Bible Study 101: How Do You Know If It's God Speaking? Hearing Jesus, Devotional

Bible Study 101: How Do You Know If It's God Speaking? Hearing Jesus, Devotional This is the last day of the color method, and yellow is different from every color before it. The first five marked things that were already on the page. Someone could look over your shoulder and check your work. Yellow marks what God showed you, which means nobody can check it but you. That's exactly why Rachael saved it for last. If she'd handed you all six colors on day one, most of us would have reached for yellow immediately and skipped the work. Instead you spent five days looking at Him before you spent one minute looking at you. This episode covers what to do with what you heard. Three filters to run it through before you act on it, what Paul meant when he told the Thessalonians not to quench the Spirit, and the two ditches on either side of this road that people fall into. Links Speakpipe: Leave a voice message or prayer request Join the newsletter SEEDS: Download the free SEEDS app and take one small step today: plant your first seed and see what God can grow. Chapters 0:00 The last color 0:30 Why yellow was saved for last 1:27 What yellow actually marks 1:54 The verse her eight year old highlighted 2:51 Why you would have grabbed yellow first 3:25 Five days looking at Him before one minute looking at you 4:04 Reading John 6:1-15 6:00 God speaks in other ways too 7:02 His voice will not contradict His word 8:20 Reading 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 9:30 The two ditches 10:22 What quench actually means 11:20 The other ditch 12:17 Notice the order Paul puts it in 12:41 What to highlight in yellow 13:33 The three filters 14:17 The third filter, and what happened in Babylon 15:04 What biblical meditation actually is 16:13 How to respond 16:59 Prayer 17:57 Homework 18:31 Don't compare your yellow to hers What is the color method? It's a way of studying Scripture that Rachael developed while teaching sixth and seventh graders who had never been shown how to read the Bible for themselves. She published it in her first book, She Hears. You take a short passage and mark it with colored pencils or highlighters, one question per color. Green marks the who. Blue marks the supernatural. Red marks the action words. Purple marks timing. Orange marks numbers. Yellow marks what God showed you. This week the passage has been John 6:1-15, the feeding of the five thousand, one color per day. What does yellow mark, and why is it last? Yellow marks what God impressed on your heart. It doesn't come from the page the way the other colors do. It comes from what happened in you while you were in the word. And that's precisely why it goes last. The first five colors are observation. You didn't invent anything, you noticed what was already there, which means your page and Rachael's page look mostly the same. Yellow isn't like that. Yellow also feels like the most spiritual one. The others can feel like English class. Yellow feels like hearing from God, which is exactly why most of us would reach for it first if given the chance and skip the work entirely. Rachael learned this at home. Years ago she had her kids highlight whatever stood out to them in their daily reading. Her eight year old landed on a verse in Song of Solomon that was wildly inappropriate for her age. She didn't understand it, she just thought it sounded poetic. It was innocent, and it made the point. Impression without context goes sideways fast. So instead, look at what you actually did this week. You looked at who the passage was about. You looked at what only God could do. You watched who moved first. You found a sentence about a festival that unlocked the chapter. You lined up the numbers and felt the gap between five and five thousand. You spent five days looking at Him before you spent one minute looking at you. So by the time you pick up yellow, you're not guessing at what God is like in this passage. You've been staring at it all week. Does God only speak through the Bible? No. Sometimes it's an impression while you're praying. Sometimes it's a thought that doesn't feel like your own thoughts, one that carries more weight. Sometimes it's a sense that God wants you to do something or stop doing something. Sometimes it's a person who walks up and says God told me to tell you this. That's the reality of a Spirit filled life. But God's voice will never contradict His word. That's the standard. Something may come to you outside of your Bible reading, and the way you find out whether it's really Him is by holding it against who He says He is in Scripture. That's how you tell the difference between God, the enemy, and your own head. Rachael has had someone say something to her that was so damaging it