3 ways to confirm you are hearing God’s voice clearly

How God confirms his living word to us through the triple witness of dreams, real life signs, and the inner voice of the Holy Spirit.

Is it possible to hear God’s voice with confidence?

Can God speak to you through your mind? What about dreams and visions? How can we get signs of confirmation?

This article uses the What3Words app as an example to explain three types of ways God speaks, and how these three come together to give witness that we have heard him correctly.

I approach dream interpretation from a biblical perspective. My belief is that our dreams can come from God, and understanding them is best understood within the context of an ongoing relationship with Him.

If you have just come across this post and are new to dream interpretation, you might find it helpful to see my free ultimate guide to Interpreting dreams from God.

Contents

• Hearing God’s voice
• 3 ways to confirm God’s living word
  • Hearing God through an inner voice
  • Hearing God through real life signs
  • Hearing God through dreams
• Relationship with God through prayer
• Conclusion

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Hearing God’s voice

I recently had an experience where I needed to know my location accurately.

It was dark and late at night. I was driving on the motorway with my son in the car. Suddenly I heard a loud bang. I realised we had a flat tyre and needed to pull over quickly.

Unfortunately, there was no hard shoulder. We had just passed an official layby, so we ended up on a patch of grass beside the road, which, thankfully, had enough room for us to stop on.

It was very frightening, as cars and lorries were thundering past. We used our mobile phone to call for help. But because we were not in an official stopping place, the only way they could find us was using an app, called What3Words.

The What3Words app gave us three words to describe our exact location, which we could share with the Highways Agency – who then were able to find us and escort us to safety.

So what is What3Words?

What3Words is one way to convey precise locations. They have assigned a unique combination of three words to every 3×3 square meters of the planet. These three words can be shared, allowing others to accurately pinpoint a specific spot.

Needing to hear God clearly

Rather like my car incident, we are all on a life journey. And there are times when we need to hear God’s voice clearly for guidance, and to know for sure that we have heard him correctly.

I am referring to the times when we need to know specifically what God is saying in our personal situation. In this article I am calling this hearing God’s living word, or rhema word as it is sometimes known.

• It could be when we are in an emergency on our life journey, rather like in the above story.
• It could be a time when we need to make a big decision or are facing a hard choice.
• Or we might just need the confidence to know we are on the right track.

Over the past few years God has been mentoring me in an easy-to-remember way to hear his voice – which is accessible to anyone who wishes to hear God in the context of a relationship with Him.

This involves looking for God to confirm his word in three different ways, just like the What3Words app.

In this article I am talking about hearing the personal, living word of God for our specific situation, rather than the general wisdom found in the bible. .

3 ways to confirm God’s living word

The bible tells us that two or three witnesses are needed to establish something. Having two witnesses provides good confirmation, but having three witnesses establishes it.

• Deuteronomy 19:15, NIV One witness is not enough to convict anyone accused of any crime or offense they may have committed. A matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.

Similarly, for important decisions it is wise to seek two or three confirmations of what we believe God is saying, and these confirmations should come in different ways.

These confirmations of God’s living word act as witnesses of what he is saying to us. Having two of them tie-up can be enough, but when we have all three agree we can be certain – like triangulating our position!

These three ways are:

• Inward: The inner voice and witness of the Holy Spirit.
• Outward: Signs in the world around us.
• Upward: Dreams and other heavenly communications.

Hearing God through an inner voice

The first way to hear God is from an inward source.

This voice of God is an inner voice that flows from our connection with the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, and it is very important to learn to recognise this inner voice.

The Hebrew word naba`means to bubble up, which beautifully describes the way his voice wells up within us. Jesus described this as being like living water flowing from within.

• John 7:38-39, NIV “Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive.

The resulting revelation from God generally flows through our intuition before being processed with our logical mind. Mark Virkler explains this intuitive flow more fully in his excellent book, 4 Keys to hearing God’s voice.

This inner voice can come through a sudden thought, realisation, or feeling; or it could be a growing awareness over time. We might not be aware of it at first.

I often find I have been thinking about something for a while, but not realised it until I have a dream or see a sign which brings it into focus in my mind.

We can also learn to recognise how our own spirit is reacting to things, and this can be a great confirmation when we discern a positive reaction. We sometimes call this witness of the Spirit.

But, as we are all painfully aware, not all our thoughts and feelings come from the Holy Spirit! That is why we must confirm God’s word in other ways. Plus, we must dig deep, past all our soulish ideas and what we have picked up from the world, to find that inner voice.

