Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] In 2011, I sat down with a friend of mine who was also a mentor and really didn't have an agenda for our time together. But he asked a question that actually changed the trajectory of my life. He simply just asked me. He said, if you weren't on staff with a campus ministry, what would you want to do with your life?
[00:00:22] And it was interesting. I didn't realize that I had even thought about this that much. But in the minutes after that, I very articulately and clearly explained what it was that I would want to do. And it kind of caught me off guard, actually. And so it was something that I began to press in with the Holy Spirit. It was like, what. What is happening here? Because I just seemed like there was something more beyond just being able to answer that question. And it started a process where I began to think about doing something different, different with my life. And I need to tell you, I did not want a different job. I loved the job that I did. I felt like I was competent at it. It was fruitful. It was fun. I had a team that I worked with that were just some of the greatest people that a person could work with. I didn't want to make a transition, but the Holy Spirit began to speak to my heart and let me know that there was a transition that that was coming.
[00:01:19] And there was one time, and I was resistant at different times because I really did love my job. And there was a time when I was speaking to a group of the students on the campus, and something that I would often do, always do is challenge them. Whatever it is that God asks you to do, say yes.
[00:01:38] Never say no to him. And it was kind of interesting. There was like this. I was speaking and preaching, but there was this conversation that was happening between the Holy Spirit and myself in the background of my mind.
[00:01:51] And what he said was, if you don't follow me, you will never be able to challenge students to follow me wholeheartedly, because you will have not done it yourself.
[00:02:01] And it was one of those things where I just knew that God was doing something in my life. So it started a process that I brought, obviously, Carmen into, friends that were close around me and lots of other people to discern what it was that God wanted me to do. And it led to a complete change in my job. And I ended up here on staff at Journey.
[00:02:24] What I wanted to describe to you was a way that what the Bible calls discernment, that we actually listen to the Holy Spirit, we reflect on what it is that he's bubbling up in our life, and we make decisions based on that to follow him. So discernment, if we were to define it, it's the practice of becoming aware and. And receptive to the voice of the Holy Spirit, even when there are lots of other voices and even counterfeit voices in our life.
[00:02:52] And now, I don't want to oversimplify what I mean when I'm talking about discernment, because oftentimes when I hear people talk about discernment, they usually just think about it in terms of big decisions that they're going to make in their life. Maybe it is a job change, or I'm going to make a move, or I'm going to marry this guy.
[00:03:11] But we need to know how to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit not just in the big decisions, but in the ordinary decisions of life.
[00:03:23] So many times when it's just a big decision, if we don't learn how to do it in the ordinary decisions, we just like, well, here's what I think I'm gonna do, and I'm just gonna do this. Unless God just completely shuts it down, closes the door, makes it impossible for me to go forward. We need to learn to think about discernment in the little ordinary things of life. Listening to the Holy Spirit.
[00:03:46] I love how Jesus talked about this process of discernment. In John chapter 10. He gives us a metaphor, this picture of him as a shepherd and us as sheep, to talk about discernment. Here's how we describe that metaphor. It says, the gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen.
[00:04:06] Voice.
[00:04:07] They listen.
[00:04:09] He calls his own sheep by name, calls them by name and leads them out.
[00:04:16] When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them and his sheep follow him because they know his voice.
[00:04:26] But they will never follow a stranger. In fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger's voice.
[00:04:37] I love this picture because it tells us that we like sheep. We listen for the voice of the shepherd, which is the voice of the Holy Spirit that lives in the life of every follower of Jesus. We listen to him. We live our life with one ear to heaven and one ear to our life. And whatever it is that we hear, whatever it is that we sense, those nudge, those promptings, we follow in obedience. And here's what I love in that metaphor. He says the shepherd calls them by name.
[00:05:10] By name. What does that mean?
[00:05:13] It means that his voice is individualized. It's not just one voice. That's the same to everyone. He knows how to speak to you individually. It's not a one size fits all.
[00:05:26] That's what I've seen in my own practice and experience of talking with others. There's a vast array of how God speaks to us, but he calls us by name because he's personal in our life.
[00:05:37] And when we hear his voice, we simply follow him one step at a time.
[00:05:43] He says this, we say yes. He says this, we say yes, we follow him.
[00:05:49] And he says that we won't follow any other voice because we don't recognize it. We learn to attune our hearing to his voice, and we learn to drown out all the other voices in our life.
[00:06:03] When I talk about discernment, there's a. I don't want you to get this kind of a picture that it's like this maze that's out there. And God just kind of drops you in the maze and is like, good luck with that. You know, you're just running around trying to make all the right turns. That's not a picture of what God he wants it to be what? Personal.
[00:06:23] He wants you to hear it. It's not like his will or what he wants for you is like he holds it behind his back and says, guess right, Guess right. Or else that's not the picture. He wants us to hear him and respond to him in obedience.
[00:06:38] But listening for that voice of the Holy Spirit in our life, it can be challenging.
[00:06:45] Cancer. Some of you are just saying. I'm not even sure I know exactly what you're talking about, all these voices.
[00:06:51] But I want you to understand why it can be challenging. I want us to look back in the Old Testament. There's this pinnacle story with Elijah on Mount Carmel. It's an amazing story, but it is a picture of the power of God's voice. Because Elijah, he takes on the prophets of baal. God shows up in power, brings fire from heaven, burns up the altar and the offering, and then they kill all the prophets of baal.
[00:07:22] And what happens? Is there a great revival in the land?
[00:07:25] Not at all. Elijah actually finds himself on the run from Jezebel. He is a wanted man, out in isolation for 40 days. He's scared, and he needs to hear the voice of God.
[00:07:38] So here's what happens. Here's how God shows up for him on Mount Horeb. First Kings, verse, chapter 19, it says, the Lord said, go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.
[00:07:56] The Lord's going to show up Elijah.
[00:08:00] Then a great and powerful Wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord.
[00:08:08] But the Lord.
[00:08:12] After the wind, there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.
[00:08:19] After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire.
[00:08:27] And after the fire came a gentle whisper.
[00:08:35] A gentle whisper.
[00:08:38] What? The King James Version has famously translated a still, small voice.
[00:08:45] And it says, when Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.
[00:08:53] Then a voice said to him, what are you doing here, Elijah?
[00:09:00] God spoke in a gentle whisper.
[00:09:06] When we look across the pages of the Bible, God's native language is a whisper.
[00:09:15] But here's what makes whispers challenging.
[00:09:19] They can be difficult to hear, and they can be easy to overlook.
[00:09:28] And if that's true, this is what I think we need to realize. Maybe, just maybe, in the gentle whispers, God is speaking to us way more, way more than we would ever realize.
[00:09:44] And we can tend to miss the things that God wants to say in our life.
[00:09:49] Not because God is not supernatural, but that he's incredibly natural in the way that he communicates to us.
[00:10:00] Because when we read the pages of Scripture, we can tend to look for those big mountaintop moments. We want the wind, we want the earthquake, we want the fire. God speak to us in power.
[00:10:11] But rather, God comes in a gentle whisper.
[00:10:18] To be honest, God can speak in a powerful voice. It's his voice that spoke, and all of creation was thrown into existence. God has an outside voice, and he can use it in this life, and he's not afraid to.
[00:10:36] But in the Bible, when God wants to be heard, when hearing matters, it's a whisper just above the threshold of hearing.
[00:10:50] Why?
[00:10:52] Why would God do that?
[00:10:54] There's something unique about a whisper, my friend.
[00:10:59] For you to hear a whisper. If I were to want to whisper to you, what it would require is that you would have to get close to me.
[00:11:09] Maybe even bring your head close to. To my head. I could even cup my hand to your ear to speak to you. It's not for everybody else. It's just for you. There is a closeness and an intimacy about a whisper.
[00:11:26] If God just wanted to transfer information to you, there's lots of ways he could choose to speak to you.
[00:11:34] I mean, just text, send an email.
