This testimony is from way back in October but I still felt like it was important to share. During my DTS lecture weeks, I began to see the power of testimony come alive in a really practical way. What I had heard about before, stories of God moving, speaking, and transforming lives, was no longer just something I was listening to. I was actually living it. Over the two months of outreach that followed, I watched testimonies multiply in ways that honestly felt overwhelming in the best way.
The lecture phase itself was deeply transformative. Each week carried its own weight and challenged me in different ways. We covered topics like identity, Lordship, spiritual warfare, evangelism, and more. Week by week, God was reshaping how I saw Him, how I saw myself, and how I saw the world around me. It wasn’t just information. It was formation. And it was intense in the most life-giving way.
One of the most impactful weeks for me was “Hearing God’s Voice.” During this week, God gently began to unravel something I had carried for a long time, the belief that I struggled to hear Him.
That week in chapel, we studied the teachings of Jesus in the Book of John, especially John 10:1–5. We talked about how Jesus is the Good Shepherd, and how His sheep recognize His voice. That image stuck with me. The reality is that sheep don’t recognize a voice by instinct alone. They recognize it through familiarity, through closeness, through time spent with the shepherd.
And that’s what God began to show me.
He gently revealed that the seasons where I felt like He was silent were often the same seasons where I had chosen distance from Him. It wasn’t that He wasn’t speaking. It was that I hadn’t been actively growing in relationship with Him. Because of that, I was struggling to recognize His voice, not because He was absent, but because I wasn’t familiar with how He speaks.
It was like hearing someone call your name in a crowded room but not realizing it’s someone you know well, because you haven’t spent enough time with them lately to recognize it instantly.
The truth that hit me was simple but deeply confronting. I had been hearing God at times, but dismissing it because I didn’t recognize it as Him.
Like with a close friend, you can usually tell when something feels familiar or unfamiliar because you’ve invested time in them. That kind of recognition doesn’t happen instantly. It’s built through relationship over time. And it’s the same with God. You learn His voice by knowing Him, not just knowing about Him.
Without that closeness, you can hear Him and still assume it’s just your own thoughts or something insignificant. That realization helped me understand why I had overlooked what was actually God speaking in my life.
What God showed me so clearly is this. You can’t expect closeness with Him if you aren’t actively pursuing Him, and you can’t expect to recognize His voice if you aren’t growing familiar with Him.
That week didn’t just change how I think about hearing God. It changed how I approach relationship with Him entirely.
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