John: No, His Word always lines up with that. If you get a sense of peace that doesn’t line up with God’s Word, don’t listen to it. You obviously have wrong motives in your heart; you need to get back to neutral first. The Word has the final say.

Lisa: The Word is always the foundation and the structure.

John: Yes, that is right. So the inward witness is number one. Number two is the still, small voice the Bible talks about. Jesus said, “My sheep know my voice” (see John 10:27). The Spirit of God speaks what He hears Jesus saying, and that’s the still, small voice.

Some people have gotten into bondage because they started following voices without any inward witness. Any time I’ve heard the voice of God, the witness accompanies it, and both line up with the Word. We’re building a foundation here: Word, witness, voice. If you hear the voice but have no witness, don’t listen to the voice. I have been in meetings where people have prophesied over me but I experienced no presence of God, no inward witness. I don’t heed those words.

The next way the New Testament says God speaks to us is through dreams. Acts 16 recounts the story of Paul having a dream. A Macedonian man came to Paul in his dream, saying, “Please come help us.” That was the Holy Spirit using a dream to tell Paul, “Get over to Macedonia.” God speaks to some people through dreams a little bit more than He does others. God speaks to my wife powerfully through dreams. God usually speaks to me through the inward witness and the still, small voice.

The next way that the Bible talks about God speaking to people is through visions. Paul also had a vision. When he described it, he said, “I don’t know whether I was in the body or out of the body” (see 2 Corinthians 12:2). In a vision, you don’t know whether you’re in the body or out of the body, but you literally see into the spirit world. When my pastor launched Lisa and me into the ministry in 1989, it was because of a vision. He came into a staff meeting and said, “I had a vision last night. It was like I was watching it on a TV screen. One of you pastors will not be on our staff much longer. You’ll be traveling all over, and you’ll be a blessing to the Body of Christ.” Then he said, “That man is you, John Bevere.” God had told me the same thing in prayer about eight months earlier, so it was a confirmation to me.