[00:11:39] But God isn't just about giving you information.
[00:11:41] He wants to give you intimacy.
[00:11:45] He doesn't want you to just hear his voice.
[00:11:48] He wants you close enough to him that you actually hear his heart.
[00:11:55] But if God speaks in whispers, we need to understand that the spirit actually Then speaks the loudest to us when our lives are the quietest.
[00:12:12] God speaks the loudest when our lives are the quietest.
[00:12:17] Because one of the difficult things about hearing the voice of God is noise.
[00:12:25] And I'm just going to say it. Our lives are two stinking noisy.
[00:12:31] We've got way too much noise going on in our life.
[00:12:36] And the Apostle Paul, in Ephesians chapter two, he talks about the challenges, the things that want to scream into our life, the things that cause noise into our life.
[00:12:48] And what I want us to do is I want to look back a little bit at the picture that we talked about last week. Because in Romans chapter eight, as we're talking about how do we live the spirit filled life, it is about us learning not to set our mind on the things of the flesh, but to set our mind on the things of the spirit. But what Paul wants us to understand is that there are things that influence us through our flesh that we need to learn to discern and pay attention to. Here's what the Apostle Paul says, starting in Ephesians chapter 2.
[00:13:23] Now understand, when Paul is describing this, he's describing people before they knew Jesus. But these same influences still exist after we know Jesus. They create noise in our life. Here's what the Apostle Paul says. He says, as for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed what the ways of the world.
[00:13:50] Paul is saying the world creates noise in your life.
[00:13:58] But that's not all. There's more than that.
[00:14:01] And the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient, who is the ruler of the kingdom of the air, goes from bad to worse.
[00:14:17] That is Satan himself, the enemy of your soul and all of his minions. They want to create noise and chaos in your life. But let's go back to the world. What am I talking about when I talk about the world? I'm talking about a world system out there that is not surrendered in any way to the values of God's kingdom, but it wants to influence you. It wants to influence your thinking, it wants to influence your behavior. And this world system continually bombards us with voices.
[00:14:53] Let me get specific. What am I talking about? I'm talking about a 24 hour news cycle that we're just constantly bombarded with news and commentary, social media, incessantly, endless podcasts, nonstop entertainment, the onslaught of marketing that we experience in this world, and the voices of people around you.
[00:15:19] People's voices can get noisy in our life as well. There can be condemning voices in our life. Things that bring up things about our past can be noise in our life. Your own negative self talk can be noise in your life.
[00:15:36] And if we don't recognize and understand and we're aware of this, we have all this unfiltered noise in our life. And it makes it extremely difficult to understand and hear the still, small voice.
[00:15:53] Because the spirit is the loudest when our life is the quietest.
[00:15:58] And the world bombard you. And how does it do it?
[00:16:04] Right here, right here. It's got easy access to your life.
[00:16:10] I was doing some little bit of research. It was fascinating to me to look at the average amount of time that people spend on their phones each day.
[00:16:21] The average.
[00:16:23] The average is over five hours.
[00:16:26] And you think, well, maybe that's not that bad.
[00:16:29] But if you are younger, that number goes increasingly higher.
[00:16:35] In fact, when I was doing some of this research, I realized that I can turn on an app on my phone to track the number of hours that I'm on my phone every day. And I just got a notification this morning telling me how many hours a day I was on my phone. Do you know how many hours I was on my phone this week?
[00:16:51] None of your business.
[00:16:56] I'm working on it.
[00:16:59] But all that to say we are bombarded with an onslaught of noise in our life, and we allow it day in and day out, five hours a day, seven days a week, 35 hours, that's a job.
[00:17:16] 35 hours a week, that's a job.
[00:17:19] Now, if that were the only thing that was trying to influence us, maybe we could overcome that. But you've got an actual enemy of your soul who wants to steal, kill, and destroy your life. And he wants to influence you through our flesh.
[00:17:36] He is the greatest deceiver, the greatest con artist this world has ever seen. It started way back in the garden, deceiving Adam and Eve, getting them to want to live a life separate from God.
