Have you ever wondered whether you – yes, little ol’ you – can hear God’s voice? Does God actually speak to you? Or does he just speak to certain special people?

The short answer is that the Lord speaks interiorly to every single one of his people, but we must learn to recognize his voice. Jesus clearly said, “My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27). In other words, if we want to be numbered among the “sheep” – i.e., disciples – of Jesus, we need to learn to hear and follow the Shepherd.

We might expect the Lord to make himself known with spectacular visions or mystical experiences, and sometimes he does. Psalm 29 speaks of the immense, obvious power of the Lord’s voice: “The voice of the LORD flashes flames of fire. The voice of the LORD shakes the wilderness, the LORD shakes the wilderness of Kadesh; the voice of the LORD rends the oak tree and strips the forest bare” (Psalm 29:7-9). There are many holy people throughout the history of the Church who have encountered the Lord in such clear and astonishing ways.

Most of us, however – like most of the great saints of history – won’t encounter the Lord in such exceptional ways during this life. We instead must learn to hear the voice of the Lord much more subtly.

One of my favorite Bible stories is the encounter between Elijah and God on Mount Horeb (1 Kings 19:9 – 14). The word of the Lord told the prophet Elijah to stand on the mountain and to wait for the Lord to pass by. There was a strong wind, but the Lord was not in the wind. There was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. There was a great fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. Then Elijah heard a “light silent sound” (19:12). Hearing this soft whisper, Elijah hid his face, because he knew that the Lord had arrived.

The story reminds us that the Lord’s “voice” is often soft, barely perceptible. To truly get to know the Lord, we must learn to listen attentively to the silence during daily prayer. Elijah understood that the Lord is most profoundly encountered not in the extraordinary signs that he sometimes grants to his people, but in the quiet stirrings of our hearts.

This Fall, I’ve begun taking weekly online classes through Encounter School of Ministry, and one of our instructors recently made an extremely important point: God speaks to us through us. In other words, we “hear” God through an interior stirring of our own interior faculties, e.g., our intellects, our imaginations, or our hearts. We may, for example, interiorly see some image in our imagination, hear some word or think some thought in our mind, or feel some emotion in our hearts. Those gentle stirrings of our own souls often don’t feel like they’re coming from someone else – they feel like they’re coming from within us.

In other words, when the Lord speaks to you, he doesn’t sound like Morgan Freeman or Val Kilmer – He often sounds a lot like you. Learning to distinguish between those inner stirrings that are from the Lord and those that are not from the Lord is part of the great adventure of Christian prayer.