How Prophesying Your Year Works: Start The New Year Off Right
You can absolutely kick things off at the beginning of the year, but June, or any other month for that matter, is just as good.
Begin whenever you’re ready. If you find yourself circling back to January, notate the year and simply remind yourself that you’re planning for the next year ahead. I have friends who prefer to align this look-ahead with Rosh Hashanah, following the Hebrew calendar. Here’s the thing: you’re aligning your plans with the Alpha and Omega, the Eternal One, the One with no beginning and no end. So don’t feel constrained by the idea that you must start prophesying your year in January.
Why Prophesy Your Year?
We do this because we want to differentiate the difference between our thoughts and God’s thoughts: “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9 NIV).
This is an opportunity to track measurables, and nothing is more measurable than your own life.
Scripture says faith is important and that we are to prophesy according to our faith (Romans 12:6), so listening for your- self and tracking measurables builds your faith muscles. And we want to build our faith muscles because Jesus says our faith can move mountains (Matthew 17:20).
What if we became a body of believers who are so faith-filled to prophesy that when we speak the world will ask the question, “Who is your God?”
Ways to Listen
This is not a manual on how to hear God’s voice. There are great materials out there for that and I teach classes on it. But here I will lightly cover some ways for you to listen; and for the sake of brevity, I will keep it short and simple—tap into your senses.
Ask yourself what you are seeing, feeling, perceiving, or hearing. Use all four of these senses when you prophesy over yourself. Enjoy experimenting and pressing in to hear His voice in new ways. Remember, you’re the only one who is going to read what you write, so go for it! Take some risks, ask questions to get more specifics so you can learn where your thoughts end and God’s begin.
How You Write
1. I have included prompts for you to stir up conversation with Holy Spirit. However, just because I have given you a specific question doesn’t mean you have to end the conversation there. These are mere starting points. For example, I could give you a prompt about pursuing God by asking, “What is changing in my relationships this month?” and you could end up hearing a word from God about your finances.
Please read the following seriously—the prompts are to get you started, but follow the Holy Spirit’s leading on what He wants to reveal to your heart, spirit, and mind. I’m here to launch you into the infinite highway of hearing His voice. And yes, God has things to say to you. Psalm 139:17-18 (NIV) says, “How precious to me are your thoughts, God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand….” These verses make it clear that God has a lot to say, and He delights when you draw near. So allow the prompt to draw you near to Him.
2. The best advice I can give you is to write everything down— even words you are convinced are yours, or the TV show you watched yesterday—write it down. That’s why you are reading this book, right? I’ll say it again: Learn where your thoughts end and His begin. So every time you have a question or a doubt, picture me sitting next to you with a megaphone yelling, “WRITE IT DOWN!”
I promise you that later when you review it, you will have wished you had pressed in for more. Because as you move through the timeline of your life, something will happen that will trigger a faint memory of when you were doing this process, and when you go to your journal you will hope to find it there. This has happened to me countless times. So what are we going to do? We are going to write it all down.
3. Write as if Jesus is writing a letter to you in the first person. For example, I write, “Lindsey, this month we are on the move, and I have many plans for you!” I like to do this because first, it changes my posture when I write. Frustration seems to melt off, and I tend to connect to His heart more. And second, later when I return to read it, it is as though He is still speaking to me.
4. Or you can write metaphorically: “I see crowds, the color red, and something about Christmas in July.” Sometimes I write like this too, because images will flash before my eyes and I write down what I’m getting. It doesn’t have to always be a well-thought-out sentence, you may even sound like the prophetic version of Dustin Hoffman in the movie Rain Man. If you write metaphorically, don’t try to interpret in the moment, refer back to point 2—write it all down! Interpretation may come later or make more sense as time goes on.
5. And of course, how you write may be a combination of all of these ways and other ways you may prefer, because His voice is infinite! I just want to give you some inspiration and break the box of fear that you are doing it wrong.
What Happens
Once you write everything down, you will forget what you wrote—so check back often! I know you might think that you’re going to wake up on the first day of the month and check your words that you wrote, but you won’t. Life is busy. So I can’t express this enough—you will forget! Go back to this journal often and re-read what you wrote.
You will get things wrong, and this is good. Making mistakes is part of the learning process, an opportunity to grow closer to Him through dialogue. We certainly can misinterpret Him. You wouldn’t expect to wake up one morning and be able to speak fluent Russian—that is unless you are Russian, of course. We should give ourselves the same patience when learning to discern God’s voice. It’s okay to make errors in this process.
How To
What are some ways to dialog with God when you get things wrong?
Some of what you write may turn out to be your wants and desires more than hearing from the Lord. Learning from that isn’t bad. Recognizing and documenting your aspirations is crucial, as they matter to God. Remember when I thought the Lord was saying I was going to Italy in 2020? Turns out, I just wanted to go to Italy. And so a few years later I made that happen! All of this aligns with Habakkuk 2:2, which in essence says, “Write the vision, make it plain, and give the angels something to run with.”