[00:17:50] He started in the beginning, and he's still good at what he does. He is a deceiver.
[00:17:57] And here's what is terrifying in some ways is that he knows you.
[00:18:02] Not just people in general, he knows people in general, but he knows you.
[00:18:08] He can observe your life.
[00:18:10] He understands your personality, your tendencies, your vices, your weak spots. And he goes after every little crack in your armor. He goes after you, and he wants to deceive you, and he wants to do it through your flesh.
[00:18:26] Those desires, sometimes those strong desires that aren't actually our deepest desires but he's able to influence us to say, no, no, no, what you're doing, that's not life. This will bring you life. Feed your flesh.
[00:18:41] And he deceives us. And we say he yes.
[00:18:45] And we grab ahold.
[00:18:47] Temptation, sin separates us from intimacy with God.
[00:18:54] But that isn't where he stops. He's not just the deceiver. The Bible also calls him the accuser.
[00:19:01] The accuser of the brothers and sisters in Christ.
[00:19:04] This is what he wants to do. When he can get you to fall away, when he can get you to turn away from God, then he goes from deceiver to accuser.
[00:19:14] Look at what you did.
[00:19:17] Look at what you did. There's no way you call yourself a follower of Jesus. Look at what you did. You should be ashamed of yourself.
[00:19:26] Causes us to move into a place of shame in our life.
[00:19:30] Deceiver, accuser, Deceiver, accuser. It's his one, two punch that he does over and over again. And you would think, oh over all these millennia that he would do something different. He doesn't be, you know why he doesn't do anything different?
[00:19:45] Because it works.
[00:19:47] It works on us. You know that it works on you. I know that it works on me. And this is what the scripture wants us to understand, talks about if we want to get rid of noise in our life, we've got to pay attention to the world, the flesh and the devil, Satan himself. We've got to think about how are we allowing these things to influence our life, the world, the flesh and the devil.
[00:20:12] This is bad news because our mind naturally, if we do just what comes naturally to us, we want to set our mind on the things of our flesh.
[00:20:22] But the good news of Romans chapter eight is that we've got another option now.
[00:20:28] We've got something else that we can do, something else that we can respond to. And it's a he we can respond to the Holy Spirit. This is what the scripture says in Romans 8, 9. This is the promise. It says you meaning believers right there. You however are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the spirit. He's saying don't live over here, you've got to live over here. Don't live in the realm of just your self centered desires. You've got to think about something that else in your life.
[00:21:03] And discernment, friends, when we talk about discernment it is the practice of differentiating and putting a listening ear away, away from the desires of our flesh and saying yes to the voice of the spirit in our life. Saying no to those shallow hungers of our life. And say yes to the deepest longings that are in our soul. Longings for God himself.
[00:21:29] And God wants to whisper to us in that way, but for us to hear the whispers of God.
[00:21:36] The whispers get loudest when our life becomes the quietest.
[00:21:44] But there's ways that God influences us through the power of the Holy Spirit in our life. We are not alone in that.
[00:21:52] God wants us to engage with a couple things where we can hear the whispers of God. One is the Word and one is the body of Christ.
[00:22:12] This is what the scriptures say, discernment as it relates to the word. 2 Timothy 3, 16.
[00:22:19] This is what Paul says. He says that all scripture, everything, everything in our scripture is God breathed.
[00:22:28] It is God's breath. It is his whisper to our hearts and our minds that we can know the voice of the Holy Spirit through the Word. All scripture is God breathed. And it's helpful. It's useful. For what? For teaching. It tells us what is right.
[00:22:47] The things in our life that we need to be right about. It tells us and it rebukes. It tells us the things in our life that are wrong. It corrects. It tells us how to get right in our life when we get off track. And it trains us in righteousness, meaning it shows us how to stay right with God and with people so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
[00:23:14] Because the Spirit speaking God's Word to us, it equips us for everything that God would want for our lives and from our lives.
