Hearing God’s Voice: How to Quiet the Noise and Find Peace in a Distracted World

Hey, and welcome back to Faithfield Living.

This is your host, Kristen.

Today we're going to talk about why it's important that we sometimes turn off the noise or change the channel so.

That we can hear that quiet, still.

Voice of God in our lives and how he's trying to move in and through us.

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I just got back from my morning walk, and some mornings I listened to a sermon.

Other mornings I listened to a podcast about all different topics.

Other mornings I listen to worship music.

And some mornings I just realized that I need quiet.

I just need to turn it all off and have some quiet.

Well, this morning I was listening to one of my playlists, which is upbeat music, faith music.

And as I was doing that, I must have had 20 things that I either thought of or a song prompted me to think of that I wrote down and put into my notes, my phone notes.

But I share that to say sometimes what we need most is to silence the voices or the noise that we're being filled up on.

We need to turn up the noise of the news and of culture, whether that's what online or whether it's your television, whether it's your email, whatever it might be.

But sometimes what we need in order to hear our own thoughts, to hear the thoughts of God and to get a download, right, like to get something that's clicking with us or maybe something that we need to kind of ponder, we need to wrestle with, we need to hold on to, but we have to be paying attention to what's stirring in our spirit in order for us to do that.

In other words, this morning I was looking at podcasts, I was looking at to See if there's anything that I wanted to play or to listen to.

And most of the topics for the new podcasts that I was thinking about listening to, they just weren't really hitting right.

They weren't things that I felt like spending my morning on.

And the podcasts that I listened to from a few pastors that have sermons, there were no new ones that I saw that I wanted to listen to at the moment.

So I decided, okay, I'm just going to start with music, and then sometimes from there I'll put on a podcast or I'll just turn off the music.

But anyway, so I turn on the music and I listen to it the whole time.

And like I said, first of all, I wrote down probably 15 things that I want to talk about in these small micro episodes, right?

Solo episodes.

Because sometimes what I've learned is I can't force the work.

What does that mean?

Sometimes I sit down at my computer to record an episode when it's just by myself.

I don't have a plan for that particular episode, and I just can't quite get it together.

Then other times, something comes to me.

And what I've realized is with this kind of work, so whether you're writing a sermon, you're working on an inspirational email, you're working on a devotional, maybe you're just thinking about sending a note to a friend, or you're like me and you're podcasting.

Of course I plan out my guest episodes.

I plan out themes and topics that I might want to talk about.

But when I try to add in extra solo episodes, right, these mini or micro episodes, those don't always have an exact plan because I want them to be full of something that spoke to me, right?

About faith or about life.

Something that kind of clicked or hit.

Sometimes that comes from a book I'm reading.

It can be from scripture.

It can be from somebody that I saw something that they wrote about scripture or about a biblical perspective, whatever it is.

But what I found is when I try to hold on to the idea and I wait to talk about it, when I wait to record, I have missed the.

The urgency.

I've missed the fire, right?

I've missed talking about it.

And then it gets harder as it's gone.

It's kind of like in the rear view mirror.

So why am I sharing all this with you?

I'm sharing with this.

This with you to say two things.

One, you need to pay attention to when you need to turn off the noise or to change the station or to change Your environment.

Maybe sometimes you're just drowning at work or something's frustrating you in your home, right?

Maybe there's just a lot of stress.

It's a hard season.

Sometimes you need to just shift where you're at, go out back, take a walk, whatever it might be.

But sometimes I think we stay stuck in our patterns.

But when we stay stuck in our patterns, we often stop hearing what God is speaking to us through the Holy Spirit, or we stop listening to our own voices.

You know, I say voice as voice, and sometimes then we don't hear those little nuggets, the little whisper that's trying to tell us something.

And so one is just to say you're in charge of what's on, what's playing, right?

You're in charge of changing the station to something else that's more uplifting or encouraging or is going to help you renew your mind.

Like listening to scripture or sermon or a podcast that's going to help you.

