I have come to believe that hunger for God is the most underestimated thing in the entire conversation about hearing His voice. Not method. Not discipline. Not the right book. Hunger. And on Day 7 of our Hearing from God series, I watched that conviction get demonstrated in front of me rather than argued.
I asked Prophet Emanuel Johnson to come and train us. Manny has been on the B2T Show many times, but this was different — he came to teach, not to be interviewed. I asked him for the one-minute version of how he started hearing from God, and he did not give me a method. He gave me one word.
Then he said the thing I have not stopped thinking about since: “You cannot serve a God you cannot hear from.”
Read that again. If God is silent to you, what is it exactly that you are serving?
Day 7 is part of our twelve-day series — the full index sits at the Hearing from God hub, where a different prophetic voice teaches each day.
What Hunger Actually Is
Manny got saved in what he calls a quaint, basic church. Nothing about the room was remarkable. Everything about the moment was. He describes three things landing at once — unconditional love, unconditional acceptance, unconditional forgiveness. His parents loved him, he is quick to say. This was something else.
“That blew my mind,” he told us. And it lit something he had no vocabulary for yet.
“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” — Romans 8:1 ESV
Here is the detail I keep going back to. Manny says openly that he does not like to read books. And he read the Bible cover to cover. Not because somebody told him to. Because he could not stop.
“As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.” — Psalm 42:1 ESV
A deer does not decide to pant. It pants because it needs water. That is the whole difference between a man disciplining himself to read Scripture and a man who dislikes reading finishing the entire Bible because something in him is thirsty.
And this is the part I want to press on, because it reorders everything: the hunger came before the hearing. It was not a technique Manny picked up. It was an appetite God put in him — and Hebrews 11:6 puts the reward on the far side of seeking, not on the far side of getting the method right.
“Whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.” — Hebrews 11:6 ESV
If you have been waiting to feel qualified before you go looking for God, that verse quietly removes the requirement. What it asks for is that you come — and that you believe He responds to people who do.
Can I manufacture hunger for God if I do not feel it?
Not directly, and Manny would not tell you to try. Hunger is something God places in a person who comes to Him honestly. What you can do is clear the ground it needs. Most people are not short of appetite — they are short of room, because the appetite is competing with everything else pulling at their attention. Remove the competition and see what is actually underneath it. That is a very different project from working yourself up into wanting God more.
The Week He Asked For
Church was good. It was not enough for him. He was hungry before service, hungry after service, hungry on days there was no service at all. He did not understand it at the time. Looking back he calls it the Holy Ghost moving in him before he had words for it.
Then a number showed up in his heart: seven days. No audible voice. He just knew. So he asked his employer for the time off, and they gave it to him.
Then came the real question — what do you do with seven days you asked God for? His answer is the most practical thing in this entire teaching, and it is the part I would want you to copy. He gave God the exact hours he would have given his job. He was on the clock at five in the morning, so he got up at five in the morning and sought the Lord. He did not build a programme. He redirected time he was already giving away.
“You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.” — Jeremiah 29:13 ESV
Manny is careful with that phrase, and I have adopted his question. When somebody tells him they have sought God and heard nothing, he asks: with all your heart, or according to your own standards?
The Neighbour Who Told Him to Be Quiet
He did not pray in tongues. He did not know tongues existed. He cried out — tears, loud, hours at a stretch, asking for more of God without fully knowing what he was asking for.
It got loud enough that a neighbour screamed at him through the wall to shut up. And what did that do to a brand-new believer with no training and no theology of persistence? It made him louder.
“And many rebuked him, telling him to be silent. But he cried out all the more, ‘Son of David, have mercy on me!'” — Mark 10:48 ESV
Bartimaeus had a whole crowd telling him to be quiet, not one man through a wall — and he is the one who walked away seeing. Manny had not read that story yet. He did the same thing on instinct. Embarrassment is one of the cheapest tools the enemy owns, and it stops more people than opposition ever does.
Thursday Morning
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Same routine, same crying out, nothing spectacular. Then Thursday, before his alarm, God woke him first.
What happened next he had no category for. He describes coming out of his body, standing in his living room, looking at himself asleep. He was not panicking — he says you do not scream in a moment like that. What he noticed was that he felt more alive outside his body than in it.
“…whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows — and he heard things that cannot be told.” — 2 Corinthians 12:3–4 ESV
Paul would not pretend to understand his own experience, and I respect that Manny tells his the same way. He describes being taken up through the roof, seeing the earth and the building beneath him, seeing things yet to come, and hearing the voice of Jesus telling him that what he had been crying out for had been granted — and that he was called to be a prophet. Then the sense that it was time to go back. He woke up, and from that morning the voice of God was clear.
I want to be careful here, because this is where people draw the wrong conclusion. The encounter did not make him a prophet because it was dramatic. The encounter was God answering a week of hunger. Take the drama away and the sequence still holds.
He Was Being Emptied, Not Just Filled
Manny offered this himself and I had not thought of it: “I didn’t realize during those days that I was crying out, I was also being emptied out.” He had a lot of the world in him that needed to come out. Seven days was what that cost him. It is not a price list for anybody else.
He said it plainly. “God may just tell you one thing, and boom.” Your week might be ten minutes.
And God had already spoken to him years earlier. At eighteen, before he was saved and before he knew any Scripture, he heard a voice he knew was God promising to be with him and never leave him. He kept it in his heart the way Mary kept hers.
So I will ask you what he asked us. If you are sitting there certain you have never heard God — are you sure? Or have you simply never counted what you already heard? For a lot of people that second question is not a rebuke. It is a door.
Do I need to take a week off work to hear God?
No, and Manny is the first to say it. Those seven days were what God required of him in that season, with that much of the world still in him. What carries over is not the schedule. It is the willingness to give God time you are currently giving to something else, at a set hour, deliberately. He redirected his work hours. You might redirect ten minutes of scrolling. God is not weighing the size of the offering — He is responding to appetite.
Your step this week: find hours you are already spending elsewhere and give God a piece of them at a fixed time. Not whenever you get around to it. Something that costs you in the same way Manny’s five in the morning cost him.
Stop Trying to Copy Somebody Else’s Walk
This was the part of the night that landed hardest in the room, and it started with Manny’s own marriage.
He has been married eighteen years. His wife hears from God — beautifully, consistently — and she has never once heard Him the way Manny does. When they got together she assumed his method was the method, so she started getting up early to cry out just as he had. Nothing. She told him it felt good, but there were no results.
So he told her the truest thing I heard all night: “God doesn’t want you to duplicate me. He wants you to be you.”
She sought the Lord her own way, and God answered her plainly — that He would reveal Himself to her through His Word. Now she opens her Bible and God speaks. That is her line. A prophet’s wife does not hear God like the prophet, and there is nothing wrong with either of them.
The Bookshelf Problem
Manny’s warning about the shelf of books on hearing God was sharp, and he thanked God for those books before he said it. Many of them are built entirely on what one person did. The reader closes the cover thinking: do it that way and this will happen to me.
“It’s not an ingredients,” he said. “God is not looking for a group relationship. He’s looking for a personal relationship.”
Then he held up his thumb. No two fingerprints on earth are the same — not now, not ever. That is how specific God is about you. So stop asking what the method is and start asking Him how He wants to speak to you. I have watched believers who love God deeply stay stuck for years chasing a pathway that was never theirs, and it is one of the quieter tragedies in the church.
How do I find out the way God wants to speak to me specifically?
Ask Him — directly, and then stop supplying the answer yourself. Manny’s wife lost real time praying like her husband before God told her to open her Bible instead. Then pay attention to what has already worked. The moments you felt God most clearly are data, not coincidence. For some people it is Scripture opening. For others it is a dream, an impression, worship music, or a word delivered through somebody else. None of those is a lesser channel.