[00:23:25] But what we need to understand is it's the Holy Spirit himself that actually inspired the Scriptures.
[00:23:32] He moved along the authors to write the very words that we have in Scripture.
[00:23:39] And that same Holy Spirit, as you read the Scripture and he's in you, have you ever had those moments where you're reading the scripture and it kind of just jumps out at you? Something just grabs your attention?
[00:23:50] That is the work and the voice of the Holy Spirit in your life. It's what the scriptures say. He illumines the Scripture to our mind.
[00:23:59] And he is the spirit of truth. He is the real teacher.
[00:24:05] That's why when I stand up here, before I ever stand up here, I ask the Holy Spirit to be the one that speaks into your hearts and life. He's the real teacher.
[00:24:14] He's the one that has access to your heart and to your life.
[00:24:19] But it's not just the Word that we need to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit. We need each other.
[00:24:27] We need each other. We need the body of Christ to help us filter the noise. Here's how Paul talked about the body in Ephesians, chapter four. He starts out by talking about the noise again that we can experience. In verse 14. He says, Then we will no longer be infants tossed back and forth by the waves and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. He's like, that's the noise.
[00:24:59] But he said, instead, here's what we do. Here's what we do for each other instead. Speaking the truth in love, that's what we're called to do. That's how we hear the voice of God's Spirit in our life, is by speaking the truth, the truth of God's word into each other's life in love. And here's what happens. Paul says, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is Christ.
[00:25:32] From him, the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love as each part does its work.
[00:25:49] What does Paul say?
[00:25:51] He's saying that if you want to quiet your life, if you want to raise the whispers of the Holy Spirit in your life, you need help.
[00:26:03] You need help from other brothers and sisters in Christ.
[00:26:08] You need help from the body. What kind of people?
[00:26:12] Not just any kind of people. You want people that are full of the Holy Spirit, that are seeking to hear and respond to his voice in their own life. You need people that are full of God's word so that they have a filter to help you understand how to press into your own issues, your own things, that the Spirit is trying to speak into your life. You need people.
[00:26:38] Isolation, friends. When we live in isolation, it deafens the whispers of God in our life. We've got to have people.
[00:26:47] And I want to tie this back because Paul's talking about how we get to maturity as a result of walking this out. Truth in love. The very first week when we were talking about that gap, there's a gap between what the scripture describes as a fully mature body, fully mature follower of Jesus and your life. There's a gap.
[00:27:09] We acknowledge that. But what is true is that it's oftentimes easier for other people to see the gaps in our lives than it is for us to even see our own gaps. That's why we need each other.
[00:27:23] I started to think about, well, I should just give some illustrations of this from my own life. This last week, there were so Many. I started to think about all these different environments from a council meeting where someone just stopped at one point and just said, I need to stop you right there, Bob. That's not true. What you're saying right now is not true. And I needed to hear that.
[00:27:44] It ministered to my soul. There were times that I was in other environments where people gave me words of encouragement that I needed to hear the whispers of God in my life. We need other people around us that are full of the Spirit and full of the Word to speak to truth in love to us. We need it. We need those kinds of friendships. And that's why we're gonna. We're just gonna keep saying it over and over again. You've got to get connected with people. And it's not just going to a group. It's a kind of group where there's actually the kind of spiritual friendship that I'm talking about here, where you're actually pressing in to each other's lives. You're actually talking about what God's spirit is nudging you and prompting you toward so that you can get input and prayer around all of those things in your life. That's what we need. We need that kind of spiritual friendship. That's what it means to be part of the body of Christ.
[00:28:39] Every ligament held together. That's how we grow.
[00:28:44] Any other way that we try to grow, it's not going to accomplish it. We need people in our life.
[00:28:51] So you've got two options.
[00:28:54] You've got one, you can be formed in your life by the world, the flesh and the devil, or you can be formed by the Word, the Spirit and the body of Christ.
[00:29:06] You get that choice.
