God’s Voice Is Not a Feeling

Have you ever wondered whether God is speaking to you, or if you’re just making something up in your head? It’s one of the most spiritually pressing questions for modern Christians and more of us are wrestling with it than ever before.

For many young believers today, “hearing from God” has shifted from reading the Bible to listening for an internal voice. That’s not how Christians have historically understood divine revelation. And yet, this trend is growing rapidly in evangelical circles, especially among younger generations raised in churches and youth groups that emphasize personal experience over Scripture.

One Christian college professor observed this firsthand. Teaching a course on the philosophy of religion, he assumed his students understood “revelation” to mean the Bible. But one student challenged that idea, saying she couldn’t trust any form of divine revelation because she could never really identify which voice inside her was God’s. What she revealed unintentionally was the weight and confusion that comes from relying solely on internal impressions.

This is the crisis of a generation that’s been taught to expect God to speak primarily through feelings.

On the surface, this seems deeply personal what could be more intimate than God whispering directly into your heart? But the reality is far more complicated. If every voice in your mind might be God, how do you discern which one to trust? The irony is that this theology leaves people less confident, not more. They’re paralyzed by uncertainty, doubting whether they’re hearing God or simply themselves.

The Bible gives us a better answer.

Scripture never instructs us to hunt for divine messages in our fleeting emotions. It points us instead to something far more stable the external Word of God, proclaimed and preserved in Scripture. As Paul writes in Romans 10:17, “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.” That “word” is not some mystical inner prompting it’s the preaching of the Gospel, a message you can hear, read, and know.

This doesn’t mean God doesn’t work within us. He absolutely does. Ephesians 3:17 says that Christ dwells in our hearts through faith. But even that faith is rooted in something outside us. It’s built on the foundation of the truth found in God’s Word.

And that’s freeing.

You don’t have to analyze every internal impression to figure out if it’s divine. You don’t have to carry the anxiety of wondering, “Was that thought from me or from God?” Because the truth is, none of the voices in your head are God’s voice. They’re yours and that’s okay. The Lord doesn’t need to bypass your mind and heart to speak to you. He’s already spoken clearly and authoritatively through His Word.

This misunderstanding can have real consequences. Consider the young man who says, “I think God wants us to be together,” or the girl who breaks up with her boyfriend because she thinks God told her to. The first is often manipulative. The second? Tragic, because it reflects a person who doesn’t yet believe her own instincts matter unless they’re labeled divine.

Imagine a girl convincing herself that her possessive boyfriend is godly until, quietly, her inner voice says something different: “I have a bad feeling about this.” That subtle voice may be the whisper of wisdom. But instead of trusting it as her own, she has to repackage it as “God’s voice” in order to give it legitimacy.

Why can’t she just own it as her own judgment? Because she hasn’t been taught that she’s allowed to.

This is the sad result of replacing the authority of Scripture with personal impressions. It leads young Christians to distrust their God-given conscience and moral reasoning. Worse, it reduces God to a projection of their own thoughts, rather than a personal Being who exists outside them and speaks through His revealed Word.

The Bible presents revelation not as an internal guessing game, but as a gift freely given. In Jesus Christ, we see the fullness of God’s nature (Hebrews 1:3), and through the written Word, we learn His ways, His will, and His voice. That’s where the Spirit leads us: not into a maze of inner voices, but into the clear, firm, liberating truth of the Gospel.

So should you listen to your heart? Absolutely but don’t confuse your voice with God’s. Instead, let God’s Word speak louder than every other voice, including your own. Let it guide your thoughts, shape your prayers, and correct your instincts when needed.

And if you’re wondering whether God is speaking to you, start by opening your Bible. You’ll find that He already has.

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