Guarding the Line
Manny’s sentence for this is the one I have quoted most since: “God’s voice is one. But the distractions are many.”
His point is that we are so bombarded that people assume God has gone quiet. He has not. The line is open. Something else is on it. And the hard part — the distractions are never going away. You will not outlast them. You take authority over them or they keep the ground.
His declarations were simple enough to borrow: the phone will not be my master, the internet will not be my master, mainstream media will not be my master.
Then the challenge. Turn the television off for a full day. Turn your phone off for a few hours during the day, when it costs something, not overnight while you are asleep. Say out loud that these hours belong to God. And when you shut the door, expect your flesh to come alive — you will get sleepy, you will suddenly remember errands. Manny says that is how you know you are on the right path. Fall asleep, wake up, go at it again.
Start at the Edge of the Mountain
If eight hours sounds impossible, good — it is not the assignment. Ten minutes. Then twenty. Then twenty-five. “God will meet you where you’re at.” Start at the edge of the mountain if that is where you are standing. And then the line that took the pressure off the whole room: “If you’re hungry, He has patience.”
I have needed that sentence more than once, and I suspect I am not alone.
Pray — Then Be Quiet
Manny corrected something in most of our prayer lives with one distinction. God often does not want him praying for an hour and calling it finished. God wants him to pray, and then be still.
“If you’re just saying I’m praying for an hour a day — what is that to God? It has to be both ways. I’m talking, and He’s talking, and we’re fellowshipping. Now you’ve got something.”
Keep a Record
Write down what you think God is saying, even when you are not sure it is Him. Date it. Keep it.
“Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it.” — Habakkuk 2:2 ESV
Two things happen when you write. Time confirms or corrects you. And you start learning the sound of His voice from your own record instead of borrowing confidence from somebody else’s testimony. That second one compounds, and it is the closest thing to a shortcut I know of.
Asking for Confirmation Is Not Faithlessness
Manny still asks God for signs after thirty years and open-eye visions. Gideon asked twice in opposite directions and God never once got angry with him.
“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” — John 16:13 ESV
Guidance is His job. That is not a loophole — it is the arrangement. Wanting to be sure is not the opposite of trusting Him.
Why does my mind go everywhere the moment I try to be still?
Manny expects it, and he treats it as a signal rather than a failure. The sleepiness and the sudden urgent errands show up precisely because something is at stake in the quiet. His advice is not to fight harder but to keep returning — fall asleep, wake up, go again tomorrow. The distraction is not evidence that God is absent. It is evidence that the room you just cleared is worth something.
Your step this week: pick one day and turn the television off completely. Put your phone in another room for two waking hours. Say out loud that these hours are His. Pray — then sit in the silence long enough to be uncomfortable, and write down whatever comes, even if you are unsure.
It Is Not the Big Ministry
I want to say something about Manny’s public record, because I watched the clip with everybody else. He gave a word in December 2023, repeated it in January 2024, and spoke it on camera in February 2024: a major pushback against the enemies of God, starting at the Supreme Court and moving down, with an announcement between February and March. On 4 March 2024 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Colorado could not remove Donald Trump from the ballot under the Fourteenth Amendment’s insurrection clause, which also closed the parallel efforts in Maine and Illinois. He played the original dated clip. His point was not credit — it was that the timestamps sit publicly and nobody can move them. He also spoke of a shaking in the world’s currencies, in gold, silver and copper, which he says is still unfolding.
That is why he guards the line the way he does. When thousands of people are going to hear what you say next, you had better be sure you heard.
But the sentence that should free half the people reading this is much smaller: “It’s not the big ministry. It’s the big obedience.” His mother’s assignment was to raise her children in the ways of the Lord. She did it well. Manny says she will stand among the worldwide evangelists — because obedience is the thing being measured, not audience size. He walked away from more than twenty years in a medical career, steady salary and next month covered, to learn dependence the hard way.