was clearly not from God, and was aimed at stopping what God had called her to do. Scripture is how you test that. What does it mean to quench the Spirit? Do not quench the Spirit. Do not treat prophecies with contempt but test them all. Hold on to what is good, reject every kind of evil. That's 1 Thessalonians 5:19-22. The word quench means to put out a fire, to extinguish a flame. Paul is picturing the Holy Spirit's work in a believer, or in a room full of believers, as something like a fire that can be smothered. He's not warning against being too intense. He puts it right next to "do not treat prophecies with contempt," which means he's talking about specific ways a church shuts down what the Spirit is doing. Dismissing a word. Shutting down someone who shares what they sense God saying. Resisting a prompting because it's uncomfortable or inconvenient. What are the two ditches? Rachael lives in rural Pennsylvania, so she pictures a road with a ditch on either side. In the first ditch are people who got burned. Someone said "God told me" and it was manipulative, or overused, or flat out wrong, and it hurt. So now anything that isn't printed on the page feels unsafe. Paul is talking to that person when he says don't quench the Spirit. In the other ditch are people who accept anything with a spiritual label on it. If it sounded holy and the person seemed sincere, it gets taken at face value and never checked against the word. That ditch is where church abuse happens. It's where the stories in the news cycle come from. Paul answers that one too. Test them all. Keep the good and throw out the rest. Or as one of Rachael's mentors put it, chew the hay and spit out the sticks. And notice the order. Paul says don't quench first, then test. He doesn't start from suspicion. He starts open to the Spirit and then adds discernment. What are the three filters? Before you act on anything you wrote in the margin, run it through these. Does this match who God is? Not who you want Him to be. Who He reveals Himself to be in Scripture. Does this line up with the Bible? And not just whether a verse can be attached to it, because anyone can cherry pick a verse. Does it fit what Scripture actually teaches in context. God does not contradict Himself. If something is telling you to do what Scripture says not to do, that is not His voice. Do I want this to be true? This one is there to check your bias, and it's the hardest of the three. Think about Jeremiah 29. There were prophets in Babylon telling the exiles they'd be home in two years, and God said something specific about them. He said the people were encouraging those dreams. They wanted it to be true so badly that they helped create the lie. What is biblical meditation? If what you heard passes all three filters, sit with it. Meditation here isn't emptying your mind. It's closer to chewing. Remember the Hebrew word in Deuteronomy 6 for teaching your children the word, shanan, which means to sharpen like a blade. Repeated contact until something has an edge on it. You've been doing it all week. You've had John 6 in your teeth. So do that with the yellow. Carry it around. Say it to yourself in the car. Pray about it. Ask God what He wants you to do with it. Then respond. Is there something here to obey? Something to confess? Something to thank Him for? Does this change how you see Him? Highlighting it in your Bible is a different thing than the obedience He's calling you to. FAQ Do I need to have heard the earlier episodes? No, though this one is the payoff of the week, so the earlier ones will make it richer. What do I need today? Your marked page and something yellow. What if I didn't get anything? That happens, and it doesn't mean you did it wrong. Sometimes a passage opens six months later. Write the question you're stuck on in the margin and move on. Should I compare what I got to what Rachael got? No. She has been teaching this for years, has a seminary degree, and has spent a great deal of time in John. Don't measure one week of the color method against that. It isn't a competition and there's no shame in a shorter list. What's the homework? Take whatever you highlighted in yellow, run it through the three filters, and then respond however He's calling you to, whether that's obedience, confession, or gratitude. If you'd like more, read the rest of John 6 and mark it too. What's next? Rachael replays her original teaching on John 6 from last year's John series, then a Q&A episode, then the fall Bible study begins in the Gospel of Luke, followed by Acts. The Hearing Jesus for Kids podcast returns alongside it. Where can I go deeper on the color method? She Hears, on Amazon, teaches it over six weeks through the stories of six women in the Gospels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices