How does scripture relate to hearing God’s Voice? Romans 10:17 says, “faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.”
Many believers try to know God and hear God with their minds through their thoughts and emotions. But God’s voice does not originate in the Soul. It also factors into why so many have trouble hearing God’s voice. That is why understanding who you are in Christ and your spiritual design– your identity and how you were designed to function is vital to hearing God.

Paul tells us in 1 Thessalonians 5 that we have capacity for life function on three levels, spirit, soul, and body. Our body is where we have a world conciseness. Our soul is where we have individual conciseness. And our spirit is where we have God-conciseness. If our point of reference is our soul, then our point of reference is still ourselves, vacillating between thinking and feeling attempting to determine for ourselves between good and evil. As a result, we find ourselves trying to stop the bad and do the good believing we are bad when we have bad thoughts and good when we have good ones. We will not feel victorious until we have nailed it down. Trying to stop your soul from experiencing emotions and thoughts is like trying to stop the tide from affecting the surf, it is not going to happen—that is the way God design it. God put it into motion.
God designed us on the soul level to be capable of feeling and thinking things to process reality. What God says is true reality regardless of the subject matter. Not everything we think is truthful and may be contrary to spirit reality. God’s purpose for us is that we would learn to live by faith by hearing God.

Too often our focus is on ourselves rather than God and what He is saying and doing. We try to understand God with our minds. This is a form of self-consciousness rather than God-consciousness. If we rely on self-consciousness as our starting point for hearing God, we will simply hear our thoughts swirling around in our heads. This why understanding our spiritual identity is central to hearing God voice because it is there, we are one with Christ. Only then will our attention be taken off ourselves (our soul) and only when we direct our attention toward Christ will we hear Him.
Spiritual identity is derived from our spiritual union. The deepest aspect of our humanity is at a spirit level. God designed us to live from Him. As Christians we are joined to Lord in our human spirit. Being aware and living from our spiritual union, allows us to hear God. The spirit is the place of hearing God. We can then say, “That our soul variations do not define us, nor do they have to interfere with us hearing God’s voice, and in fact, they are necessary for us to fully experience our humanity.

I have often referred to the soul with all the thoughts and emotions as… “the world wide web,” there are a multitude of “voices” bidding for our attrition. However, faith has one focus which is God’s activity, and not everything traveling through our minds is of God.

Faith is receptive to God’s love and not susceptible to the temptation that has so easily distracted me. Temptation is Satan’s negative attempt to distract us from walking by faith, choosing rather to walk after the flesh in unbelief. The soul is a noisy place, with much going on, thoughts and emotions. God designed our human spirit, as a quiet place, it does not make noise, it is a place reserved for God’s presence. Proverbs 18:10 refers to the “secret place of the Most High.” Our spiritual union in Christ is just that, it is the place of God, an inner sanctuary.

We were designed to live from and draw our life from, this place of perfect stillness and quietness, where we simply know God because we are known by God. The Spirit of God is never going to make a lot of noise in our life. It is as if God is saying, “to know me relationally you will need to be still and know that I am God, or you’ll miss me.” Hopefully by now it will not come as a surprise to discover that hearing God’s voice does not start with our thoughts or feelings.

Hearing God’s voice always starts with what God is saying. That doesn’t mean that He won’t work through our soul (our thoughts and emotions) at some point but that’ not where He begins. Your spirit does not hear God’s voice be analysis but rather by revelation. To many Christians are on a fact-finding mission to hear God and that is why they are not hearing God. They are trying to use their brainpower to figure God out—to know Him. You know God by revelation not studying. Once we have heard God, we will certainly process with our minds, and volitionally choose with our will to allow for the behavioral expression of God’s will to be expressed thought us. But hearing God is always being aware of His presence and attentive to His voice.

The Message Bible communicates this well in Romans 15-17. “This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike “What’s next, Papa?” God’s Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what’s coming to us—an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we’re certainly going to go through the good times with him!”
To hear God, is to experience God, it is relational. It is in the presence of God that we hear His voice. Too few of us have practiced the presence of God. It is a mystery to us and so the Bible agrees, when it declares that it is the mystery of Christ in you the hope of glory. The problem too often is, we try to figure God out with our minds studying with our brains. The Bible is fine, but it is not the exclusive means by which you will experience God—it rather points to God. Yes, it is God’s word and yes, He will speak through His word, but it (the bible) is not Him. He is not in it; the Bible is not God. The scriptures point to Christ. Jesus illustrated it for us John 5:39, “You examine the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is those very Scriptures that testify about Me.”
Jesus is saying that, the inspired scriptures provide a personal revelation of how God would have us to think but they are not God. He is God.

The purpose of understanding the scriptures is… that we might more intimately know JESUS and understand the spiritual realities of God in Christ. We should not diminish or criticize the scriptures in any way, but neither do we want to deify the scriptures or allow the scriptures to displace the reverence that is due to JESUS Christ alone.

The scriptures should not be mistaken for hearing God’s voice. Certainly, God may choose to speak to you through the scriptures, but remember it is God’s voice, and not the object that He chooses to use to communicate with us that is of most importance. As Jesus said in John 10:27, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” As you walk aware of God’s presence you will hear His voice!