I don’t always know if something comes from God or just from my brain. I’ve never heard an audible voice in prayer, but I have had an interior voice, kind of like a regular thought, that comes. Those are the ones that are hard to figure out, because they could be from me or from God. For the most part, I have a few ways to figure out where it’s coming from.
Sometimes there are things that are genuinely unimportant but that make me smile or even laugh during prayer time. It could be God giving me hope, or it could just be a random thought. I tell God that I’m not sure if it was my thought or His voice, but that I thank him for whatever benefit I gained from it. That way, I’m not reading too much into it, but I am making sure not to neglect God’s gifts to me either.
One sure way for me to know if it is God or me is if a thought keeps coming back. For example, I tend to pray at night. This usually works well for me, but occasionally I’ll put it off for too long. There are nights where I constantly feel like I should be praying. When I ignore this feeling, something inevitably happens that makes prayer more difficult later, whether it is an unexpected visit from a friend or just getting tired unusually early. After this happened a few times, I realized that this urge to pray was probably a prompting of the Holy Spirit, Who obviously knew that if I put off praying that night, it would be much more difficult.
There are other ways I look to see if it is God’s voice if I think He is guiding me to make a particular decision, as in discernment. Usually, I have time to think about it, so if I think I hear Him telling me to go a certain way, I continue to bring this up in prayer. If I continue to be completely unsure about it, I usually figure it’s my own voice. At other times, though, the more I think and pray about it, the more I can’t see any other way. These times may also be followed by external confirmations. For example, if other people who don’t know what you’re trying to figure out offer advice unprompted, and they all say the same thing, and it agrees with what you think God is telling you, it’s probably God who’s telling it to you.
A final way to know if it is definitely NOT God: if you think God is telling you something that goes against the truth He has revealed, it’s not God telling it to you.