Seeing the Voice of God: What God Is Telling You through Dreams and Visions (23 page)

The voice of the L
ORD
is majestic.

The voice of the L
ORD
breaks the cedars;

Yes, the L
ORD
breaks in pieces the cedars of Lebanon.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we experienced God’s voice this mightily every day? But most of the time, what we get is the small, still voice. Why so? Because it requires relationship. God can zap anybody into obedience with a dish-rattling encounter (as can any heavy-handed parent), but the still, small voice requires that you know God really, really well, which is what He is after. First Kings 19:12 (
NIV
) describes God’s voice coming to Elijah as a “gentle whisper.” But I am here to testify that this voice is often stronger than something audible, and it rattles you to your core. There have been times in prayer when it felt like my heart had ears, my kidneys had ears, my arms, my legs and
all
of
me
. Hearing only with the actual ears in that type of encounter pales in comparison.

I once heard an interview with a famous television psychic who was asked, “How do you know what’s your voice and the voice of your spirit guide?” The answer was, “It sounds sort of like the voice you hear when you’re reading a book silently to yourself.”

How telling! That is because it
is
either your voice, or that of the enemy trying to mimic your voice so what you hear will sound less disreputable to you. He cannot mimic God’s voice, and he is not going to come in an obviously evil voice or you would dismiss it immediately. So steer clear of this counsel. I am not saying you will hear a deep, grandfatherly voice per se, but God’s voice never sounds like “my” voice to me.

As I said earlier, God can also speak by getting your attention through billboards, license plates, secular music, church marquees, sermons at your local church or through a myriad of other creative means. Master salesman, marketer and entertainment management guru Ken Kragen (who worked with the Bee Gees, Olivia Newton John, Burt Reynolds and more) always lectured on doing things in “threes,” meaning that in today’s
busy marketplace you have to get people’s attention three times before they remember you. I find it is often the same for God.

Let me give you one example: Our family is part of a talent agency that gets us work in television and more. When we first signed in 2001, the last four digits of the owner’s phone number started showing up everywhere in my path. Let’s say they were 1639. One day, I was taking a walk and stopped to rest. Looking up, I noticed that the mailbox in front of me read 1639. Days later, my check came to the table at a restaurant, and the bill was $16.39. A few days later, while homeschooling, my child answered a math problem with the total 1,639.

“Okay, Lord, loud and clear!” I knew it was a call to pray for my agent, but I did not know her well enough at the time to ask if there was anything specifically I could pray for, or even if she believed in prayer.

When I heard a voice telling me, “You can’t tell her you’re praying for her. She’ll think you’re a religious freak and never hire you to do anything,” I knew that was not God’s voice. Why would God tell me not to let people know He had them in mind? Telling them shows His great love for them. I emailed her, and the response was wonderful. She said that she believed in prayer and thanked me. But the real thanks came just days later, when she called me from home. Steph said, “Laura, I was standing in my shower picking the glass out of my body and realized I needed to call you. I was just in a horrible wreck this morning, and the side of the car that was demolished was the side my infant son usually sits on. He was not with me today, as he normally is. I know it was because of your prayers.” Our hearts were knit together from that day. It has resulted in more blessings than I can recount, including financial ones.

The voice of God will never contradict Scripture. It will always do one of these twelve things:

• Comfort you (Psalm 23:4; John 14:16)
  
• Warn you (Acts 21:4, 10–14; Ephesians 6:4)
  
• Edify you (Ephesians 4:12)
  
• Convict you of sin, but never condemn you (Romans 6)
  
• Rebuke and reprove you (Titus 1:13; 2 Timothy 4:2)
  
• Bring Scripture to memory (John 14:26)
  
• Guide you into truth (John 16:13)
  
• Exhort you (Romans 12:1; Jude 1:3)
  
• Remind you of God’s love (Jeremiah 31:31; John 3:1)
  
• Increase your faith (Romans 10:17)
  
• Instruct you in righteousness/right standing with God (2 Timothy 3:16)
  
• Bring salvation and healing (Romans 10:9–10; 2 Timothy 3:15)
  

We come to God by faith, but we grow in Him experientially. You can learn to discern with utmost certainty the differences between God’s voice, yours, other people’s and the enemy’s. Hebrews 5:14 says the spiritually mature “have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.” But with that maturity of discerning good and evil comes an awakening, an awareness of heavenly activity both light and dark. Once that switch is flipped, you will never be the same.

