15 Journal Prompts for Hearing God More Clearly

Hearing God is less like receiving a message and more like learning a voice. It takes time with the person before you can pick them out in a crowded room.

Philippians 4:6 is the posture underneath all fifteen. In nothing be anxious, but in everything, by prayer and petition with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. Made known is the phrase worth noticing. He is not waiting to be informed. The telling is for you, and a page is one of the better places to do it. These fifteen prompts are built for that slower kind of listening. Take one a day and you have three weeks. Take one a week and you have most of a season. Neither is wrong.

Noticing What Is Already There

Most of us are not short on God speaking. We are short on paying attention.

1. Where did I see something good today that I did not arrange?

2. What has God already told me that I have not acted on yet?

3. What keeps coming up in my reading, my conversations, or my thoughts this month?

4. When did I last feel close to God, and what was I doing?

5. What am I afraid He might say if I asked plainly?

Listening Without Rushing

These take longer. Give them more than five minutes if you can.

6. Read one psalm slowly and write the single line that will not leave you alone.

7. What question do I most want answered right now, and what would it cost me to wait?

8. Who in my life sounds like wisdom, and what have they been saying?

9. What have I been asking God to change that He may be asking me to carry?

10. If nothing changed for another year, what would I want to be true of me by then?

Responding Honestly

Hearing is only half of it. These are the ones that turn listening into something.

11. What is the next small step I already know to take?

12. Where am I waiting for certainty before I obey?

13. What would trusting Him look like this week, in something specific?

14. Who could I tell about this, so it stops living only in my head?

15. What do I want to thank Him for before I close this notebook?

How to Use Them

Write the prompt at the top of a page. Sit with it before you write anything. If nothing comes, write that down too, because an empty page on an honest day is more useful than a full one on a performed day.

Do not answer more than one at a sitting. The point is depth, not coverage.

And keep the notebook. Read back through in three months and you will find things you had forgotten asking, some of which have quietly been answered.