DOUG ADDISON

My Story: Why I Wrote This Book

Read an excerpt from Hearing God Every Day …

Whether you received a prophetic word from someone or if God spoke to you directly, this book will help because it contains practical ways to help you respond to what God has given you.

Too often, people receive a prophetic word from God, but they do not follow
through with it, let alone activate it in their lives. I am excited to share some principles and practices that will really help you.

The most common questions I get after training tens of thousands of people on hearing God are:

• “How can I know if what I am hearing is from God, myself or the evil one?”
• Also, “I received a prophetic word, but I don’t know the timing or what to do with it.”

What I am about to share with you in this book are the things I wish someone would have told me more than 25 years ago.

My prayer for you is that God will open your spiritual eyes and ears so that you can understand what He is saying to you, and why He is saying it.

I want you to know how to get into God’s timing so you can understand what is for now and what is for later. Whether you are praying through small or large amounts of revelation, my goal for you is that it would expand into great things for the Kingdom of God.

Is That You, God?

I have been hearing the voice of God all my life, but for many years I did not realize it was God, so I seldom responded to Him. Most of the time, I considered the guidance and insight that came to me as coincidences.

Looking back, I now realize that I did experience supernatural things, but never understood them or knew that I should track them.

Because the Christians I knew at that time did not understand me or know how to guide me, I became very wounded and was in and out of church for many years.

Even though I had encounters with Jesus, I could not figure out how to change my life. I would go up to the altar over and over, praying for Jesus to save me. It was like I was born again—and again and again!

Finally, in 1987, God got my attention through prophecy. I was in the occult and had gone to a psychic (which I do not recommend). I was backslidden from the Lord and was in desperate need. Then to my surprise, the Holy Spirit spoke to me about my condition right there in the psychic’s office!

A year later, my sister, who had been in the occult practice with me, gave her life to Jesus. She called me at five in the morning and said that Jesus had awakened her and told her to call me and tell me the very thing He had spoken to me in the psychic’s office. I was shocked because I had not told anyone about those words.

I responded to what Jesus said, and my life changed forever!

I found a church that offered emotional healing and helped me develop my spiritual gifts. But what I found most helpful was that they nurtured my ability to hear God. Since then, I have been a pastor, church planter and business owner. I was one of the forerunners of prophetic evangelism in which we use prophecy and biblically based dream interpretation as a means of sharing God’s love.

My Life Verse and Mission

One day I was sitting in my apartment and heard the Holy Spirit say to me, “Isaiah 61.” I had no idea if there was even an Isaiah 61 in the Bible. This is what I found when I looked it up: “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners.”
(Isaiah 61:1 NIV).

I burst into tears because I knew this was my destiny. I cried for about six weeks because God was speaking to me—an alcoholic, meth-addicted, backslidden mess!

That was my introduction to hearing God for myself.

I went on from there, and still had a lot of ups and downs. But now, here I am, decades later, and God has been doing exactly those things from Isaiah 61 in my life. That experience set me on a journey to learn to hear the voice of God.