How God Communicates with Me

He Wants to Communicate With You, Too

Communication Is Two-Sided

Prayer is communication with God, and as with all communication, it’s two-sided. Consequently, a prerequisite to real communication with God is openness to listening for a response as well as a willingness to adjust based on His feedback. My dad never explicitly taught me how to pray, but once I’d learned, I realized He had been doing it the right way for years. He’s constantly opening himself to hear from God and to allow the Lord to direct his life, which is the biggest part of communicating with the Creator. However, “machine gun prayer,” as a pastor friend of mine calls it, is never going to get a response from God. Throwing a bunch of questions and requests into the air without waiting for a response isn’t communication at all.

Another important thing to remember about God is that He is very close and wants to speak to us. Contrarily, in many circles, prayer is explained in a way that makes it sound like God is someone very difficult to “get ahold” of. Like our friend who simply never has her phone on her (and even when she does, it’s on silent mode), we’re led to believe that God is a bit flaky (though we’d never say it in those terms). I cannot iterate enough how simply untrue that is. God is alive, vibrant, and aching to speak with us if we’d only stop to calm down and listen.

The next thing to realize is that God has already probably been speaking to you; likely, you just haven’t been giving Him the credit. Not that you’re ungrateful, but if you are a Christian, then you have the Holy Spirit: He’s inside of your bones. With that indwelling* comes promptings. What you may have written off as a “gut feeling” was God’s Spirit giving you insights.

The Nuts and Bolts

Now, for a communication framework. Sometimes, communicating with God can feel very mystical, but more often, the Lord reaches us in ways that are extremely ordinary and even mundane. Nevertheless, there’s a distinct pattern in communicating with God, though its form and medium can vary drastically depending on the person and situation. I’m not going to cover the different communication methods in-depth in this article, but rather a general structure for how communication with God occurs.

Breaking it down into the simplest terms, communication with God has four parts:

1. Prompting (i.e., the “still small voice” in 1 Kings 19:12)

2. Confirmation*

3. Revealing

4. Re-Iteration

5. Expansion

Promptings can come in many different shapes, but they all begin with our minds or hearts noticing something new. A sign you may have passed a dozen different times suddenly “jumps out” at you, along with a corresponding thought. Or, while you’re praying, an idea sticks in your brain that you hadn’t had when you prayed about the same topic earlier. You might even be watching a movie, and a scene in it reminds you of something that happened to you during the week that bothered you. In any of these cases, something highlights itself, and suddenly there’s an underlying message that you never noticed before.

Most people at this Prompting stage of course notice the new, strange melody, but rather than pulling on the string to see where it leads, they brush it off. They either think it’s a coincidence or they’re too distracted to slow down and ask God if there’s something He’s trying to show them. However, asking God for His opinion and following the thread is essential because openness to change is what allows the Lord to work on our hearts and show us a new path.

After God has pricked and Prompted your heart, He’ll start Confirming what He’s said. Especially if you’re a newer Christian (or listening for God is uncharted territory), He’ll often give lots of reinforcement. People who are more mature in their faith usually don’t need quite as many Confirmations unless it’s a very drastic and life-altering command, but when you’re not used to listening to God, He’ll typically give you a lot of encouragement initially that you’re on the right path.

For example, when I started feeling very discontent with my work and station in life a few years ago, I began bringing it up in prayer to God and kept my eyes and ears peeled for direction from Him. One of the first mediums he used to Confirm I should move in a different direction was people. Without delay, my family and even co-workers started to “randomly” say things to me about how creative I was. As I was driving by a church one day, its beauty struck me, and we attended a service. At that service, a complete stranger walked up to me and began talking about beauty and creativity and how God uses those things to reach people’s hearts. Instances like these came in spades, letting me know I was on the right track in pursuing creativity.

Assuming you don’t brush off the Confirmations, God will begin to Reveal the fuller scope. This is how I ended up quitting my job in tech and starting a cinematography company with my husband. One day, while I was praying and quieting my mind, God told me, “You’re not going to stay in tech for much longer. I have other, creative plans for you.” This was a clear directive, but it only came because I’d been feeling out of place in the corporate world and nudged by the Holy Spirit that I was in the “wrong room.” Little by little, for years, God had been pulling layers off of the false identity and security I’d built for myself. He began showing me through the Bible, other books, music, my husband, prayer, and a myriad of other ways that my creativity and who I was as a little girl was the true self He wanted to pull back out and build upon.

