I suspect that some have now dropped their Word for the Week subscriptions because they became impatient waiting for me to get into more of the books of Daniel and Revelation. Patience is necessary, because as the Lord told John in the beginning of Revelation, this was given to His bondservants. Without the heart of a bondservant—the patient willingness to learn of their Master and obey Him in everything—they cannot understand what we will soon get into with much more detail.
The better we get to know Him, the better we will know His voice. In John 10, He said that His people would know His voice and follow Him because they knew His voice. He did not say they would know the voice of the wolf, or deceiver, but they would know His voice. When we know His voice, we don’t have to know the other voices; we will quickly and easily recognize any voice that is not His.
Psalm 32:6 states, “Therefore, let everyone who is godly pray to You in a time when You may be found; surely in a flood of great waters they will not reach You.” It is in the calm before the storm when we need to prepare for the storm. When the storm breaks, it is too late. The storm is now growing and bearing down on us, so we must not waste another day. As we’re exhorted in Hebrews 3:7-8, “Therefore, just as the Holy Spirit says, ‘today if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts.’” How do we harden our hearts? By not obeying His voice or His warnings and not acting on them immediately.
If we have laid down our own lives to live for Him and not ourselves, we will be both willing and free enough to respond to Him quickly. If we are still living for ourselves, and are driven more by our selfish motives, we will not be free or willing enough to respond to Him as we must be to navigate—or even survive—the coming times.
I was once shown in a vision a war horse that was so sensitive, it would instantly respond to a gentle nudge from its rider’s knees to go right or left, to speed up or slow down, even in all of the clamor of battle. The Lord said to me in the vision that in the days to come, His people will have to be that sensitive to a nudge from Him in order to survive the times. I received that vision about 30 years ago, and now these times are coming upon us.
The primary way we become dull of hearing spiritually is by hardening our hearts. If we give in to a child who throws a tantrum to get what they want, we are helping to harden their heart by letting them think they can get what they want through rage. We have many Christians today who boast about how easily they get anything they want from the Lord, and fast. This is not maturity in the Lord but the opposite. It takes “faith and patience” to inherit the promises (see Hebrews 6:12). Why is it that we have this huge “faith movement” but no “patience movement?” I fear for the ones who have only grown in the self-centeredness of impatience rather than following the way of the Lord, the way of the cross that is dying to our selfish ways.
In the world now—even in our government—people have come to use rage as a strategy. Such do not even consider using democracy to counter those they call “a threat to democracy.” They try to use rage against them and use some of the most undemocratic methods, such as using the courts to impose policy rather than carefully using our democracy the way it was designed.
Obviously, this strategy of using rage in place of democracy is the real threat to democracy. Thankfully, the majority now see this for what it is and are becoming increasingly determined to show the guilty the consequences of such bad behavior. America and other nations are actually beginning to discipline their immature, selfish, and impetuous citizens. That’s what the Lord did to Israel in the wilderness. When the people stopped entreating the Lord and became demanding, that generation forfeited its promised land and perished in the wilderness.
Above all else, we must trust the Lord, recognize His voice, and obey Him. With new levels of deception coming at us continually, there is a lot of energy now required to discern and counter this tyranny. However, rather than spending so much effort to discern and react to the negative, we must have more faith in the Holy Spirit to lead us to the truth than we do in the devil to deceive us. Then, we will not be reacting but acting with both faith and patience. We must give most of our attention to knowing the Lord, knowing His voice, and following Him, more than discerning the enemy. But we must not be ignorant of the enemy’s devices.
As rage increases and battles clamor around us, this will be increasingly important. The time is approaching when it will almost daily be a matter of life or death for us to know Him and His voice so well that we will stay in close proximity to Him through everything. Now is the time to seek Him, to know Him, and build our lives on the Rock. He described building our lives on the Rock as hearing His voice and heeding it. If we want stability and peace in our life, this is how we get it.
© 2025 Rick Joyner. All Rights Reserved.
