There Is One Voice of God

We have seen how easily we can mistake acquired beliefs for our identity, temporary satisfaction for lasting fulfillment, and emotionally charged thoughts for truth. Our memories, experiences, desires, and the countless influences operating within our minds can shape not only what we think and feel, but also how we act and experience life.

We can spend years living according to these influences without realizing that they are drawing us away from our true nature and the love, joy, peace, and goodness we were created to experience. Even when we sincerely want to live differently, we may struggle to recognize which thoughts and impulses are leading us toward truth and which are pulling us away from it.

If we are to live according to our true identity, we need to know what that identity looks like in its perfect expression. We need a way to recognize truth among the many voices competing for our attention, including those that sound remarkably like our own.

We cannot find that perfect standard in another human being. Every person we encounter has their own experiences, acquired beliefs, limitations, and imperfections.

The perfect expression of the love, goodness, truth, mercy, justice, patience, and peace for which the human organism was created exists in God Himself. His character reveals the nature of the identity we were created to live from.

And God is not merely a distant ideal whose character we are meant to study and imitate. He is present and speaks to us.

Just as thoughts, images, and suggestions can enter our minds from influences that seek to draw us away from truth, God can move within our hearts and minds, guiding our understanding, directing our attention, and prompting us toward particular choices and actions.

His voice may come as a thought, a quiet conviction, an inner prompting, or a movement of the heart toward love, forgiveness, compassion, courage, or truth. It is not necessarily an audible voice. Yet it has a character of its own, consistent with who God is.

In a world filled with competing voices, including spiritual influences that seek to deceive and distract us, we must learn to recognize His.

Learning to Recognize His Voice

This is why knowing God's character is so important. To recognize His voice, we must become familiar with Him, not merely with the idea of Him. We need to understand how He thinks, what He values, what He loves, what He asks of us, and how He responds to human weakness, suffering, wrongdoing, and need.

When we know someone intimately, we can often recognize whether something attributed to them is consistent with their character, even without having heard them say it. We understand their intentions, their nature, and the way they would respond. Familiarity allows us to recognize what sounds like them and what does not.

The same principle applies to God. When a thought, suggestion, or prompting enters our mind, we can begin to recognize whether it bears the character of God. Does it reflect His love, mercy, truth, justice, patience, and goodness? Is it consistent with how He would have us understand ourselves, treat others, and act?

Recognizing God's character also requires us to be honest about what goodness itself means.

We recognize qualities such as honesty, humility, patience, kindness, faithfulness, mercy, and selflessness as good because they reflect the nature for which we were created. In God, these qualities exist in their perfect expression.

But we can become accustomed to treating goodness as something conditional. We may value honesty when it benefits us but justify dishonesty when telling the truth becomes inconvenient. We may admire humility in others while seeking recognition or superiority for ourselves.

When we allow our preferences, desires, or circumstances to determine what we consider good, we begin measuring truth against ourselves rather than measuring ourselves against the truth.

God's character does not change according to what is convenient, socially acceptable, or personally desirable. It remains the same regardless of our circumstances.

We cannot recognize what contradicts God's voice if we continually redefine goodness to suit what we want to hear.

The more intimately we know Him, the more naturally we recognize the difference. We are no longer trying to evaluate every thought from scratch. We have become familiar with the one whose voice we are learning to hear.

Recognizing God's voice is recognizing His character in what enters our hearts and minds.

Becoming Familiar with God

The Bible is how we come to know that character. Through it, we discover what God loves, what He values, what He asks of us, and how He responds to the circumstances of human life.

We become familiar with the way Christ treats people, responds to suffering, confronts wrongdoing, extends mercy, and expresses love. We begin to understand not only what God tells us to do, but the nature and intentions behind His words and actions.

This familiarity becomes essential when we encounter the beliefs and behaviors that the world presents as normal. Popularity, cultural acceptance, personal desire, and familiarity do not establish truth. Nor does the intensity or pleasantness of an inner prompting necessarily establish that it comes from God. His character remains our standard.

The love we recognize in Him is also the love for which the deepest place within us was created. As we come to know and receive that love, we begin to experience the wholeness that no substitute can provide.

To know God's voice is to know Him so intimately that we recognize His character in what enters our hearts and minds, and can distinguish it from everything that contradicts His truth.