[00:29:08] What is the voice that you're listening to? What are the voices that you're listening to? And if we're going to grow, we've got to learn. How do we squash the voice of the world, the voice of the enemy, and the voice of our flesh? And how do we magnify the voice of followers of Jesus, the voice of the Word and the voice of the Holy Spirit in our life? That's what it means.
[00:29:33] That's what discernment means. We need to grow in that.
[00:29:37] So how do you know how you're doing?
[00:29:40] How do you know if you're doing a good job at listening to the flesh or listening to the spirit in your life?
[00:29:48] Paul makes it so clear for us.
[00:29:51] He says it's about fruit.
[00:29:55] What is the. What is the outflow of your life? If people look at you and look at your Branches.
[00:30:01] What are the things that they see? What is the fruit in your life?
[00:30:05] In Galatians, chapter five, starting in verse 19, Paul just says it so clearly.
[00:30:11] He says the acts of the flesh are obvious.
[00:30:14] Sexual immorality, impurity, debauchery, idolatry and witchcraft.
[00:30:24] Now I want to pause because I want to pay special attention. Not that those are issues that I just read, but I want to pay special attention to the next things that Paul says.
[00:30:36] He talks about hatred, that you hate people, angry at people.
[00:30:43] There's discord, broken relationship with people. There's jealousy. I want what they have. There's fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, envy, broken relationships.
[00:31:02] I want us to just think a little bit about the fruit that we see in our world right now.
[00:31:09] We see a world that desperately, desperately needs the power of God's spirit to reign in their life. We see hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissension, factions. There is a lack of love in this world, and we know it. We see it out there in our culture. And so maybe you can just say, but those aren't all followers of Jesus. We can't expect them to have these things. And, and you're right, absolutely, we can't hold people to that.
[00:31:42] But here's where we can't be naive. Those same things, hatred, discord, anger, dissensions, factions, they exist in the church as well.
[00:31:53] And that grieves God's spirit beyond what he can even bear.
[00:32:00] It breaks his heart. And I've been thinking about it this way as we think about our church or even the church as a whole. The brokenness in people and relationships, maybe that's mine to bear as the shepherd of our church.
[00:32:14] But here's what I want you to think about. Do you see those things in your own life?
[00:32:20] What is the fruit of your life?
[00:32:23] We can't control everything that happens in the culture. We can do a lot about what happens in the church. But you, my friend, you get to decide what it is that you're gonna listen to, what you're gonna respond to. You get to decide what is gonna produce fruit in your life.
[00:32:42] Is it gonna be the fruit of the flesh or what Paul calls the fruit of God's spirit. He makes it so clear as he continues. These are the things that will be true in your life if God's spirit is filling your life.
[00:32:57] But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, sometimes translated patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control.
[00:33:14] Against such things, there is no law.
[00:33:20] What do you see?
[00:33:22] What do you see in our culture?
[00:33:26] What do you see in our church?
[00:33:31] What do you see in your own life?
[00:33:35] Because here's the deal, friends.
[00:33:39] God's intent is that his people would be salt and light in the culture and change the culture around us.
[00:33:48] But, friends, if we look exactly like the culture, with hatred, discord, anger, jealousy, dissensions, factions, we've got nothing to say to a culture that's broken.
[00:34:03] We've got to believe that God's spirit would start with us, start with me, that he would allow his spirit to so transform our life, to so fill our life, that we would be so in tune with him and responsive to him, that these would be the things that are coming out of our love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, self control. Against such things, there is no law.
[00:34:32] If God's spirit, the fruit in our life, we've got nothing, friends, nothing to say to our culture.
[00:34:42] That's why we've got to take care.
[00:34:45] What does it mean to quiet these things in our life? How do we slow down the input that the world has in our life? And here's what's amazing to me, friends. Like the world isn't even trying to hide the fact that they just want to feed you what your flesh wants. It's called an algorithm.
[00:35:03] You've heard this.
