How to Recognize God’s Voice — Brother Lawrence’s Quiet Answer
⏱ 12 min read
You have asked the question more than once. You have asked it after the sermon that everyone else seemed to hear something in, the one that landed on the woman two pews over but went past you. You have asked it during the long prayer in the car when nothing came back. You have asked it at the kitchen sink, hands in the water, asking whether the small nudge you just felt was God or whether it was your own thought wearing His name.
How do you recognize God’s voice. Not the dramatic version — the burning bush, the audible word, the unmistakable thunder. The ordinary version. The one for the Tuesday afternoon. The one that has to work for the woman who has been faithful for fifteen years and still feels uncertain about what counts as Him and what counts as her.
This is a slow walk through Brother Lawrence — a seventeenth-century French monk who washed dishes in a Carmelite kitchen for half his life and who, by the end, said he heard God all day without ever hearing words. His small book, The Practice of the Presence of God, is the contemplative answer to the question you have been asking. It is also the practice that sits behind our Prayer Journal for Women — a 140-day form of the same slow listening, for the woman who wants a daily seat to come back to.
Brother Lawrence’s answer is not what most teaching about God’s voice will give you. He does not give you three tests. He does not tell you to look for goosebumps, or peace, or a verse jumping off the page. He gives you something older and quieter. He says: the voice is not what you have been straining to hear. The voice is the presence you have been standing in the whole time.
What Brother Lawrence actually said
Lawrence joined the monastery in his middle years, broken in body, unsure he was even saveable. He spent his first ten years there in spiritual turmoil — convinced God was distant, convinced he was disqualified, convinced the saints he read about were having an experience he was not having. Then something shifted. Not a vision. Not a moment. A slow decision to live as if God were there, regardless of whether he felt Him.
What came of that decision is what the book reports. Here is the line that holds the whole answer:
“Thus I continued some years applying my mind carefully the rest of the day, and even in the midst of my work, to the presence of God, whom I considered always as with me, often as in my heart.”
— Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God
Read it twice. Slowly. Notice what is not in it.
There is no audible voice. No special posture. No retreat house. No quiet hour with the candles lit. The man is in the midst of his work — peeling vegetables, washing pans, walking from the kitchen to the refectory — and the thing he is doing inwardly is applying his mind carefully to a presence he is considering always with him.
This is the part most teaching skips over. Lawrence does not say he was hearing God speak. He says he was considering God as with him. The verb is the practice. Consider. Hold in mind. Take as true. Allow to be the background of the room.
The question you have been asking — how do I recognize God’s voice — quietly changes shape under this sentence. The question assumes God is somewhere else, sending signals you have to tune into. Lawrence’s practice assumes God is already here, and the recognising is a slow re-orientation of your attention to the presence you have been standing inside the whole time.
The voice, in Lawrence’s hands, is not a sound. It is a presence you learn to live as accompanied by. The recognising is the noticing of the company you were always in.
How this lands today
Your hands are not in a monastery sink. They are in a stainless kitchen sink, or on a steering wheel in the school pickup line, or on a keyboard answering an email at 4:43 on a Wednesday afternoon. The setting is different. The practice is exactly the same.
Considering Him always as with me. That is the line you take into the Wednesday afternoon. Not as a verse to memorise. As a small inner posture you keep coming back to.
It will feel like nothing the first week. The hands will keep moving. The email will get answered. You will not feel anything in particular. The mind will wander off. You will remember at some point — at the traffic light, or while the kettle boils — that you were meant to be considering Him here, and you will quietly return. That returning is the practice. Not the staying. The returning.
The reason the question how do I recognize God’s voice never gets a clean answer in the books that promise tests and signs is that the question itself is shaped wrong. God does not, ordinarily, break into the day with a sound. He is the floor the day stands on. The practice is not the catching of an event; it is the slow learning that the floor was there all along.
The woman who has been waiting for thunder will keep missing the floor. The woman who has begun considering Him with her — at the sink, in the car, in the small unimpressive minutes of the work — will, within months, find that the floor has become noticeable. The day will start having a quality it did not have before. Decisions will feel companioned, even when no specific direction comes. A peace, not the absence of trouble but the presence of Someone in the trouble, will be the new weather of the inside of you.
That is what Lawrence is reporting. That is what the question is really asking after. (If the daytime version of this practice is what you most need to begin with, How to Start a Quiet Time with God (When You Have 10 Minutes) walks the smallest possible entry point, and A Daily Prayer Journal That Holds the Asks You’re Embarrassed to Pray is for the part where the considering becomes spoken.)
What does the voice sound like, then
Here is where Lawrence is most useful, and most quietly different from the teaching you may have been raised on. He answers the what does it sound like question by reframing what sound is doing in the question.
“We may simply continue with Him in our commerce of love, persevering in His holy presence with an act of praise, of adoration, or of desire or with an act of resignation, or thanksgiving, and in all the ways our spirits can invent.”
— Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God
Commerce of love. That is the phrase. Trade. Back-and-forth. Small exchanges across the day. Not one big revelation. A continual quiet with.
The voice, in this hands, sounds like the slow registering of His agreement with what your heart is already doing toward Him. You make a small act of praise — a single sentence in the car: thank You for that light through the trees — and the voice is the small inward sense of being received in it. You make a small act of resignation — a single sentence at the sink: I do not know what to do about her, You do, I leave it with You — and the voice is the small inward sense of the leaving being honoured, the load lightening by a fraction, the next breath being available.
