I have learned that people hear what they want to hear, and they can only hear according to their perceptions of the voice that speaks. If we don’t see God correctly for Who He is, we will not properly interpret what He says. We all have our own personal dictionaries that we use to define the things we hear. This is why praying in the Spirit, praying in tongues, is essential to our daily walk of faith. Meditating of what God has said in the past is also essential to knowing what He will say and is saying today. For this purpose, we have God’s written word. It is not so we will know what or what not to do; it is so we will properly discern God’s voice in our lives. Scripture has been given to us as an example for our learning. Only the Holy Spirit can give us a proper understanding and we must make the traditions of our own minds subject to what God’s word declares. The Scripture must be read in the context of story and its entirety and never as a verse on its own. It is often meant to be poetically correct and not theologically correct according to our measurement of reasoning. It is written to inspire a personal relationship with God, not merely a biblical principle to live by. God’s words are beyond our natural understanding and unreasonable to our natural thinking. Scripture must be read as being the shadow of Someone who is good and a testimony revealing His will is good things. God is the one who defines good, not our own perceptions that are influenced by experiences, feeling, or external spiritual forces that twist our understanding of good. We cannot change God’s written word because it doesn’t say what we think it should say, but we can allow God’s Spirit to change our understanding as to what we have thought the words said. When we hear God’s voice, it must line up with the shadow of Scripture. If it cannot be found in the shadow, we are hearing Him wrongly. If it cannot be experienced in His life-giving manifest presence, we are reading His word wrongly. God’s voice always inspires life to us and through us to others. #a-voice-of-life #a-life-changing-voice