How to hear Jesus is a simple and practical process. The problem is it takes faith, and no one preaches it. It’s even more difficult to accept than living cleaned up and holy. But scripture is clear for both of these concepts, as can easily be shown.

My wife and I began getting a word from the Lord shortly after we were married in 1976. The repetitive message over seven years or so was that a time was coming where hearing clearly from the Lord would become necessary. It was tied in with the idea that at the end of the church age it would be required. We assumed that it was tied in with persecution, the banning of the Bible, an underground church, and so on.

By the mid-eighties I became convinced that I needed to work on this diligently. It became the focus of my spiritual life. By the early nineties I had a procedure that worked. But the level of faith required was daunting. It was based on 1 John 4: 1-3:

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world.By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God,and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist, of which you heard that it was coming, and now it is in the world already.

Discovering what to focus upon to hear Jesus

I was intensively trained in spiritual warfare from the time I met Jesus. He sovereignly pulled me out of my drug-crazed pursuit of the Truth. My Dad had finally cut off the arguments we had about spiritual things after making me promise that I would never give up until I was CERTAIN that I had found the truth. Of course, I never actually checked out Christianity. I knew that was powerless BS. But the Lord was patient and brought me to end of that foolishness.

My Dad was a perpetual deacon in the Episcopal church, was baptized in the Holy Spirit in the late fifties/early sixties. He had a ministry of deliverance while working for a bishop who didn’t believe in personified evil [Satan]. So, my father ended up heavily involved in the earliest Charismatic Renewal work in Minnesota.

I mention this because one result was that he immediately taught me the simple, straight forward truths about spiritual warfare. I recently wrote a new article about this general topic in my Biblical Reality substack: The importance of the Holy Spirit today.

The Holy Spirit showed me that demons could talk in my mind

I knew this from practical experience. What held me up for years was Jesus never talked in my mind. I simply didn’t understand that I had to initiate it by faith. Duh!

But the Spirit gradually showed me that I had three sources for my thoughts: myself, the enemy, or the Lord. He taught me how to recognize the differences between the three. By the late fifties I had a method which I discovered always worked. But it was a struggle.

But, I’ll talk about that in the next post… soon…