Eat, Sleep, Prophesy, Repeat: Book Review & Insights

If there was a book I wish I had read at the beginning of my prophetic journey, it is this one. I spent years trying to hear God’s voice; from the moment I received salvation at age 14, all the way until age 20, I had intense trouble identifying the voice of God. I always expected a thunder, a booming, or a loud trumpet to be sounded in my ear before I knew it was God speaking to me. Little did I know that God is more interested in speaking from a place of relationship than He is in speaking from a mountaintop, as He did in the days of Moses. This is the meaning of the new covenant – to be brought near to a God from whom I was once afar off (Acts 17:27). And one of the practical applications of this is that hearing His voice should be an easy thing for us, not this overly complicated and enormous thing that we make it out to be. So, I hope that as you read this review, I can convince you to get your hands on this book if indeed you want to know God’s voice for yourself.

Funnily enough, I was actually given this book by prophetic instruction. For those who may not understand what that means, it means that I was informed by someone (who hears God) that God wanted me to get this book. Subsequently, my lovely friend gifted it to me, and a few months later I found myself reading it.

This book explores various aspects of the voice of God, particularly as pertains to prophecy. Prophecy, in its simplest form, is when God speaks to a person and that person relays the information they’ve received to others. God can speak to people about things that have happened in the past, are happening in the present, or are set to happen in the future. And it’s not this weird and spooky thing that the world makes it out to be. It’s actually quite normal when you think about it. If God is our Father, as we quite happily call Him, then why should it be weird for Him to speak to us? The only reason why a person will call this weird is because that person lacks the revelation of God as a real and present father to us. Is it weird when an earthly father speaks to their child? Of course not. In fact, it is weird when a father doesn’t speak to his child, and we use all sorts of terms to describe this – such as abandonment, neglect, and abuse. So in that case, if God is the perfect father, as He is described in Matthew 7:11, then doesn’t that mean that He should speak to us all the time? Yes. And that is exactly what He does. The only problem is that we struggle to believe this is true, and because we struggle to believe this, we fail to recognise His voice.

In Eat, Sleep, Prophesy, Repeat, Apostle Tomi Arayomi describes the various ways through which God can speak to us. Some of these ways include – but are not limited to – your thoughts, imagination, senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch), dreams, and through people. I am not going to go through everything, so as to eliminate the purpose of you reading the book yourself, but Arayomi goes through these things in detail so that you may understand how God may present His voice to you. As for me personally, God speaks to me primarily through my imagination, thoughts, through people, and through my dreams. I see visions in my mind that are very vivid at times, and I know it is God oftentime because I can’t make up what I see in my head. I have other friends who, in contrast, primarily hear God through their inner ear and do not see many visions. Again, there are others I know that God communicates with through their emotions and feelings, and so they can discern when someone is feeling a particular emotion, because God makes them feel it too. As you can see, there are a vast array of ways that God can speak to a person. It is now up to you to learn and explore the specific ways through which God speaks to you.

“The voice of God is not heard, the voice of God is discerned.”

Apostle Tomi Arayomi in ‘Eat, Sleep, Prophesy, Repeat’

One of the things that stops people from identifying God’s voice more than anything is the presumption of what His voice should sound like. I, in all seriousness, believed for a long time that God should sound like Morgan Freeman. And so therefore if I was not hearing a deep, powering voice in my external ear, I believed God was not speaking to me. This was genuinely my way of thought, and what a pity that was, because it means for years God was speaking to me and I dismissed it completely because He didn’t sound how I expected him to sound. For some of you, God has been speaking to you your whole life – you just don’t know it is Him. Apostle Tomi Arayomi releases a powerful statement in this book, a statement he first heard from Dr Sharon Stone, which is “The voice of God is not heard, it is discerned.” This means that you cannot rely on an audible, obvious voice before you know it is God. Hearing God, just like everything else in Christianity, requires faith. As we see in the book of 1 Samuel chapter 3, God’s voice tends to sound like a familiar voice to us. Why? Because He speaks from a place of relationship. This means that He wants to speak to us in a way that is comfortable to us and does not scare us, because He loves us that much. This is why His voice often sounds like our own. But some of us are so desperate to hear the audible and terrifying voice of God that we forget about the experience of the Israelites who heard this voice that we so badly yearn for and cried out to Moses in response “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.”

“You have not come to a physical mountain, to a place of flaming fire, darkness, gloom, and whirlwind, as the Israelites did at Mount Sinai. For they heard an awesome trumpet blast and a voice so terrible that they begged God to stop speaking. They staggered back under God’s command: ‘If even an animal touches the mountain, it must be stoned to death.’ Moses himself was so frightened at the sight that he said, ‘I am terrified and trembling.'”

Hebrews 12:18-21, New Living Translation

This book goes further to describe how to discern (i.e. how to distinguish) when God is speaking to you, in contrast to it just being your own mind. There are certain characteristics by which He tends to speak, five of which are described in the book. When reading these, I found that I was given a lot of comfort as it made me feel like I wasn’t crazy as pertains to some of the things I regularly experience. If you are someone who feels like God might be speaking to you, but you just are not quite sure, I highly recommend that you get your hands on this book.

Other parts of the book are more specific to the gift and office of a prophet. The book speaks about the responsibilities of a prophet and how to steward the office, if you are indeed called to it. These things are slightly more complicated to write about in a blog post, so I may leave that for those who are interested to read it themselves. It touches on aspects such as building a prophetic lifestyle, birthing the prophetic in your local church, and learning how to prophesy maturely. It also speaks about receiving prophetic words for nations and high places. I can definitely tell that a lot of thought went into the writing of this book and I applaud it for its ability to break down what so many believe is a complex matter into something so simple and understandable for any sort of reader.

The only criticism I will give this book is for some grammatical errors that I came across more often than I would have liked to. I think some more work could have been put into the editing process; but still, this does not take away from the content of the book itself. Writing and publishing a book is not an easy thing to do, especially when one is busy doing the work of the Lord, travelling the globe, and raising a family etc.

In conclusion, if you would like to indeed build a lifestyle where you eat, sleep, prophesy, and repeat – this book is your manual. And a great one at that. If you plan to purchase this book after reading this review, do let me know in the comments below. And if you do read it after purchasing it, feel free to message me your thoughts or any gain that this book may have brought to you!

Wishing you all a great day and God bless.