Sid Roth

SID: You talk about keys so that we can really understand.

KAREN: Yes.

SID: What God’s will is. I mean, so many people are almost paralyzed.

KAREN: Yes.

SID: For fear they’re going to do something wrong, so they don’t do anything.

KAREN: Yes.

SID: And then they go their whole life doing nothing, and they had a whole destiny ahead of themselves. One of your keys that you talk about is determine that you’re going to be led by God and nothing else.

KAREN: Everybody that I know wants to be led by God. They want to hear his plan. They want to obey him and move, but they don’t necessarily know the track to take. But when we determine that we’re going to be led by him, in other words, Father I’m not going to do anything until I hear from you, that requires several things from us. We first have to seek him. Right? And so if you’re facing a major decision or you’re looking for God’s direction in life, you have to decide, first of all, most important, I’m going to see God about this and nothing else. We make decisions based on money. We make decisions based on lack of money. We make decisions based on circumstances or feelings, or opinions of other people, or we make our own pro-con list, you know, and we have to remember that, like Proverbs 3:5-6 says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Don’t lean to your understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him and he’ll make your path straight.” Our understanding is one thing, but we understand in a very limited way, don’t we?

SID: So give me an example like tragedy hits your whole family. How did this play out?

KAREN: Yes. Well you know, when I was 37 years old and my first husband was 37 years old, he died. We were pastoring a church. He just was sick, suddenly, just went home to be with the Lord. My sons were 12 and 13 years old. And so you can imagine I just had major decisions to make every day, all day instead of taking advice from other people, which is important and good, but you need to weigh everything by what the Holy Spirit is saying to you. And so I had to spend extra, extra time in the Word of God. You know, the Bible is God talking to us and it’s how I walked out this whole, I had to take over pastoring our church and raising teenage sons, and I really needed the Word of the Lord in my life more than anything. And it probably, you know, grounded me inside of me.

SID: Not to mention, even though you sorted it out, you had to, coming from your husband was a graduate of Rhema, too.

KAREN: Yes.

SID: And coming from that background, when something like that happens, it’s just not supposed to happen.

KAREN: Right.

SID: And in addition, having sorting out why your husband died suddenly and having two children to raise, and pastoring a church.

KAREN: Yes. And so I spent that time pressing into his Word. And by that I mean I read it a lot. I meditated on it. I, you know, there’s a scripture in Psalm 119 that says, “Lord [except] for your Word I would have perished in my affliction.” And that was me. I read it like a five-year-old learning to read, ran my hand down the page because the Bible is God talking to us, and that’s how we learn to recognize his voice.

SID: Tell me a little bit more about that because that is key to recognize God’s voice. You said practice, but tell me a little more about that.

KAREN: Well think about it. If the Bible is God talking to us then we need to hear him talking to us. And if we familiarize ourself with the Bible, we read it a lot, we’ll find out how he leads people, how he guides people, what he sounds like, you know. And I use this analogy, because I heard one time that the U.S. Treasury Department trains their agents to recognize a counterfeit bill by giving them the real bills. And they touch them, and they smell them, and they put them under a microscope, and they look at them a long time so that they’re so familiar with the real that if a counterfeit comes along they notice it right away. And what if we as Christians, as believers, as people who love God get into the Word of God so much we understand the real that if a counterfeit idea, you know, the devil comes along or our own voice comes along, we recognize it right away.

SID: Now you were trying to decide something. What was God telling you to do?

KAREN: When I was pastoring our church after my husband passed away and God started talking to me about moving to Tulsa, and I didn’t want to because I loved the Northwest and my family and friends were there, and Tulsa is in the Midwest. And you know, and so I made my own pro-con list, and under pro it said, “Because God said so.” And under con it said, “Because I don’t want to move there and my friends and family are here.” And the con list was about ten things long, and the pro list was about one. And if I had gone by a pro-con list, I would have voted con and stayed there, and been out of God’s will. So we can’t go necessarily by our own idea of a pro-con list.

SID: How did it turn out?

KAREN: It turned out good. I moved to Tulsa and I ended up, you know, got to teach at Rhema and really travel the world, and preach. And so who know where I would be if I hadn’t obeyed God.

SID: If she wasn’t determined to follow God and no one else. Now what is the difference between hearing his audible voice or promptings? Everyone is looking for his audible voice.

KAREN: Yeah. And really most of us are to be led by the inward witness. You know, the Bible teaches us that we are a threefold being. You know, we live in a body. We have a soul, but we are a spirit and the part of us that’s a spirit, the born again part, is just like Jesus. It’s just like God. And so then we are meant to hear his voice. He said in John 10:27, “My sheep hear my voice and they follow me.” And so we are meant to recognize his voice, but we hear it as a prompting from the inward man, from the Spirit, the Holy Spirit speaking to us. I like to call it a knowing in your knower.

SID: Okay. Give me an example of a prompting when you were driving late at night.

KAREN: Yeah. One time I was on I-5 driving, you know. And in my family, if you get tired while you’re driving, I was all by myself, we just pull over to the side of the road and take a nap. And so I was tired, I pulled over, I leaned the seat back and I went to sleep. And I don’t know how long I had been sleeping, but all of a sudden, the Lord just prompted me. I got this inward witness that just woke me up, and I sat bolt upright, and I felt the Holy Spirit say, “Move now.” And so I put the seat up, I started the car, and I moved. And really, that’s the end of the story, which it turned out good because nothing bad happened. Who knows, maybe a, you know, trucker was sleepy and he would have veered off the road right then and squashed my little Honda like a bug. And so, you know, I listened to the Holy Spirit and he gave me that inward witness, and I obeyed him.

SID: Tell me about your son’s experience where you learned how important it is, and listen to this, watch your mouth.

KAREN: Yes. That’s one of the keys to hearing the voice of God because we need to be sure our words agree with the Bible, you know, because the Bible is what we’re following. It’s our roadmap for our destiny. And if we talk opposite of it, say somebody goes in their prayer closet and they say, “Lord, please help me, direct me, guide me, let me know your direction for my life,” and then they come out of their prayer closet and you ask them, “So what are you going to do?” And they go, “I don’t know, I can’t hear from God.” They just said the opposite of what they prayed.

SID: And they got the opposite.

KAREN: Yeah, exactly. And so my son, you know, he was facing graduation. He was an ORU senior and everybody asked him, like you ask all graduates, you know, what are you going to do when you graduate, and he didn’t know. And he hated to have to keep saying, I don’t know, because he’s been praying to know. And so finally one day he said to me, “Mom, I’ve come up with the answer. When people ask me, what are you going to do after graduation, I’m going to say, I’ll know when the time comes.”

SID: Much better.

KAREN: That way he keeps his word in agreement with the Word.

SID: I like that.

KAREN: Yeah.

SID: Okay. When we come back you’re going to find out one of the most important keys. And I mean, it’s been deemphasized in our society and shame on you that are deemphasizing this. It’s called tongues, supernatural languages.

KAREN: Yes.

SID: This is where the power is. We’ll be right back.