By Robert Morris
One evening during our hot tub talk, Debbie turned very serious and said to me, “Robert, I want to ask you something.”
I nodded. I’d just been teaching some Bible classes on hearing God’s voice, and she said, “Would you personally teach me how to hear God?” “Sure,” I said. We went through some general principles from the Bible, and then I added, “You know, you can hear God right now, did you know that? Let’s just stop for a moment and focus on the Lord and pray and ask God to speak to you. He’ll speak; I promise. It’ll be like a thought coming into your mind that aligns with the character and goodness of God. Ready?”
So Debbie nodded, and we closed our eyes, and I prayed. Then we opened our eyes, and I watched her face. She looked like she was listening really intently. Then she kind of tilted her head, smiled, and shrugged all at the same time, as if to say, “Oh well.”“Wait a minute,” I said. “What did you just hear?” “Well, it wasn’t God,” she said. “I know that.”“How do you know?” I asked. “Tell me what you just heard.”
She paused, as if searching for the right words, then began. “Well, right before I put the kids to bed, I read them that old children’s story, The Little Engine That Could. You remember it? It’s about a little blue train engine that was designed to pull small things, like one or two cars around a rail yard. There was a long train that needed to be pulled over a mountain. So the long train asked several big engines if they could pull it over the hill, but all of the big engines said no. So finally the long train went to the little engine and asked him. The little engine said yes, and the whole time it worked at the job, it kept repeating this phrase over and over and over again, ‘I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.’ And finally it got over the hill. And then it said, ‘I know I can, I know I can, I know I can.’ That’s what I heard just now. I heard that phrase. But that couldn’t be from God, could it?”
As I listened to my wife, I was praying simultaneously, and when she said that, the Holy Spirit immediately impressed upon my heart that this was indeed the voice of God for her.
“You just heard God,” I said. “You see yourself as the little engine and me as the big engine, and the Lord is trying to tell you that you can hear from the Lord yourself. It’s not ‘I think I can, I think I can,’ but ‘I know I can, I know I can.’”
Years have passed since then, and my wife has developed her personal relationship with God over time and grown deeper in her faith. These days, whenever she comes to me and says, “Robert, I have a word from the Lord for you,” I’m all ears because she regularly hears from the Lord today. Maybe you’re at that same stage in your spiritual journey where you don’t know whether or not you can hear from the Lord. You’ve read this far in this book, and you’re saying, “Well, I think I can do this.” I want to encourage you that you can indeed hear from the Lord. It’s not “I think I can, I think I can,” but “I know I can, I know I can.”
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Robert Morris is the founding senior pastor of Gateway Church, a multicampus church with more than 36,000 active members in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. He is the bestselling author of 14 books, including The Blessed Life, The God I Never Knew, Truly Free, and Frequency.
Taken from Frequency: Tune In. Hear God. by Robert Morris. Copyright © 2016 by Robert Morris. Used by permission of Thomas Nelson.www.thomasnelson.com.
