Proverbs 23:7 (Amplified Bible)

7 For as he thinks in his heart so is he.

What are we hearing every minute of every day of our lives, what are we listening to? What are we allowing into our hearts? God never leaves us nor forsakes us, and Jesus said in John 15:5 that whoever abides in Him, and Him in us bares much fruit but apart from Him we can do nothing!

God faithfully abides in us, do we acknowledge His presence in our daily lives? It is God’s desire that we hang out with Him, as we hang out with our friends. Everything we do and think can be done for God, in God and through God, His power at work in us.

We cannot hear from God if the Word of God is not alive and dwelling in us by the power of the Holy Spirit in our hearts.

There are three kinds of voices in our hearts, and we need to discern the three different kinds:

  1. There is our own voice, the voice of our feelings, what we would like to do, bearing in mind that feelings often lie. We usually choose comfort over breakthrough and then our comfort zone shrinks and we wonder why we lose our joy.
  2. Then there is the voice of the enemy, that is the voice that comes from deceptions and lies, this is the hardest voice to discern, because the whole purpose of deception is that we do not recognise we are being deceived. This looks like a short cut solution to the problem, but ends up with us being worse off than before.
  3. Then there is the still small voice of God. That one is the quietest, and needs stillness to be able for us to tune into God’s ways. It needs a lot of discipline.

The Word of God is like a mirror exposing our true motives to us and helping us discern what kind of voice we are listening to.

Just like there are radio signals in the room, God is sending His Word into our lives and into our hearts continuously. Unfortunately there are other signals and distortions reaching us from the world around us, from our circumstances and from our insecurities and our negative feelings.

For example, fear is a very common feeling to man, but in 2 Timothy 1:7, God’s Word says that He did not give us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love, and of well balanced mind, discipline and self-control.

Which one of us is absolutely fearless? Probably none, if we are honest! Though it is OK to have a little bit of fear in our lives, as children of God we are not meant to live a life full of fear but of love.

In and of ourselves we cannot be victorious, but the good news is: we are not on our own, we are in Christ. We cannot conquer the enemy in our own strength, but God living in us can empower us to do the things we could never do in the natural.

Victory happens when we come to the end of ourselves and we rely on God to do the supernatural. Trusting God means obeying God letting Him empower us to do in the supernatural what does not come naturally to us. Otherwise we would be praising ourselves instead of praising God for the victory.

I pray you would not let your hearts be hardened by looking at your circumstances and your weaknesses but instead be sensitive to what God is saying, to His Word and to the Holy Spirit.

  1. Why are my thoughts so important?
  2. How do we distinguish the three kinds of voices?
  3. What could cause us to harden our hearts?