[00:35:05] It takes. What do you want? What does your flesh want? And it says, I'm gonna give that to you. Whatever you like, whatever you want. I'm gonna give you more of that and more of that until we get to a place where we imagine that there's no possibility that anybody could think differently than we think. We've created an echo chamber of for ourself. And the world is just echoing the things that we think that we believe. And the world influences us, and that's why we've got to take care. What is the fruit of our life?
[00:35:40] What are the things that are coming out of our life?
[00:35:45] I want to give you an assignment. I like to give you assignments.
[00:35:53] Here's the deal, what I'm talking about here, listening to the spirit, saying no to the flesh and yes to the spirit. It takes practice.
[00:36:01] It actually takes practice. I mean, just think about. What do we think of when we think of the word practice? It means that we're trying to learn to do something. Think about anything that you've ever learned to do. Maybe play an instrument, maybe play a sport. It takes practice. It takes muscle memory. We need to try and fail along the way when we say that we're practicing Something, it's kind of an unwritten rule that mistakes are gonna be made. We're not gonna get it perfectly every time. Perfection is not demanded, but engaging is. We've got to figure out, how do we learn to hear and respond to the voice of God in our life? And here's what I want you to practice.
[00:36:45] This is an ancient practice sometimes referred to as the prayer of examine or the prayer of examination.
[00:36:53] This is what it entails.
[00:36:56] It entails likely at the end of your day, looking back on what you did that day, the way you experienced that day. It starts first with an invitation to the Holy Spirit to speak and bring things to your mind. But as you start to reflect on your day, one of the questions that you ask is, where did I feel the most close to God?
[00:37:21] Where did I sense his presence in my life?
[00:37:25] And asking the question, then, what maybe was God trying to say to me in that moment? Was there something that I should have heard and learned from Him? And on the flip side, we also asked the question, was there any part of my day where I felt especially distant from God?
[00:37:41] And what is God saying about those times? Was there something going on in my heart and my life that the Spirit would want me to know about? But we look back at our life and we examine our day, and then we just make one simple change, one simple change in our life. What am I going to do tomorrow to invite more of, of the presence of God in my life and turn away or repent from the things that made me feel distant from God? Here's why this is, and I need to acknowledge this. This is a new practice for me. As I was reading some of the things that people have talked about in terms of this whole idea of discernment, I'm usually kind of a morning, quiet time guy, looking forward to the day. But this idea of examination takes us to the end of the day. And this is why it's powerful. I believe, and have experienced a little bit.
[00:38:35] You've heard the phrase Hindsight is 20 20.
[00:38:39] Sometimes it's easier for us to look back on our day and see the things that God was doing in and around our life and to make observations about how it was that he was speaking to us in those moments. And this is why this is powerful. As we learn rep after rep of observing how, how it was that God spoke to us throughout our day, things that made us close to him, things that made us far away, feel far away from Him.
[00:39:07] We learn his voice, we learn how he speaks to us. So that when we come to a place of the present.
[00:39:13] We're actually able to have understanding of how God speaks to us because he speaks to us by name.
[00:39:20] We need to learn how it is that he speaks to us.
[00:39:28] But I'm going to say it again.
[00:39:30] We've got to take the time to quiet our lives. You're not going to do a prayer of examination apart from creating some space and a place in your life where you quiet down all the other voices.
[00:39:45] Because the voice of the Holy Spirit is the loudest.
[00:39:49] Friends, when our lives are the quietest, we've got to learn to quiet our lives before him.
[00:39:58] Let's pray.
[00:40:03] Holy Spirit, I am so grateful that you are in us, that you know us and that you want to speak.
[00:40:16] We acknowledge that sometimes we just. We just want a mountaintop experience. We want shouts.
[00:40:24] But that your language is the language of whispers. Holy Spirit, attune us to your spirit. Attune us to your voice. That we would know your voice from all the other voices. That we would know the voices of this world and the voices of the enemy and the voices of people and maybe even voices in our own head are strangers that we should not follow.
[00:40:49] We want to know your voice and we want to follow you. Holy Spirit, help us to do this.
[00:40:56] And Jesus, it's in your powerful and resurrected name that we pray. And all God's people said amen.
