How to Listen to the Holy Spirit

Do you know that the Holy Spirit keeps on communicating with you? Maybe you don’t. Perhaps you think that the Holy Spirit talks to you only on certain occasions, like when he has a special message to you, or he has a specific mission for you to do.

The fact is that the Holy Spirit continues to communicate with you, if you are a true Christian or someone who truly believes in God, no matter what your religion is. You might not know this. That is why this article was written so that you can understand that the Holy Spirit continues to speak to you and you may be able to listen to it attentively, righteously, and do what he asks of you.

The evidence of the Holy Spirit continuing to communicate with you is your mind and Spirit. You keep thinking. Your brain continues to function as long as you are alive. Psychologists have proven that even during sleep, our brain and mind continue to work. Dreams are the work of our minds while our bodies fall asleep.

When we think or even when we want to stop our thinking consciously, we generate ideas or attitudes and cheerful emotions. We can see images and stop analyzing images. We saw it, without bothering to think about the picture. However, individual impressions appear in our minds: the beauty of images, color combinations, colors in images, etc. Apart from that, we enjoyed the picture.

Now generating ideas and attitudes and pleasant emotions is a work inspired by the Holy Spirit for us to do. He is in our minds and spirits, enabling us to produce these ideas and entertain these attitudes and emotions. Without him, we cannot do anything; our souls and spirits cannot function. He is a life-giving breath, and he is a life that allows us to think, talk, act, and do what we are supposed to do.

It is obvious now that the Holy Spirit works in our minds and spirits endlessly, even in our sleep. Finally, he is in control of our dreams. That is why there are times when HE explicitly communicates with us through dreams, as HE did with Joseph, Maria’s husband, in the Gospels.

Now, accepting this reality in our lives is the beginning of listening to the Holy Spirit. Being always aware of this is a habit that allows us to listen to Him without us knowing. I will illustrate what I want to say here.

There are times when we turn on music when we work. Indeed, we listen to music, but we are not explicitly aware of it. What we know explicitly is the work we do, like typing on a computer keyboard. Music serves as the background.

In the same way when we first become aware of the work of the Holy Spirit in our minds and spirits, and then we go to our practice, what we explicitly realize is the work that exists, but this idea of the Holy Spirit works in our minds and spirits is behind our consciousness, functioning as a background for our work, as music.

So, the first step in listening to the Holy Spirit is to acknowledge that he communicates with us all the time, day and night while our minds and brains are functioning, while we are still physically alive.

The second step is to be first aware of the work of the Holy Spirit before we do individual work, such as preparing to go to work, or working on the farm or office, wherever the task expects us. This idea then becomes like background music in our work.

The third step is always available to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit when we do our work or rest. He will inspire us with the right ideas in our work. After all, it was he who designed and created our world. He might ask us to move this, go there, talk to a specific person, etc. If we have done the first two steps, this third step will be most natural. That will happen naturally.

The fourth step is to follow what we consider to be the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. As we grow, He will give more inspiration to work and leisure. If we do not support, He will continue to work in us, but He will speak to us less and less explicitly until we no longer hear His soft and calm voice. He will even talk to us in general, but we become increasingly deaf to his voice.

There are four steps in listening to the Holy Spirit.

You might think when you see the title of this article that I will start by advising you to pray and there in prayer to listen to the Holy Spirit. Although we can hear it during worship, it is not only in prayer that he communicates with us. He talks to us all the time. Specific prayer, which establishes the place and time for worship, can prevent us from listening to the Spirit.

Remember, he is like the wind; he blows where he wants. Making him talk to us only during certain prayer times is like putting a band-aid on his mouth or tying his hands outside this prayer time. We tell him to speak to us only if we want, which is the opposite of the proper attitude in dealing with the Spirit of God. Let him talk to us always, as he wishes, during certain times of prayer or outside, when we do our work or when we rest.