Can you hear God?
Perhaps the better question is: What if He has been speaking all along?
One of the concerns we hear surprisingly often from people who come for a Sozo is that they can’t — or think they can’t — hear from God. Sometimes the reason is:
“Why would He want to talk to me?”
Perhaps they don’t feel worthy of being addressed by God. Perhaps something in their experience has led them to believe that God is distant, disappointed or simply uninterested in them. Others come from a very different angle. They’ve never stopped long enough to listen.
There is so much going on in our heads — thoughts, memories, worries, plans, opinions and everything else that life throws at us — that they have never learned to recognise God’s voice amongst all the other voices. So they assume that God isn’t talking. But what if He is?
God wants relationship with us
Our experience, both personally and from doing thousands of Sozos, is that God is talking to us all the time. That may be difficult for some people to believe. But our experience tells us that God’s greatest desire for each of us is that we are in relationship with Him. And at the heart of that relationship is love.
God is love.
For some people, that may challenge the way they have understood God. We don’t experience God as waiting for people to become good enough before He will talk to them. In Sozo, we have repeatedly seen something rather different: God inviting people into relationship with Him and revealing His love for them.
The invitation isn’t: “Get yourself sorted out and then come and talk to Me.” It is much more like: “Come into relationship with Me.”
And as we begin to know Him, we begin to recognise His voice.
“Why would He want to talk to me?”
This is perhaps the most important question to settle first. Maybe you’ve made mistakes. Maybe you’ve done things you regret. Maybe you’ve spent years believing that God is disappointed with you, or perhaps you simply don’t think you’re important enough for God to speak to you. But the starting point isn’t: “Am I worthy?” The starting point is: “Does God love me?”
Our experience says that He does. And if relationship is what God wants, then communication is part of that relationship.
We talk to the people we love; we listen to them; we want to know what they think. And God wants us to know Him.
Our heads and our hearts
One of the things we’ve discovered through Sozo — and explored much more deeply in our book ‘Becoming Wholehearted’ — is the relationship between our heads and our hearts. We tend to run much of our lives from what we hold in our heads. Our brains contain an extraordinary library of experience: everything we’ve seen, heard, learned and experienced, good and bad, painful and pleasurable and we think and react from this accumulated experience.
Ask your head a question and it will often give you an answer based on what it knows. That doesn’t mean that everything in our heads is wrong. Far from it. Our heads contain knowledge, wisdom and valuable experience.
But they also contain our interpretations of what has happened to us, and some of those interpretations may not be true. And this is where the heart becomes important.
We use the word heart in a particular way when we talk about inner healing and hearing God. We aren’t simply talking about the physical organ or using heart as a synonym for emotion. We’re talking about something much closer to the core of who we are — the place where our emotional responses, feelings and deeply held perceptions can reveal something about how we are really experiencing life. Becoming Wholehearted describes the heart as the place from which we can become emotionally connected to ourselves and increasingly live authentically.
Sometimes our heads and hearts tell us different things.
Our head may say: “That doesn’t matter anymore.” Our heart may say: “It still hurts.”
Our head may say: “I know God loves me.” Our heart may still feel: “But does He really love me?”
The answer isn’t simply to choose the head or the heart. The journey is to allow God to bring truth, healing and wholeness to the heart, so that our hearts become a safe informant for our heads to listen to. And that has a profound effect on how we hear God.
Learning to listen
Sometimes God speaks quietly. The Bible speaks of the “still, small voice” of God, and often that is what it feels like. The difficulty is that our minds are rarely still, there is always something competing for our attention: thoughts; memories; worries; plans; other people’s opinions; our own opinions; the noise of everyday life.
So one of the things we have to learn is simply to be quiet enough to listen. That’s why quiet and meditation can be so important, not because we’re trying to manufacture an experience of God, rather, we’re making space to notice what He may already be saying. The quieter we become, the easier it can be to recognise what is coming from God amongst all the competing internal messages.
How does God speak? Does God only speak through an internal voice? Of course not. God uses what is around us to communicate with us. He may use Scripture, suddenly highlighting something we’ve read dozens of times. He can speak truth through prophetic words that others bring to us. He can bring people into our lives at just the right moment. Sometimes apparently coincidental meetings turn out to be anything but coincidental.