And sometimes it's for you to realize you need to turn it all off for a moment, and other times it's to say, I need to just stop listening to the news for a minute or get off of social media.

I shared recently in my Faith Fridays email that distractions can really get us off course, right?

They can keep us from doing our most important work.

They can keep us from loving people well, because we're distracted in the moment, we're distracted in life.

But also, I shared that I feel lately I've been picking up my phone too much.

I've become distracted by, excuse me, going on social media.

And I don't go on Facebook very much, but I go on Instagram.

But the problem is I follow a lot of people that I actually like their content.

But the more content I like, the more the algorithm is giving me more, like, content.

And it's of interest to me.

So it might be faith content or health and wellness content or whatever.

It might be gardening, but it's.

I've gotten sucked in.

I can see my patterns change.

I'm picking my phone up too regularly when I'm not sitting at my desk focused on a project.

And so for me, I have to acknowledge that I'm going to need to do some pauses and put some better boundaries around how much I'm touching my phone or going on it, because it's become.

I.

It's become too much.

And so for me, it's going to be, I need to turn down the volume of that.

I need to turn off social media or at least turn it off for certain days or hours of the day.

Okay.

The other thing that I wanted to remind you of is what I just already brought up, and it's this.

We need to take advantage of the things that hit us, the things that speak to us.

Like, don't just say, oh, later I'm going to share this with somebody, or oh, later I'm going to write down what I thought about it, or oh, later I'm going to, you know, write the email or just like write the question to myself, like, is this something that I want to reflect on later?

Because what I've found is when you do that, you miss the moment, you miss that, you know, the thing you are supposed to hear or get from the thing that's that kind of hit you right in your soul or in your heart.

And so I just want to share that also, if you're somebody that does creative work or you're somebody that works with people, I would just challenge you to say, are you doing that work when you feel that fire, when you feel called, when something hits you?

Because what I'm starting to find, and I've noticed in the past, is when something clicks with me, I need to just go to my computer or go to my voice memos and I need to record something, you know, what it hit, what hit me, what it was about, why it meant something to me.

Because that is the closest I'm going to get to sharing the impact that.

That scripture or that those words or that person's message or that song, you know, whatever it is that it spoke to me and it hit me and it was meaningful.

So I would just encourage you because sometimes how many people work, you know, because that's how we get paid is a 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, or some people work evenings, right, if they are a waiter at a restaurant or something.

But for those of us that do different work, creative work, or you do work to serve people, right?

Maybe that's a ministry in some way or in your vocation.

We sometimes need to make the phone call or record the thing or send the note to somebody when it hits us, when it's on our heart, when we're thinking about it, because that's when it's going to have the most impact.

And sometimes that means that our days and our schedule looks a little different.

And I think we have to be open to that.

I want to wrap up today's mini episode with you by a few words from Bob Goff and his book Undistracted.

He says, how many days remain for you.

Do the math.

Who will you decide to be and what will you decide to do with the time you have left?

We can spend our remaining days focused on the meaningful and beautiful and joyous and purposeful.

Or we can drift aimlessly and fritter away our one wild and precious life.

One of the astounding gifts of God is that the choice is ours to make.

We can get busy right now throwing our energy into things that matter.

Here's more good news.

There is a surefire way to get clear on all of this.

Find Jesus wherever you are.

Use him as your starting and ending points and then find some waypoints in the middle you can depend on.

Stop pining away your days waiting for God to show up.

He's already in the room.

You can stop telling yourself you are waiting on him because he's probably waiting on you.

And then he says, if we learn truth without acting on it, we turn a savior into a mere teacher.

So my point of today is just saying, if we don't get quiet, if we don't turn down the noise of culture and news and our to do list and everything else, we will miss God speaking into us.

We will miss what our spirit is trying to show us and tell us.

We will miss the messages we are meant to hear and the messages we are meant to share.

And so I just want to remind you that we have an opportunity every day, in every moment to pick to act and let God partner with us in those moments and in those days to make the world a more beautiful place because we're in it.

And we were uniquely made to show up in such a time as this.

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