The Reiteration stage is one of the more frustrating stages because God usually deploys it if we’ve been delaying obedience. A good example of mine is writing. God has been Prompting me repeatedly this year to write; apparently, it’s the most important thing I can be doing right now, even more important than growing Vantage with Ty. But God has had to Reiterate that command to me several times because while I have been writing, it’s been slow and inconsistent. He doesn’t always Reiterate because we’re being sluggish — sometimes we need extra encouragement or a reminder as to why we’re doing this (whatever “this” may be for you) — but it does feel a bit like your mom telling you to “quiet down” in the backseat for the fifth time in a row. It’s a Prompt, but an exasperated one.

Finally, there’s the Expansion phase. This is when God builds on what He’s told us and gives a glimpse into the “grand plan.” I love this phase, because He usually only reveals it to us when we’ve walked a long distance down the path He set before us, and we’re finally at the edge of a waterfall of change He’s been setting up from the start. We’ve followed His Promptings, appreciated the little (or much) He has Confirmed and Revealed, but walked in faith the rest of the way (with maybe a few moments of Re-iteration). Expansion is exciting because God will give us a deeper look into what we’re building, and it’s almost always a bigger scope than we could have imagined.

It’s Not a Magical Framework

I’ve laid these prayer stages out chronologically, but many of them overlap and circle back on one another. God might Prompt you to move in a certain direction and Confirm His plan, but then later He might Prompt you again and Reveal an unexpected reason for the same Prompting. Or, He might Prompt you and Confirm His Prompting without Revealing any of His reasoning, sometimes for years. It’s not a linear process, and frequently He will Prompt our hearts in different areas simultaneously, so in one instance you’re at the Prompting stage, and in another you might be at Expansion.

The communication framework I’ve laid out is based on my experience with God and observing Godly people I know, but it’s best understood through personal prayer and by studying Scripture, especially Biblical characters like King David. He had a tremendously deep friendship with the Lord and is an excellent model for what a relationship with the Father can look like. It’s also worth noting that some Christians have described deeper ways of communicating with God that go beyond sensory experience entirely, but I’ve never experienced those methods and have little input to give.

Definitions

*Indwelling: This word sounds a little creepy to our modern ears, but the concept is pretty simple. One of the best verses about the Holy Spirit comes from Jesus in John 14:16, 17. Jesus says to His disciples, “And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.” Unlike in the Old Testament when the Spirit of God would visit God’s followers but then would leave them again, believers today are given the gift of being a “temple” for the Holy Spirit. God doesn’t just visit us on special occasions or when we’re at His temple, but we are now the church, and our bodies are the temple. God is with us, always.

*Confirmation: “Confirmation” is often used in Catholic contexts to describe a sacrament that their members go through to strengthen their faith in God and confirm their life in the faith. It’s a distinct program they follow if they want to commit their lives to God. However, this isn’t the definition I’m using for this word. “Confirmation” is the best word I can think of to describe how God verifies that He was, indeed, the one speaking to us and that His directive is serious. I have an entire notes page on my phone that I add to every time God Confirms something for me.

Further reading

1. 1 Samuel 16 - 31 — All of these chapters are a goldmine about David’s intimate friendship with God. Read the entire book if you’d like to juxtapose Saul’s self-sufficient, ignorant dialogue with the Lord with David’s completely surrendered, reliant position.

2. I Heard God Laugh: A Practical Guide to Life’s Essential Daily Habit by Matthew Kelly — This book is written by a Catholic author and speaker. I have reservations about taking prayer advice from Catholic individuals since they pray to Mary and other saints, but Matthew’s game plan in this little book is simple and fantastic. I usually skip the Lord’s prayer part of it because I find it redundant, but the thoughts and practical wisdom here are wonderful. His prayer life is beautiful.

3. Extreme Sheep: Experiencing Listening Prayer by Timothy Jones — If you want to learn how to pray, you don’t need to look further than Pastor Tim’s book. The writing isn’t fabulous, but his advice is absolutely incredible. I’ve met Pastor Tim in person, and he completely changed my life by praying for me. He didn’t know me, but prayed for the exact things I was struggling with and was a big part of Confirming that I am meant to be a creative professional. I’d never known communication with the Lord could be so clear and miraculous until meeting him.