How to know the voice of the Holy Spirit, is He the same with everyone?

You know, God knows us. He made us and He knows exactly how He has made us and how we can understand and hear Him. He will tailor His communication according to who we are and how we process things. But there is one thing that I have learned in hearing the voice of God, because I hear this asked often, ‘How can you know the difference between your mind’s own thoughts to when God uses your thoughts to speak to you?’.

How to know the voice of the Holy Spirit by looking at Scripture

I love a verse in John 7:37-39,

On the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink.He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.”But this He spoke concerning the Spirit, whom those believing in Him would receive; for the Holy Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.

Jesus says, whoever is thirsty, let him come to Me and out of his belly will flow rivers of living water. Jesus was speaking here of the Holy Spirit. The verse here adds to a mix of Scriptures that speak of the Holy Spirit in a certain way. When the Bible talks about the Holy Spirit or the voice of God, it uses terms like

• Holy Spirit as water flowing
• Holy Spirit as rivers flowing
• Holy Spirit as flow

So when you look at the Holy Spirit in the Bible, one thing you can discover is the flow of water is a particular characteristic to describe the flow of Holy Spirit.  So when it’s a thought from the Holy Spirit to you, it is going to be what I call spontaneous.

You can become familiar with the Holy Spirit’s voice through observation of thoughts that do not come from the intellect. In this case your thoughts would not derive from you trying to think and meditate on something. Instead, the Holy Spirit’s voice will spontaneously flow from your spirit out of nowhere. You know, I remember one time I was in an airport and I had a way of doing and ordering things as a missionary. One that day I just heard,

Stop to the bathroom.

I never stop at this particular bathroom. I wait until I get to the next gate. So I’m like, ‘well, that’s not me’, so I did. Long story short, I ended up finding myself in the middle of an airport literally stopping a shooting because I was at the right place at the right time, and I brought the peace of God in the situation simply because I heard ‘stop to the bathroom’, which was completely out of my norm. The voice of God will speak to you in so many different ways, but it will not be out of the intellect, or from being calculated, it will be spontaneous.

Other Blog Posts You May Be Interested In