Hearing God’s voice and discerning God’s will often involves doubt. Since God doesn’t typically speak to us in an audible voice, it’s easy for us to wonder if we’ve really heard God correctly. How can we be certain that it’s God’s voice that we are hearing and not just our own? Here are a few things that I keep in mind when I’m trying to discern God’s will.
HEARING AND DISCERNING GOD'S WILL
1. Listen to Your True Self.
God created you and your story for His unique purposes. His will always flows out of your unique experiences, personality, gifts, and passions—your true self—and moves you forward into being more of who you already are. Your whole life, both the beautiful and the ugly, builds on itself in order that God might use you for a specific purpose in His kingdom—a role that only you can fill. He will not ask you to be or do something that He did not create you to be or do. Often what God asks us to do falls squarely in the areas of our gifts, passions, or experiences, but also in our greatest fears and insecurities.
2. Process with Your Community.
I have friends in my life who seek to listen to God and follow His direction. I know these friends are in tune with the Holy Spirit and their values align with God’s upside-down values rather than the values of the culture. When I’m struggling with doubt, I always process with a friend like this who will give me honest feedback about where my pride or fear might be interfering, who will reveal my blind spots, or encourage me to take the next step.
3. Watch for Open and Closed Doors.
Many times God has led me simply with open and closed doors. When my husband and I were praying about planting a new church, we prayed that God would open a door for us to plant a church in a racially-diverse area. We prayed fervently, but the door that opened was in a small suburb of Milwaukee that is 98 percent Caucasian. We felt much internal angst about going to a place where initially our hearts were at best ambivalent. However, a mentor of ours advised us “sometimes you just have to walk through the door that opens and trust that it is God’s door for you.” So we went.
More recently, after moving to the inner city of Milwaukee, we felt great distress over where to send our kids to school in a sea of options of which many were less than desirable. I prayed and sweated over this decision for a full year. The school that I yearned for my oldest to attend, in the end, was not available for him. As I was doubting God’s providence in this situation, I came across a quote that said, “If the door doesn’t open, it’s not your door.” That gentle reminder brought me back to the reality that God wasn’t somehow absent. He was at work, only in a different way than I had expected.