Loud and Clear

I implore you to rid your life of the static we have learned about in this chapter and to come to God expectant to hear His voice. Fifteen times in the New Testament you see the following phrase: “Let he who has an ear to hear, hear!” Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all recorded Jesus saying it. Imagine the positive outcome on your life if you will always hear God’s voice and obey it. You will be a better parent. You will be a better friend. You will be a better spouse. You will be a better leader. You will be a better daughter or son. You will be a better businessman or businesswoman. You will be a better financier. You will be a better . . . you.

I often find that people who have a hard time communicating with their heavenly Father may have had difficulty communicating with their earthly father. In fact, I find the two relationships can mirror each other, period. If you had a father who was heavy-handed, you may view God as the same. Coming to Him is hard. If you had a dad who did not care how terribly you misbehaved and set no boundaries for you, then you grow up thinking you can get by with anything with God, without consequence. And if you grew up away from your father, only speaking to him rarely, you may have a hard time remembering to talk to your heavenly Father at all. It is not that you do not love God, but you became accustomed to your father relationship being maintained at a distance. Be healed today from all father wounds and ask God to renew your mind to receive Him and His Father voice.

Maybe you used to hear His voice clearly, but do not now. Maybe you have rid your mind of all the static (sin, time, ambivalence, trials, illiteracy and competing voices), but still feel deaf. Perhaps all you need is a dose of childlike faith. Let me close this chapter with a story. My daughter Jessica and her husband, Kyle, bought a new home last year and moved in with their five children (all under the age of five). The house sits up on a beautiful hill on a wide piece of property, at the top of which the city train runs closely, right behind the house. When they first moved in, my grandsons talked about this train nonstop. They were big fans of Thomas the Tank Engine, so they loved it every time the train passed by. It is so close to their house that it would even wake them up if it passed by at night. But in the short year they have lived there, they have gotten used to the sound of the train, and it has lost its “wow” factor. They still love the train, and they still include it in their outdoor play, but somehow it has lost its ability to drown out everything else when it passes by. Sometimes they do not even hear or acknowledge the train at all.

Maybe it is the same with you and God’s voice. At some time in your life, hearing God’s voice was of vital importance to you. Then over time, the new wore off and it got fainter and fainter. Eventually, you doubted if you were hearing it at all. Perhaps it even used to wake you up at night, but after you kept refusing to get up and pray, it quit coming. It was not that God quit speaking. You quit listening. You quit trusting it was His voice. But it does not matter how far away you have gotten from God’s voice; it is only one step back to get within earshot again. Are you ready to make that happen?

A prayer of dedication:

Today, oh God, I vow to put my heart into Your hands

And humbly plead for You to knead until it understands

That words alone cannot fulfill the duties that are mine

But virtue too, toward man and You, is what I must combine

So give me eyes and ears of faith that make Your chosen choice

That I might be found pure in heart and hear Your still small voice

© Laura Harris Smith, 2002

PRAYER

Let’s pray out loud together:

Father . . . You are my Father, and I know You want to talk to me. May I be attentive always! Forgive me of sins that have come between us, Lord, and forgive me for the time constraints I have put on You when I am in prayer. Help me wait on You there. Deliver me from all doubts and ambivalence, and help me drown out the trials and competing voices that speak louder to me than You do when we are together. I want to hear Your voice, Lord. Speak. I’ll be listening. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

IMPARTATION

Right now, I release and impart to you the
hunger
for holiness, the
hatred
for sin and compromise, and the
yearning
to hear God’s voice internally and externally. Remember Revelation 3:20 (
KJV
), “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” (Now open your hands, shut your eyes and receive it.)