When we build up our spirit, we are helping ourselves tune to that inner voice. If you are not sure how to do that, here are some ideas in the following article which can help: How to improve creativity for dream interpretation.

Hearing God through real life signs

The second way to hear God is from an outward source: God speaks through things in the natural world around us, commonly referred to as signs.

The bible tells us that the natural world speaks of the invisible God:

• Romans 1:20, TPT …from the creation of the world, the invisible qualities of God’s nature have been made visible…for seeing the visible makes us understand the invisible.

Sometimes these signs are obvious and straightforward, and clearly confirm what we believe God is saying. But sometimes they are symbolic, and we need to learn God’s symbolic language to recognise them.

Here are some ways God speaks through an external source:

• Through physical things we see.
• Through words that grab our attention.
• Through things we read in the bible.
• Though events and things that happen to us.
• Through art and media.
• Through things other people say, including prophetic words.
• Through social media and adverts.

These signs are outside our own thoughts and feelings, which is helpful for confirmation purposes – because we know we could not have engineered them or made them up.

An exception to this might be social media and adverts. Although God speaks to me all the time through them, the algorithms can feed us more of what we are looking at, so we need to be wise about that.

Timing is very important for these kinds of signs. Plus, the more unusual, dramatic, or extraordinary the sign, the more confidence it gives us!

I first had the idea of this article through an advert for What3Words. I had been vaguely thinking (inner voice) about the three different ways God speaks, when suddenly an advert for What3Words (real life sign) popped up on my phone – and suddenly all became clear.

I had not used the app at that point, and I had never seen an advert for What3Words before or since that moment. Plus, when I told a friend, she said she had literally been talking about the app with her son the previous day, and she never had done before (2nd confirmation real life sign).

Not everything we see is from God, so we need to confirm these things through the other ways. However, I am increasingly discovering that God is speaking through things around us much more than we think.

So, take notice of anything unusual that grabs your attention – and ask God whether He wants to speak to you through it. Plus, ask God to give you an external sign if you need confirmation of something.

Hearing God through dreams

The third way to hear God is through a heavenly source, which I am calling upward to make it easy to remember.

This can include dreams, visions, and other heavenly encounters. But dreams are an accessible way for any person to receive from heaven, because everyone dreams. So I am focusing on dreams.

We know from the different examples of dreams in the bible that God speaks through dreams. When we go to sleep, our mind switches off, and our spirit is able to receive heavenly communications.

God meets us literally in dreams; we can engage heaven in dreams; and angels can appear in dreams. Although this type of dream is fairly unusual, God sometimes uses them for important communications.

But God also speaks continuously, night after night, in parables and symbolism through our normal, everyday dreams – we just need to be willing to make the journey to learn the language.

• A dream can confirm and clarify something we feel God might be saying.
• A dream can introduce a new idea which is then confirmed in other ways.
• Real life signs can tie in with dreams to highlight a message.

Most of this blog is about everyday dreams and learning how to understand them in the context of a relationship with God. If you’re new to dreams, see my Beginner’s Guide to help you get started.

Relationship with God through prayer

With all these three ways, it is our relationship with God through prayer that is key to hearing his voice clearly.

I think of prayer as an ongoing conversation with a friend. I talk to God continuously about the things which are on my mind, and I am always listening and asking Him what he wants to say to me.

• If I have a thought or impression, I ask Him to give me a sign to confirm if it was him.
• If I see something unusual, I ask him whether he wants to say something to me through it.
• I constantly ask him about my dreams, and what they mean.

Most of the time, I don’t even need to ask, because I know what I have been talking to God about. In particular, signs are often timed to perfection – and appear just when we were talking to God about something.

Only WE can know what we have been talking to God about – so learning to hear his voice through these three ways is a personal journey.

And finally, remember that God is the one who initiates all this! He loves to speak to us, be our friend, and guide us. He is our Good Shepherd after all! He mentors us in this journey if we are willing to walk with him and learn.

Conclusion

We have seen that, rather like the What3Words app, we can learn to hear and confirm God’s voice and specific word to us through three types of ways:

• Inward: The inner voice and witness of the Holy Spirit.
• Outward: Signs in the world around us.
• Upward: Dreams and other heavenly communications.

We can look for God to confirm his word in two or three of these ways at times when we need to be confident about what he is saying.

All of this takes place within the context of a personal relationship with God through the Holy Spirit.

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