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Have you ever asked God to speak to you, and then wondered whether the thought that came into your mind was from him, or just you? Or maybe you listened for the still, small voice, and nothing came to mind at all.

Maybe you’ve heard other Christians talk about hearing God or feeling his presence and wondered, “Why don’t I experience him that way?” Maybe you know that you can trust the Bible, but you don’t always feel like you can trust yourself to hear from God.

You don’t want to claim God said something he didn’t. But you also don’t want to dismiss a thought as “just me” when he may be bringing it to your mind. I want to show you a simple, biblically grounded way to begin a two-way conversation with God, even if you aren’t confident that you’re hearing him yet.

When I Knew How to Hear God and Still Felt Distant

I grew up in a communal church on the north side of Chicago, where everyone’s paychecks were pooled and everyone got a set allowance. Bigger purchases were decided in small groups. I don’t believe this is God’s plan for his church now, but I was raised thinking that way. The good thing about it was that everyone believed in living out what the Bible said every day.

Seeking God’s direction was normal. Having your own private prayer time with Bible reading every day was normal. I took my relationship with God seriously from a very young age.

I journaled my prayers regularly, told God my problems, listened to what he might be saying, and wrote down what came to mind. Then I tested whatever I wasn’t sure about with my personal mentor. And I really was hearing God.

The thing was, I still became deeply depressed. There were plenty of times when I brought God exactly what I was struggling with, listened, and then felt very distant from him.

At one of my lowest points as a teenager, I wanted to give up on life itself. My mentor told me the reason not to give up was simply that God had put me on this earth, and he knew better than I did.

That stripped away everything I thought I was contributing to my relationship with him. Everything boiled down to simply having a relationship with God, bare bones. No strings attached.

His perspective on my life mattered more than mine, because he created the relationship itself. So when I hear people say, “I can’t feel God,” or, “I pray and I just go blank,” I don’t immediately think, “You must be doing something wrong.” I think, “Yeah, I’ve really struggled with that too.”

Feeling Disconnected Doesn’t Mean You Are Disconnected

You might think, “If I can’t hear or feel God, something might be wrong with my prayer life.” But I’ve been coaching women in their prayer lives for years, and that’s actually a common problem.

Even though hearing God is a prayer journaling skill we can master, it’s ultimately an experience beyond our control. I experienced times when I listened and had no thoughts or feelings, even when I’d been hearing God daily for years and knew how to discern his voice.

I’ve seen this in the women I work with too. Sheri experienced years of blankness, with little or nothing coming to mind when we asked God for insight.

Jennifer’s experience was almost the opposite. She was intensely sensitive on the spiritual level, but frightening experiences and uncertainty often left her questioning what was happening in her relationship with God.

One woman experienced almost nothing. The other experienced things she didn’t know how to interpret. Either one could have assumed that something must be wrong with her prayer life.

But going blank is common in prayer. Not feeling God’s presence is pretty typical, and being unsure whether a thought is from God or you is something we all encounter.

These experiences don’t tell you the condition of your relationship with God, because feeling disconnected doesn’t mean you are disconnected. If you’ve said yes to Jesus dying and being resurrected for you, you’re connected.

You can tell him, “I don’t know why I’m not hearing you,” or, “I feel completely blank right now.” So if you’re still connected with God even when your mind is blank, what do you do when you ask God to speak and insights do come into your mind?

What If It’s Just My Own Thoughts?

You might think, “If an idea seems to come from my own thoughts, it’s probably me, not God,” or, “If insights from God come through my own thoughts, how do I know I’m not just talking to myself?”

But the reality is that God wants to have a relationship with us where we actually get to know him as a person. He’s not just a belief. The Bible calls him the Holy Ghost.

If he never shared any of his thoughts with us, we’d have a belief system about God, but we wouldn’t have much of a relationship with him. The Bible is clear that, as Christians, we have his Holy Spirit living in us.

In John 14, Jesus said the Holy Spirit would live in us and teach us, and Romans 8:16 describes him bearing witness with our spirit. So the Bible doesn’t describe God’s communication as something that only happens during rare spiritual moments.

His Spirit lives in us and is in a steady relationship with us. God actually set it up this way on purpose so he could always be present with us. Nothing can take that presence away.

And think about this: Not only does God influence our thoughts, but they can also be influenced by evil. So it’s very true that we don’t really know whether every thought that seems to be from God is actually from him.

That makes it hard to tell what’s coming from his presence and what’s coming from our own mind in our conversations with him. But here’s what I can tell you from my experience.

When I ask God what he wants me to know and something comes into my mind, it really is possible that he’s bringing that thought to my mind. So I can’t dismiss it as “just me” or give up trying to figure it out.