So do not let anyone’s testimony intimidate you. Let it encourage you. There is a difference and the enemy works hard to blur it.
Never Go Dull
Manny has prayed one standing prayer for three decades: that God would quicken his spirit and never let him go dull. He never wants to lose the connection. Thirty years on, he is still guarding the very thing he received in a dark apartment before dawn as a brand-new believer who did not know what tongues were.
That is the teaching in one line. Hunger opened the door. Hunger keeps it open. And the requirement list is a great deal shorter than most of us feared — which is exactly the kind of God He has always been.
Closing Prayer
Father, thank You for what You put in a brand-new believer who did not know enough to be impressive and simply would not stop asking until You answered.
Thank You that You made every one of us as distinct as a fingerprint, and that You never once required us to become somebody else before You would speak.
Forgive us for the hours we handed to noise while telling ourselves You had gone quiet. Give us courage to shut the door and stay in the silence long enough for You to fill it.
Make us hungry. Not curious — hungry. Empty out whatever is crowding You out, even when the emptying is uncomfortable, and be patient with us the way You have always been patient with us.
Keep us from comparison. Let no one’s story make us believe we are behind. Teach us our own way of hearing You and let us walk in it without apologising for it.
Quicken our spirits, Lord. Do not let us go dull.
In the name of Jesus, Amen.
— Rick Rene, Founder of FaithNFreedom & B2T Ministries
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Questions About Hunger for God
What does hunger for God mean in practical terms?
Manny draws the line between hunger and curiosity. Curiosity wants to know about God. Hunger needs Him the way a deer needs water — a drive rather than a decision. His own evidence is that a man who dislikes reading finished the whole Bible without anyone assigning it. In practical terms hunger shows up as time you did not have to be talked into giving, and appetite that survives the days when nothing dramatic happens.
Can I grow hunger for God if I do not feel much of it right now?
Not by force, but the ground can be cleared. Manny’s position is that God places the appetite and that most people are not short of it — they are short of room for it, because it is competing with everything else claiming their attention. Remove some of the competition for a set period and see what is actually underneath. That is a different exercise from working yourself into wanting God more, and considerably more honest.
What is a quiet time with God supposed to look like?
A fixed appointment rather than a vague intention, and a conversation rather than a monologue. Manny redirected the hours he owed his employer — same start time, same seriousness. For anyone starting he suggests ten minutes, building to twenty and twenty-five. The element most people skip is the second half: pray, and then be still long enough to be uncomfortable. That discomfort is usually the flesh objecting, not evidence God is absent.
Is fasting from food required to seek God this way?
Manny’s seven days were a fast from his occupation rather than from food. He surrendered the hours and the routine he would otherwise have given his employer. The underlying principle is creating space by removing something that currently fills it — and what fills your hours may be quite different from what filled his. He is explicit that the length and the cost of a fast are shaped by the individual, not by a standard.
Why does journaling with God make such a difference?
Because memory edits and paper does not. Manny recommends writing down what you believe God said even when you are unsure, dating it, and keeping it. Over months the record does two things: it settles specific words as events unfold, and it builds a personal reference for what God’s voice sounds like to you. That reference is far more useful than borrowed confidence from somebody else’s account.
What if I have prayed for years and nothing has happened?
Manny asks two questions before offering advice. First, whether the seeking has been wholehearted or measured against a personal standard. Second, whether God has already spoken and gone unrecognised — Samuel heard God three times and thought it was Eli, and Manny himself received a word at eighteen with no category for it. He also points at the volume of competing noise, which very few people account for honestly.
Does obedience really matter more than the size of a calling?
That is Manny’s central claim about it. His mother’s assignment was raising her children in the ways of the Lord, and he believes she will stand among worldwide evangelists because obedience is the measure. He applies it to himself as well — leaving a twenty-year medical career for full-time ministry was obedience, not strategy, and dependence was something he learned afterwards rather than something he already possessed.