What do you do when you feel like your prayers are just words? How can you tell that God is listening to anything you have to say?
These are questions that all people ask at some point in time. Prayer, while it sometimes is accompanied by emotional feelings, tears, laughter or other physical elements, does not always take form in the way we would like or expect it to. Even knowing whether or not you’re receiving any communication back from God can be difficult to understand at times.
In a recent video, Isaiah Saldivar wisely provided biblical guidance and insight into what it looks like to listen to the Holy Spirit’s voice during your time of prayer.
While acknowledging that sometimes there isn’t much emotion brought up through our prayers, Saldivar points out that God absolutely wants us to experience His presence through our prayers.
“God desires to encounter us in a way that does meet our physical five senses,” Saldivar says. “Does everybody always have that? No…but I do believe God does touch us in that way.”
As Saldivar explains, much of the time the hearing and seeing we experience through prayer isn’t in the physical reality of what we audibly hear or touch, but it comes through a refining, a sharpening that takes place in the spirit.
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“Here’s the problem: we are looking at it as like our physical senses, right?” Saldivar asks. “Spiritually, that’s not the way it works.”
In the spirit, God may speak through a small thought that comes to mind to pray for something or to specifically call something to be cast out while doing deliverance. Saldivar says an overwhelming sense of peace may even come upon someone after their time of prayer as a way of God making His presence known.
One of the ways to know if God may be reaching out to you is if you continually feel nudged to do a certain thing or talk to a certain person you may not have just done on your own. However, as Saldivar points out, there are times when God blatantly allows us to make decisions on our own in which He will decide to bless us regardless of what we choose.
In these subtle yet significant ways, God seeks to communicate with us, providing opportunities for us to express bold requests. Similar to Jacob’s wrestling with God, there are moments when we are encouraged to approach God confidently, making bold appeals in our prayers.
“Hey God, I’m not letting you go, I’m going to keep pursuing You [until] You do something in my life. I’m going to keep pursuing You until You speak to me,” Saldivar says.
No matter how God decides to talk to you—whether it’s through the quietness of a reoccurring thing or person to pray for, a time of testing your faith when you choose to believe even though you have not seen or a moment where God is asking you to boldly come before the throne, one thing is certain: He desires for us to enter into a deep and meaningful relationship with Him.
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Abby Trivett is a marketing copywriter and coordinator for Charisma Media.
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