SID: So Richard, you’re counseling a pastor. He’s been married 18 years. He wants out. He wants divorce. If you could not hear God’s voice, he would have gotten a divorce. Do you agree?
RICHARD: Very likely, yeah.
SID: What happened?
RICHARD: It was about 11:00 at night, which is not my time of day. So I wanted the Lord to give the insight quickly. And was driving there and just asked the Lord to reveal what the root, where she was, right off the bat. We kind of said our introductory hellos. And as I was sitting down, I said, “Who’s Karen?” He looked at me and said, “I don’t know.” I said, “Anybody in your church named Karen?” He said, “No.” “Somebody from your past named Karen?” He said, “There was a girl I dated when I was 15.” And then the Holy Spirit showed me and I said, “her picture is in your wallet.” And he was like, “Yeah.” “And her phone number is on the back of the picture.” And he said, “Yeah.” And I said, “You had sexual relations with her when you were 15.” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “You still fantasize about having a relationship with her if something happens to her marriage and you’re out of marriage.” And he was like, “Yeah.” I said, “You’ve had ungodly soul tie for 36 years and you need to break it or you’re going to be miserable out of your marriage and out of your ministry.” I said, “Are you ready to break that?” And it took him 15 minutes to be willing to do that. And I almost told him, “I’m done. There’s nothing I can do for you if you’re going to hold on that,” when he said, “No, I know I need to do this.” And he repented to that ungodly soul tie, renounced it, and God saved his marriage, saved his ministry, and a denominational pastor has healing and deliverance in his church now.
SID: You see what happens when you can hear a voice, the voice of God? He knows everything. What are some of the hindrances you found to hearing the voice of God?
RICHARD: One of the hindrances is often all the other voices in our head. We’ve got what our families are going to think, what our friends are going to think? We’ve got the enemy. For a long time, I wasn’t even, I dealt with the demonic. But I didn’t realize how much the enemy spoke to me. One day, I had even had some tempting thoughts. And I began immediately to renounce those. And the Holy Spirit spoke to me. He goes, “Those weren’t your thoughts.” And I thought, how could they not be my thoughts? They were in my head. And the Holy Spirit revealed to me that the enemy implanted those thoughts. He had spoken back to me. And often when I teach on hearing God’s voice, I’ll say, you can’t resist. If someone gives you an idea, you’ll get a picture of it. So I want you to prepare yourself. Be an audience. I don’t want you to get a picture in your mind of what I say. Is everybody ready? And I’ll say something, no matter what it is, and people instantly get an image in their mind. So the enemy is willing to give false visions, false dreams. We can hear His voice, and our own self will can stand in the way of us hearing God. Sometimes just distractions, we get up every day and we put music on, we put the television on and we don’t take time to listen. My wife can be three feet from me, talking to me and my ears function completely well, but I don’t hear a word she’s saying, because I’m paying attention to the Sport Center or I think she’s talking to someone else, and I’m not listening. The same with the Holy Spirit. He could be there speaking to us, but our attention is focused somewhere else, and because we’re not listening, we don’t hear what he’s saying.
SID: Do you think that’s probably one of the biggest hindrances, we just flat don’t listen or we don’t even know how He speaks to us?
RICHARD: We don’t even know. I used to ask God to speak to me and it would really frustrate me, because I had all these images in my head. And I was pretty sure, and it’s interesting because this is another survey that I do that’s fairly universal. I was pretty sure when I did hear God, it would be perfectly silent in my mind and all of a sudden, a booming James Earl Jones or Morgan Freeman-style voice would come rumbling with the clouds and the thunder, and then I would hear God. I didn’t realize, because no one said, like said to Jeremiah, “Jeremiah, what do you see?” No one ever asked me, Richard, what do you see? I never paid attention to what I saw. I was seeing visions as long as I could remember. And I would have thoughts, and it would be God-type thoughts. But I was pretty sure they were my thoughts, because no one ever talked about the Spirit
SID: You know, the first time I heard a word of knowledge, I heard the word “hearing”. I didn’t have a clue what to do with it. I wasn’t even sure it was God. So I had to experiment.
RICHARD: Yeah. And that’s how you grow. As you test those things, after a while, I know that I hear God. My wife knows that I hear God. My children know that I hear God. People close to me, it’s like—
SID: Give me a couple of tips on how to hear God.
RICHARD: I think early on it’s important for you to get quiet, because you want to focus your attention. I used to think God could only speak in the silence because that’s what I got used to. And I’ve been in places where the music was so loud you can’t hear yourself, and the Spirit of God in the still small whisper was so clear. I was like, okay God, you broke that paradigm down. So it doesn’t have to be quiet. But it helps when you’re quiet and you’re able to focus your attention. It’s also, I think, very important to write it down.
SID: Yeah, but I’m lazy. I don’t want to write it down.
RICHARD: You know, I receive things and it’s so normal to debate. Is this God? Is this me? And I tell people, write down everything that comes to your mind. Ask the Holy Spirit to speak to you. Write down everything that comes to your mind, because it’s usually very easy afterwards to discern, this was God, this was my own thoughts, this came from the enemy. And I believe when we ask God to speak to us and we write down what His spirit puts in our spirit and our mind begins to process what hits our spirit, that we’re going to find that what we’re writing is the words that God speaks to us. But it is important to test those things afterwards. I usually teach people to do this. And I was teaching two young Russian girls, totally independent of each other. They were sisters, one away at a boarding school, one living with mom and dad. Both of them had the exact same experience. The first words that they wrote down were, “Get away from these people. They’re going hurt you. They don’t know what they’re doing.” I said, “Thank you for writing that down. Is that all you wrote down?” They’re like, “No.” At first I said, “Where do you think that came from?” They said, “That was the demons that talk to me.” I said, “Do you talk about demons?” And they were like, “No.” I said, “What makes you say they’re demons?” They were, “I know I’ve had demons my whole life.” I was like, okay.
SID: We have 15 seconds. I want you to shout into the camera, “Freedom”. Would you do that.
RICHARD: Freedom in Jesus’ name!
SID: Freedom in Jesus’ name!