You might hear accurately on a topic, but find your timing is off. The timeline is one of the more mysterious and harder things to pin down in the prophetic. Some of the most accurate prophets I know have wiped out on the timeline, so be gentle with yourself on this aspect of prophesying.
All of this is okay because we are learning and will always be learning.
Rules of Engagement
Love yourself well. Prophesy over yourself as you would someone else.
Listen only for words that bring hope. Does God correct or warn you? Yes! He disciplines the ones He loves, and I love to be disciplined by God. But, right now, I want you to only listen for words that bring you hope. This is more of a treasure hunt than a trash hunt. Ask yourself, Is this love? If it sounds like love, you are on the right track.
Slow down writing “giant” words such as, “I will make a million dollars in August.” Look, God does amazing and impossible things, but ask yourself, Do I have faith for this, or is this just to make me feel good?
Do your words line up with the character and nature of God that resonate within Scripture?
The Agreement
Now before we get started, let’s enter into an agreement. I want you to verbally say out loud the following agreement. Don’t just read it, say it out loud. And because I’m prophetic, I’ll know if you did it or not. (Also, that’s a joke.) But seriously, put these words on your lips. There’s power in saying things out loud:
Speak the bolded words out loud and then take to heart the paragraph that follows:
“I will not be a dodo bird and have a faith crisis. If none of what I have heard comes to pass, I am learning and that’s okay!”
I think this statement is important, “Don’t be a dodo bird.” If you don’t know what a dodo bird looks like you should look it up immediately, and it will remind you that God has a sense of humor. We need to lighten up a little bit. Joy is one-third of the Kingdom. Romans 14:17 (NIV) says, “For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit,” and we take ourselves a little too seriously. I want you to enter into this journaling process with childlikeness and wonder—it will help you laugh.
“I am not fragile. My relationship with Jesus is not fragile.”
A lot of us are afraid to lean in to hear His voice because we are scared of getting it wrong or of being disappointed. We can’t let that dismantle our faith or connection to the God who loves us. We must step into the confidence that we are the royal priesthood (1 Peter 2:9).
“I am comfortable with mystery, knowing that God is always good. His ways are above my ways.”
This is an important fact. You will hear things that might not make sense and it will seem like you got it wrong, but then it will loop around and present itself in a way you weren’t expecting. Or you were sure you heard Him, but what you heard is not coming to pass. I have a core value for mystery. God is always working in the background and you can’t always see or understand what He is doing. I trust God and I trust that His ways are better than my ways. I feel that you will get much farther in your walk with Him if you allow room for mystery.
“I will take responsibility to partner with the words that give me life in any way I can!”
It is time for us to move from being mere believers, to active followers. Review what you wrote; if something brings you life, then pursue Holy Spirit, asking how you can actively partner with that word you received. For example, if you heard you are going to travel to Spain and you really want to partner with that word, maybe you could consider learning Spanish. The key here is to see what gives you the feeling of life and love. But you don’t want to move into striving and create a bunch of to-do list items; rather, in childlike wonder, lean forward and partner with His words in any way possible.
Entering His Courts with Thanksgiving and Praise
We are about to lean in and listen to the same voice that spoke light, water, earth, and the heavens into existence! God spoke and creation bloomed. Can you imagine what happens when He speaks to you? It’s almost beyond comprehension. I don’t think we grasp the magnitude of how incredible it is that our inheritance is to hear His voice. And what better way to embrace this gift than with a heart full of gratitude? The Bible tells us to enter His courts with thanksgiving and praise. So before we begin listening for what is to come, let’s first give thanks for what He has already done.
At the start of the year 2024, I was reading Psalm 136 and it struck me how the psalmist meticulously recounts the Lord’s deeds, punctuating each with the phrase, “His faithful love endures forever.”
The following are some examples:
Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good! His faithful love endures forever (Psalm 136:1 NLT).
Give thanks to him who placed the earth among the waters.
His faithful love endures forever (Psalm 136:6 NLT).
He brought Israel out of Egypt. His faithful love endures forever (Psalm 136:11 NLT).
Give thanks to him who struck down mighty kings. His faithful love endures forever. He killed powerful kings. His faithful love endures forever (Psalm 136:17-18 NLT).
Those last few verses are a bit savage right? Listen, the Bible is wild!
So here is what I want you to do: Set a timer for 10 minutes, list all that God did in the past 12 months, and follow up each line of gratitude saying, “His faithful love endures forever.”
The following are examples:
I had a heartfelt conversation with my brother. His faithful love endures forever.
I stayed in good health this year. His faithful love endures forever.
I bought a house. His faithful love endures forever.