The voice is not a sentence dropped into your mind from outside. The voice is the felt response of Heaven to the small inner moves your soul is making toward it. The commerce is the conversation. The commerce is what you have been calling the voice all along, without realising that was its name.
This is why the woman who tries to hear God by listening harder keeps coming up dry. Listening harder treats God as a broadcaster. Commerce of love treats Him as a companion. The dry woman has been straining at a radio frequency. The accompanied woman has been making small offerings — a thanks, a desire, a resignation — and noticing the small returns.
The returns are quiet. They will not show up on a recording. They will show up, over months, as a softer chest at the start of the day. As a willingness to do the next thing without first needing to know the whole plan. As a slow conviction, almost without your noticing it forming, that you are not alone in the room and never were.
Pause for a moment
The shoulders. Where are they right now. If they are up by your ears — and most likely they are, because the question am I hearing Him correctly is a question that lives in tight shoulders — let them lower by a small amount. Not by trying. By stopping the small ongoing effort to hold them up.
Let one slow exhale, longer than the inhale. The body has been carrying the uncertainty. The uncertainty is real. It is also not where the answer lives. Lawrence’s commerce of love happens in a lowered body, not a braced one. The lowering itself is the first small act. Let it be enough for thirty seconds.
Then read on.
What this means for your daily practice
You do not need a new method. You do not need a different bible. You do not need to learn a new posture or a new vocabulary. You need to consider Him with you through one ordinary day, and to make small inward acts toward Him in it, and to notice — without forcing the noticing — the small inward returns.
That is the whole practice. The daily form of it has only three small habits.
The first is a single line, read at the start of the day, that hands the day to Him. Not a long prayer. One sentence. Lord, today, I would walk with You. That is the opening of the commerce. The day now has a shape inside which the with-ness can happen. (If you do not have a place for this yet, How to Start a Prayer Journal in 10 Minutes a Day is the format-light version that survives real life.)
The second is the small acts across the middle of the day. The unspoken thank-You at the traffic light. The unspoken sorry at the sharp word with the child. The unspoken I do not know, You do at the email you are afraid to send. None of them are eloquent. None of them need to be. They are Lawrence’s commerce — the small exchanges that, accumulated, become the conversation you have been trying to name as His voice.
The third is one honest sentence at the end of the day. Not a journal entry. One line. Today was thin. Today He was near at four. Today I was distracted and He was patient. The line is the witness — the small recording of what the day inside Him was actually like. Across months, those lines become the longer memory that proves, the next time you doubt, that He was speaking the whole time. (If you are at the age where the question how do I know it is Him is part of figuring out the wider shape of your faith, A Journal Book for the Young Woman Figuring Out Her Faith walks the same practice for an earlier season. And if the silence has gotten loud lately, the sibling article What to Do When God Is Silent — The Dark Night Tradition walks the John of the Cross answer for the year He goes quiet, and Why God Whispers Instead of Shouts — Tozer on the Still Small Voice walks Tozer on the still small voice for the noise of the soul.)
The three small habits are the daily form of the practice of the presence of God. The journal that walks them across 140 days is the Prayer Journal for Women. One page per evening. Scripture pre-printed. Space for the considering, the small acts, the honest sentence. Built for the woman who is tired of straining for thunder and ready, slowly, to begin noticing the floor.
What Brother Lawrence said about the silence between
There is one more line worth keeping near the page. Lawrence wrote it for the part of the practice nobody talks about — the days when the commerce goes quiet, when the small acts feel like they are landing on no one, when the considering produces nothing in return.
“He said we need fidelity in those disruptions in the ebb and flow of prayer when God tries our love to Him.”
— Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God
Fidelity in the disruptions. Notice he calls them disruptions, not absences. The presence has not gone. The commerce has gone quiet. The flow has ebbed. Lawrence’s word for what you do then is fidelity. You keep considering Him with you, even when the considering produces no felt return. You keep making the small acts, even when they go silent. You keep showing up to the day inside Him, even on the days you cannot tell whether you are inside Him at all.
The reason this is the test, in Lawrence’s hands, is that love tested in dryness is the love that becomes deep. The love that only flows during the felt seasons is shallow. The love that keeps the commerce going through the ebb is the love that, by year three, has become the steady weather inside which you live. The voice, by then, is no longer something you are trying to hear. It is the air you are breathing in.
The woman who has been faithful for fifteen years has already done much of this work. She has kept the commerce going through ebbs she did not understand. She has been considering Him with her, in small ways, even when nothing was coming back. The question she is asking — how do I recognize God’s voice — is being asked from inside an answer she has been quietly living all along.
The next stretch of the practice, for her, is the slow re-naming of the floor she has been standing on. The voice was the with-ness. The voice was the commerce. The voice was the patience that did not leave the room during the dry months. She has been hearing Him the whole time.
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women.
Get Seven Days of Stillness — free
A free gift from Hayley Louisa Mark. A short devotional companion drawn from the 140-Day series — seven passages, seven contemplative practices, sent to your inbox over the coming week.
No noise. No spam. Unsubscribe whenever you wish.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women walks Brother Lawrence’s practice of the presence across 140 days, with scripture pre-printed and space for the small acts of the day. Built for the woman who is tired of straining for thunder and ready to begin recognising the quiet company she has been standing in all along.
