Emily Parker spoke with Tania Harris about her new book 'God Conversations', what God's voice sounds like, how you know when it's Him speaking and who God is in the midst of suffering.

When we read the Bible we just get the highlights. We get these kind of outrageous stories where it says God spoke to Mary and Joseph, "Leave for Egypt," and it happened in a dream in the middle of the night. Then it says in the Bible, the next day Mary and Joseph got up and went to Egypt. I remember reading that thinking, "How did they know it was God?" It was just a dream. We all have crazy dreams. Which one of those is from God? So it's a process of discerning and learning what God's voice sounds like. It's a bit like a relationship, it develops as we get to know the character of the person, and the kinds of things that they say. So I always say, "If you want to know what God sounds like, get to know what He is like, and the best way to do that is to look at Jesus in the Bible." It says that Jesus is the perfect image of the invisible God. He brings kindness, goodness, love, joy, peace, and compassion. So anything He says will bring those things. It will always bring truth. It will always bring freedom. So when God speaks, that's the result and that's one of the ways of knowing.

There is another way of knowing if it's God. The beautiful thing about it, is that the Holy Spirit doesn't just speak to one person, He provides a witness or a testimony. They say that there is safety in numbers when you are on a prosecution stand; or if you are a witness in a law court there's much more strength to a testimony if there's more than one person speaking. So I think that what God does when I'm not sure about what He's saying to me, He speaks to someone else and He encourages me through other people. That's been how God has spoken to me in the past.

Emily: You mentioned before about how you got to know Jesus through reading the Bible. What was your experience of that?

Tania: That's the interesting bit. I knew the Bible very well. I grew up in church so I read a lot of it. There was lack in that personal relationship though. What happened is that I began to hear His voice for myself. A lot of the stories that I had read came alive.

One of the things I tried to do in the book is to bring the Bible stories to life against a contemporary stage. So the way the book is written, it tells lots of stories about God speaking in 'my world' in the 21st century and then splices it with the conversations of the Bible.

There's a chapter there that talks about how God spoke to me about the house I was going to live in, in days to come, which was fascinating. He spoke through a symbolic dream. There's another story in the Bible about how God spoke to Joseph about his future in a symbolic dream. So I say, "God can speak in this way. This is how He spoke in my life and this is how He spoke in Joseph's life. This is how potentially He can speak in your life too."

Emily: When you first had that dream, did you know automatically that it was Him? And when God has spoken to you differently, have you always gone back to the Bible to see whether God can talk like that?

Tania: Absolutely. You'll see that in the book, I think that the Bible gives us the pattern for who God is. There is an established foundation for the character and nature of God.

Every time I had an experience I would ask, "How do I understand this? Is this of God'? Because I think it's one thing to have a spiritual experience, but it's another thing to base a life decision on it, or to build a life on it. You need to know that there's truth and that you've got some rock solid foundations. I believe very strongly that as a Christian the Bible gives us the revelation of who God is and that's my grounding and foundation.

Whenever I talk about God speaking to me, then what He says to me today will be consistent with who He is, His character and nature and the things that He's already said. He doesn't change His mind. He's going to be consistent. He's the same person today as He was two thousand years ago. So in the same way He spoke to people back then, I would expect that He would still be speaking to me today, but He's also going to be consistent so there's no contradiction.

Emily: Have you ever had a conversation with God, which turned out totally differently to what you expected in terms of what He's asked you to do, and how you responded?

Tania: Definitely. We had lots of those. The beautiful thing about Him is that He's God and He knows a lot more than we do, and He sees a lot more than we do.

I started my ministry when I was 26. I was a school sports teacher before then. After my training finished He spoke to me about starting a new church. In the world that I lived in, single women didn't start churches and so I said, "God, that means I've got to get married first." He said, "No it doesn't. You can do this on your own." I was like, "What?" I'd never heard of that before. We had a little argument about it, but the thing I learned was that He saw the potential in me and the capacity that I had long before I ever saw it. He was calling me to do something I didn't think I could do. The trust issue came in then, "Will I follow His voice?"

Jesus said, "My people will recognise My voice, and they follow." Sometimes we want to hear God's voice because it can be so amazing and incredible. Jesus said, "I'll tell you about the things, I'll remind you of the things that have been spoken, but I'll also tell you about the things to come." So you begin to see your world open up a bit, but it's another thing to actually follow and trust what He says. So me, leading and pioneering a church on my own, without, you know, being married; that was my mindset. He broke it. I realised as I followed Him that He was right. He knew what was in me and He knew what I could do. When we listen to His voice I think we start to see things we've never seen before and the potential that is within us as He sets us free.