T
he Voice of America is the United States government’s official broadcast institution that provides broadcasts for radio, television and Internet in more than 43 countries. For years, it was transmitted into Europe through the Iron Curtain to communist captives in need of hope for democracy. But often, local communist leaders would highjack the channel’s frequency with gibberish so that incoming messages of optimism would be confused. As a result, the captives would lose all hope and expectancy.

Satan does the same thing with Christians. If he can weasel his way in between you and God on your normal communication lines, he can intercept incoming messages and scramble them up, leaving you feeling orphaned, hopeless and ignored by God. While the previous chapter covered tips to get the static caused by personal wrongs out of our spiritual ears, this one will deal with what to do when the static is not your fault at all, and in fact is demonically devised, perhaps even by a high-ranking territorial principality like the one Daniel battled in prayer in
Daniel 10. If it is a whole region of people that Satan wants to disorganize and confuse, he will assign these territorial spirits to do his bidding, the same way in which God sends His angels to do His. It is spiritual warfare 101.

Remember that Satan is the “prince of the power of the air,” according to Ephesians 2:2, so we can say that the air is his playground, office desk and townhome. He is poised there, just waiting to speak gibberish to the frequency on which he knows God and His people communicate. This is my exact story, and I would like to tell it to you. It is very personal, and I have never chronicled it before in full. I ask that you read it prayerfully, without doctrinal bias or fear. I believe that by the end of it, you will see a bigger picture and join me in the crusade to help others overcome their spiritual deafness. Region by region, we can do it.

Cheer Up

It begins not in the spirit at all, but with a thirteen-year-old girl who had just made cheerleader. I had been a Christian for three years and was already teaching kids’ Bible studies and leading them to Jesus on my school bus and in my front yard. I obviously was not any kind of scholar, but I just looked for unhappy people and told them I could help them be happier. And it was working. I guess you could say I was cheerleading people to Jesus. I was voted by my classmates as having “Most School Spirit” at the end of the year, but I think that had less to do with cheering a team than it did cheering individuals toward their God-given purposes. Life was good. School was good. Church was good. I had no way of knowing that a “Wanted” poster had gone up in hell with my face on it.

And then I got the diagnosis. In the middle of all this triumph came what felt like tragedy. Epilepsy. They called it “petit mal,” which involves small absence seizures called staring spells. But mine were so quick (2–3 seconds each) that no one ever knew about them until I told them. Even my own dear mother and stepfather did not know. I did not understand what was happening. Finally, one day I told Mama and she took me for testing. I came from a wonderful Christian family, but we never really discussed healing and had not experienced any major infirmities that caused us to talk about it. I vividly remember Mama cried at the diagnosis and said she wished it could be her and not me.

I continued to act, cheer and write and took my medicine for the next dozen years. I even married Chris and had my first two children, Jessica and Julian. I was teaching at church, acting on local TV, starting a Christian dinner theatre and writing plays for publication. But while my will and faith were strong, my body was still sick. Sadly, I had pie-sectioned off my life into the categories of body, soul and spirit, and it never dawned on me that they could influence each other. Grace and sheer determination had kicked in. Life was good. Family was good. Church was good. Once again, I did not understand how something as simple as happiness could anger the enemy. I guess it does because he has never known it.

Then in 1990, after moving into a new home and having my third child, Jhason, I had my first convulsion. For twelve years I had been used to the smaller 2–3 second petit mal absence seizures, but this was a grand mal convulsion in which I was unconscious or reemerging from unconsciousness for more than an hour. It happened soon after I had allowed some friends at our Friday night Bible study to pray over my newborn son for healing from a blood disorder caused by a two-month case of life-threatening jaundice. Jhason was miraculously healed just before the scheduled hospital interventions (which would have included a total body blood transfusion), leaving the doctors scratching their heads. But what left me scratching my head was that these same friends on the same night had also prayed for
my healing. I was not healed. In fact, the convulsion came the same weekend they prayed.

