How to Hear From God with Amy Hale

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Do you ever hear people say, I heard from God or God told me and you think man, I really want to hear from God! You find yourself being curious, how can I hear from God? I recently interview a powerful Bible teacher whose Instagram I follow, and I love the way that she shares the Word of God and shares how you can hear from God and how you can spend time with God and His Word.  

Amy Hale is a wife and mom who lives in Memphis, Tennessee. She loves teaching women how to cultivate friendships with God through daily prayer, study His Word by reflecting and studying His Word. 

About Amy Hale

I grew up as a Christian, I was saved when I was a child, but I did not start reading my Bible until about probably 10 to 12 years ago, very faithfully, and regularly. It changed my life. That sounds so cliche, but it absolutely changed my life and I can't stop talking about it. 

I spent many years as a believer, not in the Word and I would wake up in the mornings and feel like I need to pray, I need to start my day with prayer. So, there were many, many years before I ever opened up my Bible that I would talk to God, I would tell him, God, thank you so much for this and help me with this today kind of thing. I did that for a long time. 

I started my Instagram account to just share the books I was reading or to show people what God was teaching me. A lot of women are drawn to my social media and want to know more about how I study and take notes. So, I'm just very passionate about encouraging women to pursue a friendship with God, what it looks like, and why and that kind of thing. 

But it wasn't until I started reading my Bible, that I realized, that's how I hear back from him.

Where to Start

Once Amy discovered how powerful God's word really was, she started sharing it on her Instagram. She would write on a simple sheet of notebook paper the passage she was reading. When she first started, 10 years ago, she would just write down something like this:

In this passage is teaching me that God is this and because he's that it means this for me kind of thing.  

She doesn’t believe there is one perfect, one ideal starting point. Amy tells people all the time, “if you get in God's word, and you just have this pure motive to know God more, you know, he is going to absolutely help you and bless you, no matter where you start!”  

You Don’t Need the Perfect Plan to Hear From God

I believe that the enemy uses confusion as a tool. I teach so much about fitness and confidence, I feel like God wants us to just take that step in faith. And that's just opening the Bible and praying to Him. And I feel like the devil just wants us to be like, “Well, I don't have the perfect plan, I don't have the perfect workout” and we get so confused, we end up doing nothing, and then he wins. And that's exactly what he wants.

Here is Amy’s daily routine that gets her into the word:

So my daily routine is to get up and let the dogs out and go fix my coffee. And after I feed the dogs, I sit down and open up my daily planner. I like to make notes for my quiet time in my daily planner. I don't write out my prayers, but I kind of write down prayer prompts. The most important thing that I want to say about this is after I got super excited about God's word and first discovered how great it is, I would wake up every morning and just couldn't wait to get my Bible and I would just open it up and start reading. And I did that for a while and it started to kind of fall flat. And I thought, God, I'm reading my Bible every day and spending time with you in it but for some reason, I'm not really feeling joyful. I'm not feeling what I should feel like I don't know what happened. Can you help me understand what happened? And I always feel a little bit weird telling people this.

Prepare Your Heart to Hear God

I really do feel like God put a picture in my mind after I prayed that. 

Later that day, Amy imagined herself with her husband sitting in a romantic restaurant, and they were all dressed up. And her husband was trying to be very romantic. And he's speaking to her, but she didn’t hear him, she didn’t hear him because she was too busy writing down everything about him. 

I'm just writing down, he is wearing a dark suit. He looks nice in the dark suit. He ordered this and he likes this. And just making all these notes about him instead of paying attention. And I was even turning around and talking to other people about him while he was trying to talk to me, so I couldn't hear him. 

God used this to show me I was treating my time with him like a research paper, like homework, like I was just gathering facts about him to get to the point. What I realized was, I needed to prepare my heart first, before I open up God's word, I needed to spend a little bit of time praising him talking to him worshiping Him before just opening up and starting to read. When I do that I'm far less likely to just be a gatherer.

Here is What God Wants You to Hear Right Now

When I was praying about my time with Amy, I was like, God, what do you want me to share? So, here are some scriptures:

Matthew 6:6 tells us, “but when you pray, go into your room and shut the door, and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you that time with God.”

Romans 10:17 tells us, “So faith comes from hearing and hearing through the word of God.”

Psalm 119:105 tells us, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.”

So, as we're thinking about this, I don't want you to feel overwhelmed. I want you to think of simple steps. When I think about everything, Amy said, I think about getting a year plan for a Bible. Just start there so that you're not reading Leviticus and you're not stuck on grain offerings and you're like I'm new to this what are we talking about? 

Commit to a time every day whether it's with you know your morning coffee, start reading then, and really think about what Amy said about doing a brain dump, have a piece of paper right there so that when the enemy comes to distract you and derail you are already one step ahead!