We need to receive by revelation, and we receive from our heart; so the language of your heart is quite different. The Bible says: it is a flow. It is a flow; that means it's spontaneous. If you ever watch a river, rivers don't sort of go: one, two, three, four. Rivers sort of flow, and move, and they bubble, and they're full of life, so He's using the language of a river, saying that the movement of the spirit of God within you, to speak to you; one, it's like a river, it is spontaneous, it comes as a movement or a flow, from inside you. What kind of flow does it come as? It comes as a flow of pictures, or images; it comes as a flow of words; it comes as a flow of thoughts, or ideas; it comes as a flow of impressions, where you sense something or feel something. It comes as a flow, sometimes, of emotions; let me give you an example. How many of you have been in a movie, and there was some certain point in the movie, maybe there was someone and he was an underdog, and finally he comes and he wins some great - he rises above all circumstances, and he suddenly achieves and he wins and he gets a great breakthrough? Often it's very easy to feel emotional.
You feel something rise up, and you think: I wonder why I'm feeling tears; or we see one of our runners in the Olympic Games, and they run the distance, and they pass everyone there, then you see them on the dais, and they put on the medal, and they play the New Zealand anthem. You feel your heart sort of - you feel emotions rising up inside. In other words, the picture of someone achieving and winning a prize, stirs something in the heart; so emotions can be evidence of movement in your heart. Thoughts and spontaneous pictures are evidence of movement in your heart, so we need to understand, if God's going to speak to me, I've got to learn how to tune into the flow from my heart. There's a verse in the Old Testament, it's found in the Book of Habakkuk, Chapter 2, this is what he says: I will stand on the watch, or I'll set me on the watch, and I will look to see what God will say to me. So in other words, notice this, he said: I will position myself.
He's a watchman. He's a man of prayer, so when he says: I'll set myself on the watch; he's saying: I will position myself, and then I will look to see what God will say to me. In other words, he's implying that many of the ways God speaks to us, we see something; and then how I'll respond when God speaks to me. So let me just give you first of all, some simple reasons why people struggle to get something from God, so we just get that out of the way; and then I'll give you just the very simple steps, or process, that will help you. You begin to practice these things, you can begin to start to flow, and hear the voice of God. I'd love you, at the end of the meeting, to just in a few minutes, just to open your heart to see what God is wanting to say to you. What an amazing thing, if you can go away, and you say: God spoke to me in the meeting tonight. Then I'd love to pray for a few of you, and we'll see what God will say to you - we'll listen to God.
So here's some of the reasons that we get blocks. Remember, if we're going to hear from God, it will come as a flow from inside; so if you have sin in your life, you have deliberate things wrong, what that will do is, it'll tend to give a voice of condemnation. You'll hear constantly, you're reminded about what's wrong. Hidden sin blocks, or hinders, the flow of the spirit of God talking to you, because what God's wanting to tell you about is your sin, and if you don't want to deal with your sin, then there's kind of like this block inside. God says: I want to talk about that sin. I want you to get out of it. I want you to repent, want you to get right, want you to get flowing with me again; and you're saying: I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to even go there. So if I'm going to hear the voice of God, I've got to make a decision that things that offend Him, I'll remove them consciously, as I'm aware of them. So the first thing is, hidden sin can cause a block in our heart.