It was long and ugly and violent. I was rushed to the hospital by ambulance, and after regaining consciousness, I was released. Medication was increased. And then the cycle happened again: Grace kicked in, I found happiness and the enemy got angry and pushed even harder. But instead of pushing back, I just stuck to grace and happiness. Except for this brief brush with healing at our Friday night Bible study, no one in my family, neighborhood or church ever talked about divine healing, and I had no idea that it was my birthright and I could fight for it. I also had never really heard about spiritual warfare or that I had authority over this vicious cycle of thievery the enemy had me in as he tried to own my happiness.

Think about it—why does a thief steal? So that he can take something you have and use it as his own. No thief breaks into your home and steals your TV so he can throw it in a trash can. Likewise, Satan does not steal your happiness so he can move on to committing his next crime. I believe he steals your happiness in an attempt to use it and experience this foreign emotion himself. I think he is jealous for it, so he sees it, wants it and takes it. It is an impossible sequence as he goes through person after person, trying to make it work. It never does, and he is never satisfied. But like a homeless person looking for someplace to lay his head, the enemy cannot give up. First Peter 5:8 says it best: “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.”

The next two arduous years brought more grand mal convulsions and another baby, Jeorgi. And while I would love to tell you that my pregnancy with her was uneventful, it was not. I spent the first trimester in bed in a drug-induced stupor due to a medication change for all my various seizures, only to find out months later that I was on a barbiturate, at which point I switched again. But in those dark ninety days with a muddy mind, my spirit finally had revelation of what the enemy was doing. He had overplayed his hand. My desperation
forced
me
to fight for healing. Not just to ask and sit back and see what God would do, but to partner with Him and
fight
. This time, I would not use grace and happiness as crutches that could only help me hobble through to the next trial.

When I came out of that three-month stupor, I came out fighting. With my pen and my prayers. I dug into the Word of God and memorized the healing Scriptures, and my prayer life doubled. Because of that time in Scripture and prayer, my creativity multiplied, too, and somehow I became twice as productive. I wrote my first book during those last trimesters, turning in the manuscript just 48 hours before Jeorgi’s healthy debut. I also wrote another dinner theatre play during the last trimester and directed its production.

Over the next year, it was obvious that this combination of time in God’s Word and prayer had turned me into a spiritual triathlete. But the enemy, nipping at my heels, struck even harder. I began having regular convulsions, and the smaller seizures were coming every day, sometimes over a hundred a day. While you could hide a few at 2–3 seconds each, you could not hide a hundred. Doctors did not know what to do with me, and no amount of medicine was helping.

The King and I

Then, just before midnight on January 26, 1993, while I was on my knees reading my Bible, as I had done thousands of times before, God decided to do something He had never done any of those thousands of times. One minute I was in study mode, and the next minute God’s Spirit overcame mine and I could no longer read a word on the page. As if something started at the top of my head and moved down my whole being while I was still kneeling, the weighted glory of God bent me over until I found myself on my face, totally unable to move.

I had never been “slain in the Spirit,” experienced the presence of God or been baptized in the Holy Spirit (and honestly,
I did not even know such biblical experiences existed). But as I hunched there, doubled over on my face, it was as if the atmosphere was altered and someone entered the room. Sort of like how, even with your eyes closed, you can tell when someone approaches by how the air between you changes. It instantaneously affected the molecular structure of my whole being—body, mind and spirit—and suddenly, every moment got big.

