Of course the last two, one of them can be demonic oppression. Sometimes the reason you can't hear God is you're too oppressed, just got too much heaviness. Have you ever noticed if you get depressed, you don't hear God? Every noticed when you're depressed? Some people don't get depressed, but many of us have experienced depression at various times. When you're depressed, there's like a spirit sits over your mind, and your mind clouds, and you can't receive from the Holy Spirit. Until you break that depression, you don't hear God; because it's a demonic spirit, that's influencing your mind, instead of the spirit of God influencing your mind. Then the last one, and one of the major reasons people don't receive, or hear from, the spirit of God, is they just lean into their own reasoning all the time, and try to work everything out. We have to learn to shift, and make changes, to hear the voice of God.
So having shared those things, how many can identify with at least one of those things; you can say: man, there's one of those I've struggled with, one of those I've wrestled with? That's great, that's very honest; so the question then would be: if you've identified one thing blocking you to hearing the voice of God, what will you do to address it? What will you do to address it? I need to hear God's voice. Why? Because my life is committed to Him. I'm walking with Him. I'm in a relationship with Him. I need to know Him speaking to me. I need Him to encourage me, I need to hear His voice, I need to get His perspectives, I need to know what I should do. I need to know those things, and if I've got blocks that hinder that, I need to address them. So what will you do about the block you've got? When will you do it? You want to write down if you're taking notes, write down this is the block, I'm aware of it, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to deal with it, and I'll just start on it this week. If you need help, get some help, just deal with it, get it out of the way.
Okay then, so let me give you several simple ways that we can receive, or hear, or recognise the voice of the spirit of God; and then I want to give you some checks, some things because I know a lot of people say: well God told me this, God told me that, and I look at them and I think: you are weird, weird plus! So we want to be able to hear God without the weirdness factor, okay? So I'll give you several checks to stop the weirdness factor creeping in.
So if I'm going to hear the voice of God, here's several practical things you can do. Number one, free up your spirit. If you are going to hear the voice of God, it's going to be from within, it's going to be a flow. You need to literally free up the flow, from within your spirit. Now what are the ways you could do that? There's quite simple ways you can do it, it's not very hard. Speaking in tongues is a way of freeing up your spirit. You just get a flow, when you speak in tongues. Your spirit is flowing, your spirit is praying. Here's another thing you could do, is you start to begin to thank God, and begin to recognise and remember the blessings, and begin to express gratitude to Him. Gratitude will cause your spirit to lift up, see? That's another way. Begin to start to praise Him, your spirit starts to come up; so there's several things I can do, that will free up my spirit. Sometimes the reason your spirit is uptight, and there's no flow, is because you've got a conflict, or something you're anxious about, so when you try to listen to God, you just hear this thing talking, and yelling in your mind.
The voice of God is gentle. It's quite light. It's easily stopped, so if I've got noisy, noise in my mind, and distracting, dominating thoughts, I have to literally aggressively cast them, push them out of the way, otherwise I'm not going to hear from God. So number one, free up your spirit. Number two, there's a need to focus your thoughts, or to fix your thoughts, towards God. So how do you do that? You are literally having to eliminate distractions. Now how do you fix your thoughts? One of the best ways you can fix your thoughts, is with a picture. If you were to take a scripture, and the Bible says that Jesus is ever before me; and you were to begin to picture, I wonder what it looks like for Jesus to be before me? I'll just begin to picture Him standing there, He is my friend, and He's near me, and I will fix my attention on Him, that He is near me. Then what will happen is, the fixing of your attention with a picture, starts to cause everything else to just diminish, as you fix your mind; so you fix your mind on Jesus, the person. It helps to put a picture there, but it's not the picture we're focussed on. It just helps you focus your thoughts.