If I say I have a relationship with God, that usually means I’m noticing him leading me through the messages my mind is giving me. It’s up to me to sort out what I think might be an insight from him. And that’s why I use a prayer journal.

The Bible Is the Standard, but Relationship Shows Me How to Apply It

If a thought comes to mind and I’m wondering whether it’s him or me, I have options. First, I ask myself whether a thought that seems to be from the Lord matches the character of God I see in the Bible.

Remember, God knows what you need in order to properly discern his voice, because he knows how well you know him. And anytime you want, you can bring your uncertainty into the conversation.

You can tell him, “God, I don’t feel anything when I pray. I’m afraid you’re not answering me. I don’t know whether this thought is you or me. What do you want me to know?”

And the answers often come through thoughts you get from the Bible. However, just because Jesus is the word and the Bible is 100% accurate doesn’t mean all the thoughts you get from the Bible are accurate.

I’ll give you an example. When I was married and my marriage was struggling, the principle of submitting to my husband got to be kind of confusing.

I’d studied what the Bible said about biblical submission. I knew what the marriage books said about it. So I thought the biblical principles were clear about what God wanted me to do.

But I knew from lots of experience that a biblical principle could be completely true, and I could still be wrong about how it applied to my situation. That left me unsure how to trust myself to hear from God.

Unless I treated God as a separate person, living inside of me and guiding me to know his thoughts, I had no way of trusting that he was leading me. Scripture was always my standard for knowing the truth. I was just coming to grips with the fact that the relationship was the main way I’d know how to apply it.

Don’t Run Both Sides of the Conversation

Now you might be thinking, “I know I can trust the Bible, but I don’t always feel like I can trust myself to hear from God. Isn’t it just as prideful to assume I’m hearing God correctly as it is to assume I’m applying the Bible correctly?”

But there are some big differences between hearing God and applying biblical truth. The Bible itself says that your Father wants you to know him. It tells you that he’s given you his Spirit and that his Spirit communicates with you.

So trusting the Bible about this means you’re trusting that God will accurately communicate with you. The Bible doesn’t say it will show us how to apply each principle to our situation. It says the Holy Spirit personally shows us how to apply it.

The key here isn’t, “Trust in what you understand from the Bible with all your heart.” It’s, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart.”

When we think about Proverbs 3:5 this way, leaning not unto your own understanding means asking God for his understanding. It also means not assuming that God sees your situation exactly the way you do, just because you understand the Bible a certain way.

I learned that the hard way when I regretted some of the things I’d been submitting to in my marriage. When I lean on my own interpretation of the Bible, I can end up assuming I know God’s will before I even ask him what it is.

In other words, I’m running both sides of the conversation.

Here’s what I learned: Don’t run both sides of the conversation. Give him the chance to speak for himself.

What makes me so sure I’m hearing God speak accurately through my own thoughts? The reason I feel confident listening for God’s thoughts in my own mind isn’t because I trust myself to know which thought’s which.

I’m confident about this because I use the Bible to test the different ideas that pop into my head. If what comes into my mind contradicts what I know about God from the Bible, I know it’s not him.

Of course, if it lines up with what God would say, that doesn’t automatically prove God gave me that particular thought. But I can take the risk of believing it’s possibly from him and continue the conversation as if it is.

Writing out conversations between me and God helps me feel his love while building my skill of discernment over time. When it’s written down in my prayer journal, I can go back after time has passed and evaluate whether the thoughts I believed were from God actually ended up directing me the right way.

How I Tested Something I Thought God Was Saying

Here’s an example of how I tested one thought I had recently. I was writing honestly in my prayer journal about feeling tired and weighed down. Underneath that was some pain and financial frustration.

I started thinking about the fact that God had been my Father from the beginning, long before I was old enough to understand money. He’d always known what I needed, and he’d always known how to provide for me.

But I still felt like his provision depended on me learning to do things well enough, as though God had been patiently waiting for me to get it right. Underneath that, I realized I was expecting my Father to eventually run out of patience.

Once I wrote that down, I felt like he asked me, “What if I were to tell you that that wasn’t me? Would you believe it?”

I wrote that I wasn’t sure and asked, “What do you want me to know?” The thought popped into my mind, “Remember when you first realized it wasn’t that hard?”

I responded as if that thought was from God. I wrote, “Oh yeah. That was awesome. I had totally forgotten about that.”

I was remembering the relief I’d felt when I first realized I didn’t have to be financially competent before God would provide for me. The thought that came next was that he was just letting me know how much he enjoyed me instead of showing me more things I needed to improve.

Once I had that insight, I tested what I’d just written with what I knew from scripture. First John tells us we’re loved and called children of God.