Daniel 10 described my frailty exactly, when Daniel said, “I bowed with my face toward the ground and was speechless. . . . ‘How can I, your servant, talk with you, my lord? My strength is gone and I can hardly breathe’” (verses 15, 17
NIV
). John described it, too, in Revelation 1:17 (
NIV
), when he was on the island of Patmos: “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead.” But Ezekiel said it best: “And behold, the glory of the L
ORD
filled the house of the L
ORD
, and I fell on my face” (Ezekiel 44:4).

The glory of the Lord did fill my house when this King stepped in, and an intense rush of majesty overwhelmed me, leaving my entire body with no sensation. Trust me, I had no idea this kind of stuff still happened today. I think maybe I pictured it only happening to people in robes and sandals. I could see the carpet an inch below my eyes, but I remember distinctly, to this day, the feeling that if I lifted my head to see His face, my flesh would melt off my bones.

Somehow, I
knew
the King had come just so I could ask Him the question I desperately needed answered: “Are You going to heal me, God?” So I asked, never looking up.

He answered with seventeen words that have defined the last two decades of my life: “Yes, daughter. In fact, I have already begun to heal you, but it will be by process.” I wish He had stressed those last two words with a little more inflection in His voice, but I was too elated over the first two words to care. I had a word from God Himself that healing was in my future.

I was baptized in the Holy Spirit later that fall (something we will explore in chapter 10), we joined a Spirit-filled church and I began to have my first regular visions. However, they were not angel wings and crosses, as I had requested, but were images that were very difficult to discern. Sure, years before, I had seen a demonic creature behind me in a mirror, but these visions were actually stranger. Demons were in the Bible, at least, but I was seeing Indians in full headdress running toward me with bloody tomahawks—while I was sitting in my bedroom, minding my own business.

Then I found out I lived on the Trail of Tears, and that my house was on what had been President Andrew Jackson’s plantation. To confirm it all, I was finding Indian artifacts in my yard. Turns out that Andy Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, which gave birth to one of the darkest chapters in America’s history. But I was clueless about all that at the time. I was too busy changing diapers, writing plays and trying to figure out how to get rid of these angry Indians.

The more I prayed for myself and for God to cleanse the land I lived on and forgive the atrocities that had occurred there, the worse my health got. With grace and happiness as weapons (no longer crutches), I fought off discouragement, but on the hard days, when the multiple absence seizures crowded my mind, I would grieve. It was as if my faith was constantly interrupted with them multiple times each day—sometimes each hour. But after each one, I would “come to” and remind myself,
Oh yeah. You are Laura Harris Smith. You are
a woman of faith. Healing is yours.

Although the two- to three-second absence seizures and the visions both took my concentration to another place, they were very different. One bolstered my faith and left me with information I could pray with, and the other left me fighting horrible headaches and defeat. I saw the increase of the seizures as the enemy’s way of vying for my concentration so that the visions would not come, or as harming my memory so that I would not remember them. I had experienced seizures for fifteen years
without having visions, so I knew one did not cause the other or it would have shown up years before. The visions did not come until I had been filled with the Holy Spirit. The increase in the petit mal absence seizures and the introduction of the grand mal convulsions did not come until I had experienced this filling, either, so I see now that they were the enemy’s way of trying to interrupt my life and calling as a communicator about visionary gifts.

It seemed the only thing I could do without interruption was pray in the Spirit, so I did. A lot. Then one day in 1993, I was walking from my bedroom to my kitchen, and as I looked toward my front door, there in my foyer stood a dark, foreboding creature. He was in the form of a man, dressed in all black. Black cape, black hat with a big, black feather plume and big, black strapping boots that came up over his knees.

He looked like a general from another era. Hands on hips, he was staring me down proudly. Cockily is more like it. But totally at peace, I never broke my stride. He stood perfectly erect, with head held high, and watched me my whole way to the kitchen. When I got there and turned around, he was gone. It was just feet away from where I had had my majestic visitation from Jesus earlier that year. This one was a visitation of another kind.