God is not restricted to one method of communication. He is constantly communicating. The challenge isn’t necessarily getting God to speak, it’s learning to recognise when He is speaking.
How do I know it’s God?
This is where relationship becomes so important. Hearing God isn’t primarily about learning a technique for identifying a particular kind of voice. It’s about getting to know Him.
The better we know someone, the more readily we recognise them, so learning to hear God is part of learning to know God. It also means learning to test what we think we’re hearing rather than automatically assuming that every thought is from God.
We don’t need to be frightened of getting it wrong. Nor do we need to pretend that we’ve heard something when we haven’t. Learning to hear God is a relationship, not an examination.
What if I don’t hear anything?
You wouldn’t be unusual. Many people who come for a Sozo aren’t sure whether they can hear God at all. Sometimes they have been waiting for something dramatic; sometimes they’ve been listening for a particular kind of voice; sometimes they simply haven’t stopped long enough to notice.
And sometimes there are things within us that make hearing difficult — hurts, fears, beliefs about ourselves or God, or simply the noise of life.
You don’t have to force anything. You don’t have to manufacture an answer, and you don’t have to pretend that you’ve heard something when you haven’t.
Start where you are. Learning to hear God is a journey.
Hearing God for yourself
This is one of the things we particularly value about Sozo. We don’t want people dependent upon a minister to tell them what God thinks. We want to help people hear from God for themselves. That’s why we describe Sozo as a communications ministry. The facilitator isn’t there to become God’s voice for you.
In a Sozo, the person receiving ministry is encouraged to ask questions of Father God, Jesus and Holy Spirit themselves. The facilitator helps create the space for that conversation rather than replacing it. This is central to the way we use the Sozo tools.
The goal isn’t: “Tell me what God is saying.” It’s: “Help me hear God for myself.” And that’s a very different thing.
What happens when we begin to hear?
Hearing God isn’t an end in itself. The purpose is relationship. As we allow what God says to inform our lives, our thinking and our actions can begin to change. We may discover that something we’ve believed for years isn’t true; we may discover that God sees us very differently from the way we see ourselves; we may discover that something from our past is still affecting the way we live.
We may discover forgiveness, freedom, hope, love. And sometimes simply the astonishing realisation: God really does want to talk to me.
Hearing God and becoming wholehearted
There is a natural connection between hearing God and the journey we describe as becoming wholehearted. If we are constantly living out of what our past has taught us, we can become disconnected from what is really happening inside us.
But as we become more aware of our hearts, allow God to heal what has been wounded and learn to recognise what is true, we become increasingly able to live authentically. Becoming Wholehearted describes this as a journey of getting to know, developing a relationship with and learning to trust the heart — with the important recognition that the heart needs to be healed or “made whole” along the way.
And that is very close to what we see happening in Sozo. God doesn’t simply want to give us information, He wants relationship with us. He wants us to know His love; He wants us to discover His truth, and He wants that truth to change the way we live.
You can learn
Perhaps you’ve spent years thinking: “I can’t hear God.” Maybe the better starting point is: “I haven’t learned how to recognise His voice yet.”
That is something you can learn. It doesn’t require you to become a different kind of person. It begins with relationship. It begins with listening. It begins with making space.
And it begins with discovering that God actually wants to be known.
And if you think you can’t hear Him?
We can help. It’s not unusual for people to come for a Sozo not knowing whether they can hear God or not. It’s very unusual for them to leave the same way. Because at its heart, Sozo is a communications ministry. Its purpose is to help people hear from God for themselves.
Explore further
What Is Bethel Sozo? Find out what Bethel Sozo is and why we believe it can bring greater freedom and wholeness.
What Happens in a Bethel Sozo? Find out what actually happens during a Sozo session.
Sozo FAQs Answers to some of the questions we’re asked most often.
Becoming Wholehearted Explore the journey from the effects of our past towards authenticity, wholeness and living from a whole heart.
Connecting with Heaven Discover more about Sozo, prayer and helping others to hear from God for themselves.
Book an Individual Sozo If you’d like to explore Sozo for yourself, you can take the next step here.