It anchors the whole thing in his love as my Father, not in my ability to get things right so I can please him. That meant the thoughts I’d had were consistent with who scripture showed me he is.

So maybe now you can see from that example why we write the thoughts that may be from God before we filter them with biblical truth. We need his perspective so we know which truths will apply.

Try the Ask, Write, Test Process

Now that we’ve talked about why this conversation matters so much, I’d like to show you how you can try this out for yourself. I’ve developed the Ask, Write, Test process to help clients understand what they’re doing.

Don’t worry about trying to create some kind of experience with God. All I’m asking you to do is give him a moment to talk to you if he wants to. You may hear something, or you may not. Both are perfectly fine, especially if this is your first time trying this out.

Step 1: Start With What’s on Your Mind

Think of something that’s been on your mind lately that you’d really like to talk with God about. Tell him how you feel about it in one sentence.

If you can’t think of anything in particular, that’s okay. Just write down the first thing that pops into your head from anywhere in the Bible.

Step 2: Ask Him What He Wants You to Know

Now write down, “Lord, what do you want me to know about this?” Then stop and listen to any thoughts you might have.

Don’t try to make something special happen. Just notice whatever comes into your mind and write it down, whether it seems important or not.

It could be some words, an image, an insight, a verse, or simply nothing. Give yourself a couple of minutes if you need to as your thoughts settle down and flow.

Step 3: Write What Comes to Mind

Now imagine God as a loving Father sitting next to you right now and looking at what you wrote. Imagine he starts giving you insight about how this applies to your life.

You can just look at what you’ve written and notice what comes to mind next. Write it down, whether it seems important or not. Write it as a message from him as he’s showing you this.

You don’t have to decide yet whether these words are really coming from God. You’re just giving yourself something concrete to test in the next step.

Again, if your mind goes blank and you don’t notice any thoughts at all, don’t write anything.

Step 4: Test What You Wrote

Now we’ll use common sense as we look at what you just wrote. Is the message aligned with how the Bible describes God?

Where does scripture show him thinking this way, or show you that this isn’t how he thinks? If you’re not sure, ask him to help you or look something up. Remember, God knows your exact level of biblical understanding.

Jot down a verse or two, whatever comes to mind. Simple ideas are perfectly fine.

I realize there’s a risk of proof-texting with this, so when you do this again, try to use verses you’ve studied before. It’s really easy to take verses out of context.

If there’s anything you wrote that’s obviously not how God thinks, put a line through it. The rest you can keep. If you want to continue the conversation later, feel free.

What This Process Does

Some of you might have had something come to mind that you’re curious about. Some of you might have had a thought and now you’re wondering, “Was that from God or from me?” And some of you may have had absolutely no thoughts.

None of these experiences is enough to tell you where you’re at in your relationship with God. What happened in the exercise really just gave you a place to begin.

The Ask, Write, Test process you learned today was a quick trial of something much more involved. But think about why you wanted to learn it.

You probably didn’t come here because your big goal was to learn a four-step prayer exercise. You want to know God. You want to know what he thinks when you’re discouraged, recognize his guidance when you’re making decisions, and understand what he’s doing in areas where you’ve felt stuck.

You want to know him as your adoring Father. Once you start bringing these things into your conversation with him, there’s so much more you can explore.

As you have deeper and deeper conversations with him, you get better at recognizing what he’s saying. You become more familiar with how his voice shows up through your own thoughts.

You get used to testing what you’re hearing with scripture and become more confident about what lines up with his character. You build a history with him as you bring him your feelings, hear his perspective, test what you’re hearing, discover where you’ve misunderstood him, and learn how he relates to you personally.

You Don’t Have to Develop Discernment by Yourself

You don’t have to develop that discernment by yourself. That’s the kind of relationship we’re developing inside our Illumination prayer-coaching community.

This community is for committed Christians who believe God is speaking to them and want to talk about how that relationship actually works in everyday life. It’s a place where we learn how to recognize God’s voice through scripture, prayer journaling, coaching, and community with others who are like-minded.

In Illumination, we help you address the underlying issues to unblock your prayer conversation. If you’ve been longing for something like this and haven’t known how to move forward, I invite you to come take a look.

Visit Sophiculture.com/illumination and see whether our community might be just the right thing for you.

Let’s Pray

Lord, I want to be totally content knowing you’re showing me whatever I need to know. Help me know when you’re speaking so I will stop and really listen. Grow my ability to discern what’s happening in our relationship. Amen.

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Next Steps:

Get our free “Hearing God Starter Kit” and learn the journaling process at:

Sophiculture.com/guide

Get personalized support to build a thriving friendship with Jesus at:

Sophiculture.com/illumination