A while ago I posed the question:

if God speaks to me “after the manner of [my] language”, how do I know that it is His voice that I hear, and not my own? (Recognizing the Voice of God)

I realize now this is the wrong question. It is not the voice that matters, and here’s why.

God communicates to us through the Holy Ghost. He speaks, and we “feel pure intelligence flowing into [us], it may give [us] sudden strokes of ideas” (TPJS pg 153). In other words, God does not speak in words. He speaks in ideas, and our feeble brains try to translate those ideas in to concepts and words that our finite minds can grasp. So of course the words sound like our words, because it is our brains doing the translation.

But as I’ve written recently, the voice speaking the words is irrelevant. The only pertinent information is the information itself. What matters is the idea being conveyed, not who is conveying it. It does not matter if it is our voice, or someone else’s voice, or even Satan’s voice. If the message is a true message, we ought to heed it.