What is the key to hearing the Lord’s voice?
In an exclusive interview with Charisma Media, author Chris Garcia shared what he believes the missing key is for a lot of believers in their walk with the Lord.
“What marked Jesus’ ministry as a powerful ministry, yes, He cast out all devils, He healed the sick, He raised the dead. But there was relationship between Jesus’ prayer life and the power of the Spirit and activation so much so that the disciples were like, ‘Master, teach us to pray.’ They saw a relationship between His alone time with the Father ad His public ministry of power,” Garcia says.
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It is this private time alone with the Father that many people ignore. While we all need community with other people, especially with other believers, we cannot push our personal relationship with the heavenly Father to the side. Instead, it has to be the main focus of our lives, the greatest ministry that we have.
“The person of God, the man or woman of God is called to be with the Lord,” Garcia says. “Unfortunately, we’ve deduced prayer to a list of things that we have to do. Or we’ve deduced it to a chore…it’s more important that we have God’s attention and that He has our attention and that we are with Jesus, we are with the Lord.”
Garcia says one of the problems that we have with prayer and its perception today is that our Western society has made it all about a formula instead of entering into a deep and meaningful time of communion with the Lord.
“True community is found in the communion of Christ first,” Garcia says.
For many people, their relationship with the Lord can sometimes even feel a bit awkward because He is still a relative stranger to them.
“I think a lot of people are uncomfortable with being with the Lord because that level of knowing Him hasn’t fully yet developed,” Garcia says. “The more you pursue knowing Him, those moments of awkwardness go away.”
The greatest thing we can do to strengthen our relationship with the Lord, to know His voice better each day, is simply to spend time in His presence. Just as it takes time to get to know a person by spending time in their presence, the same is true for our relationship with the Lord.
“The more you learn to acknowledge the presence of God throughout your day, the more it becomes natural to slip into a deeper prayer walk,” Garcia says.
God has a plan and a purpose for each of us, and one of the biggest parts of that plan is for us to know Him deeply. The more we get to know the Lord the more our lives will be shaped be His character and fruit. By spending more time with Him, we will see the kind of harvest He wants to produce in our lives.
“New wine is received and sustained by a new wineskin,” Garcia says. “And that new wineskin is the renovation of the mind, to renew in the Spirit of your mind, that is enabling you to sustain what God wants to do.”
By spending more time in communion with the Lord, we can fully see what kinds of things He wants to do in our lives.
“Many times, God wants to do something new and vibrant in our life. But we can miss out on it with an old mentality. It kind of reminds me of in Isaiah where it says, ‘Behold, I will do a new thing, shall you not perceive it.’ And so, in order for us to receive the new and sustain the new and maintain in the new, we’ve got to allow the new thing to renovate us,” Garcia says.
If you’re seeking to hear from the Lord, to know the direction He wants you to take, the greatest thing you can do is spend time in prayer. From there, you will see how life changes as God places you on His good, eternal path.
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Abby Trivett is content development editor for Charisma Media.
Phil Hotsenpiller 
Stephen Strang 
