless you can really hear God. And you can’t obey what God is telling you to do if you can’t hear Him in the first place. So you need to be able to hear from Him in order to obey Him.
We need more than just the general guidelines and commandments that are written in the Word. We need more than our own thoughts, opinions and ideas to go on. We are exhorted to live by the Spirit so that we will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh, not to live by logic, sound reasoning and what we consider to be wise counsel. The Holy Spirit was given to us to lead us into all truth. He reveals to us the things of Jesus. The Holy Spirit speaks to us through our spirit. That’s why we need to know how to listen with our spirit. We are living epistles being written by the Holy Spirit. There are situations in our lives that are unique and not already written in scripture, so we need to be able to hear from God today, because He has specific plans and purposes to be carried out in our lives.
How is making your own plans and asking God to bless them believing Him and trusting Him to take care of you? If you believe then you will obey. If you trust, you will follow through with God’s plans. You will know that His plans are better than yours. But to know His plans, you need to be able to hear His voice. Learn to hear His Spirit with your spirit, then listen to what He says and obey what He tells you to do. Then you will really be believing and trusting Him to take care of you and you will be fulfilling what He put you here to do.
Prov. 19:21 Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it is the LORD’s purpose that prevails.
Heb. 3:7, 15-19 Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says: Today, if you will hear His voice… 15 Then while it is [still] called Today, if you would hear His voice and when you hear it, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion [in the desert, when the people provoked and irritated and embittered God against them]. And to whom did He swear that they should not enter His rest, but to those who disobeyed [who had not listened to His word and who refused to be compliant or be persuaded]?
19 So we see that they were not able to enter [into His rest], because of their unwillingness to adhere to and trust in and rely on God [unbelief had shut them out].
"Oh that God would give every mother a vision of the glory and splendor of the work that is given to her when a babe is placed in her bosom to be nursed and trained! Could she have but one glimpse in to the future of that life as it reaches on into eternity; could she look into its soul to see its possibilities; could she be made to understand her own personal responsibility for the training of this child, for the development of its life, and for its destiny,--she would see that in all God's world there is no other work so noble and so worthy of her best powers, and she would commit to no other's hands the sacred and holy trust given to her." -JR Miller
