As one who is called to make disciples, how am I helping those I am discipling become people who really know how to hear God’s voice?

Thirdly, when I talk without listening my prayers become my own personal, subjective perspective (which may not be the same as God’s!). Desiring a deeper faith, we need God to say something, anything, to turn the monologue we call prayer into a genuine conversation. Author Peter Greig is perhaps best known his work in forming the 24-7 Prayer Movement. As a movement, they have developed many resources for prayer and started a wave of people who are increasingly committed to intercessory prayer. Additionally, Pete Grieg serves as the Senior Pastor of Emmaus Road Church in Guildford England. As an author, Greig has written several bestselling books – including God on Mute - and he cowrites for the Lectio 365 Daily Devotional. This book, How to Hear God, is meant to follow How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People, but I will say that it also stands well unconnected and on its own.Yeah, that’s awesome, brother. Appreciate that. Pete, it’s been so good to have you spending time with us and helping us kind of process and think through this. If people want to connect with you pete, or your ministry, or learn more about your book, How toHear God, how can they do that? Christin Thieme: Yeah. I love that analogy that you give of the window frame and the picture frame, moving beyond seeing Scripture just objectively, but how do you receive it personally and make it that conversation? So there’s lots of really practical tools in the book, and that is a great one to start with. The issue is not whether or not God speaks to us today. The answer is yes. The issue is: how do we receive and process what God says to us? And Lectio is much more that approach. It’s less about exegesis and more what is God whispering to me through this? And there are four steps to doing it that I outline in the book. The Latin phrase is Lectio Meditatio. That’s just meditate on what you’ve read.

Additional resource links from this week’s conversation– so you and your team can easily find what is mentioned or referenced The main sections of this book are on hearing God speak in the person of Jesus, in the Bible, in prayer, in prophecy, in whispers and dreams, and (to cover all other bases) in community, creation, and culture. Examples are drawn from a wide range of sources: from St Ignatius of Loyola to the prophetic Pentecostal missionary Heidi Baker. Each chapter ends with a suggested Listening Exercise. So, yeah, it’s about reading slowly. It’s about reverence for the text. It’s about using your imagination. It’s about turning the Bible from being a picture frame to a window frame. Okay? So too often we look at the Bible like a picture that you study and analyze. It’s fixed. It’s there in the picture frame. But what if instead we treat the Bible like a window frame? So through the Bible, we kind of open the window and look out on the world. I was unfamiliar with the intimate acoustics of God’s voice. Apart from the Bible, I only really expected him to communicate through my conscience (which seemed basically tobe God saying no to a lot of things) and through something we referred to as “having peace”. The idea here was that when you made a good decision, you would be flooded with a sense of wellbeing, but when you made a bad one, you would lose that peace altogether. One individual may indeed be flooded with feelings of peace when they propose to their girlfriend, whileanother may be utterly terrified. This probably says more about the way that person is wired than it does about the will of God for their lives.The Revd Mike Starkey is Head of Church Growth for Manchester diocese and author of the Stepping Stones for Growth course. Rarely in any of our lifetimes have we so acutely needed to hear the Lord’s voice: both his word, so that we as hisChurch might navigate such dangerous days with clarity and courage, but also his whisper, so that we as individuals might know the particular guidance and comfort of his presence day by day. We live in noisy and bewildering times, full of distractions. Things are moving fast all around us. And I believe that now, more than ever, we need to learn how to be still, how to slow down, how to plug ourselves in to hear the voice of God more clearlyamid the clatter and clamour of the world.

Why do you say Christ’s encounter with the people on the road to Emmaus is a master class in learning to hear God’s voice?And it’s the key to discipleship. Jesus says in John 10:27, he says, “My sheep know my voice. They listen to me. I know them and they follow me.” And so the key to Christianity is to listen to God. So it’s massively, this is probably the most important thing you’ll ever learn to do, to listen to God. Hearing God speak is not about one tradition against the other. It’s about how we embrace and live out the Bible together, across Christian traditions, in a loving way? Shareable Social Graphics– Feel free to post them on your church social accounts, your personal accounts, or use them as graphics in your communications

The Bible is the language of God’s heart, and therefore if we wish to hear what he is saying, we have to be immersed in the Scriptures. Yeah, yeah. I love that. Pete, that’s a great kind of framework. And it gives us a freedom that I know for me, you know, that experience in Orlando, and then in the ABCs, going through that, and just the the freedom that you’re not going to get it right every time. Well, but if you’re trying to honor God, in the midst of it, you know, I mean, that’s, that’s part of the journey. And that’s the beauty of, of our relationship with with Christ. Right. So. But Pete, let me ask you this, do you see a difference? Between hearing God speak and speaking for God? When I graduated from what you guys would call seminary with a degree in theology, and another one in sociology, what I discovered was I suddenly knew a lot about the Bible, but I’d lost my ability to really hear God personally in it. Because I was just always analyzing what does this mean? What’s the Greek here, and how does it all fit together?God wants to walk with us in daily conversation as he did with Adam and Eve, and with the same intimacy he had with Moses. Occasionally he will communicate through dreams, visions and audible voices as he did with Peter. But mostly he will speak in a quiet, gentle voice as he did with Elijah, sounding ordinary as he did with Samuel (Gen 3:8, Ex 33:11, Acts 10:9-19, 1 Kings 19:12, 1 Sam 3). And do you know what? The real aim of this book isn’t just to teach people how to hear God in religious contexts, like prayer and Bible study, important as those things are. What happens when we start to hear God in all of creation? Like when we switch on the normal radio? When we go for a walk? When we talk to a non-Christian who doesn’t believe God exists, and yet we start to hear God in what they’re saying? That’s when one day the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. That’s what it says in Habakkuk (2:14). In John 10.27 Jesus says “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them,and they follow me.” The word listen here is akoúo, from which we get acoustics. To be a disciple –a follower of Jesus– is to be attuned to the acoustics, the nuance, the tone of God. As ministry leaders, if we are going to raise disciples, then we are responsible for helping them become people who really know how to hear God.