The Prayer Course– Free video curriculum from 24-7 Prayer provides an eight-week journey through the Lord’s Prayer. Each session includes a video, a guide for small group discussion and practical ideas for prayer. The Prayer Course is based on Pete Greig’s book How to Pray Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Appreciate that. And we’ll have links to all those in the description below here on YouTube. Or you can find all of the information including our weekly toolkits, you can dig more deeply into our conversation, PastorServe.org/network. Pete, I certainly appreciate you. Appreciate all that you’re doing. Thank you for taking the time to be with us today. God bless you, my friend. Pete Greig: Yeah, it’s a masterclass because most, not all, but most of the ways that God tends to speak are modeled in this story. Like Jesus turns up in disguise. That’s probably familiar for many of us. One writer says God comes to us disguised as our own lives. You know, he speaks through the Bible. Actually he’s risen from the dead and he doesn’t just go, “Duh, it’s me.” It says beginning with Moses and the prophets, he explained how the whole of the story of the Scriptures pointed to himself. 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. Many people struggle to hear God because they have been taught to listen for his voice in ways that are difficult for them to process. Certain personality types may also find it more challenging. Introverts understandably advocate their own preference for stillness and solitude, but it is equally possible and no less spiritual to discern the voice of God through external interaction, or through visual formats.

Shareable Social Graphics– Feel free to post them on your church social accounts, your personal accounts, or use them as graphics in your communications Bio: Pete Greig cofounded and champions the 24-7 Prayer movement, which has reached more than half the nations on earth. He is a pastor at Emmaus Rd. in Guildford, England, and has written a number of bestselling books, including God on Mute, Red Moon Rising, Dirty Glory, and How to Pray. 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? 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). Ministry Leaders Growth Guide– key insights and concepts from this week’s conversation as well as engaging questions for you and your team to consider and process

Pete Greig: We live our best lives, and not our easiest lives, but our most joyous, living lives. I’m more and more convinced that the most dangerous thing you can do in life is say no to the God who knows you best, loves you most, and only wants the best for your life. And the safest place you can be in life, even though it may sometimes feel scary, is to say to the God who knows you best, wants the best for you, and loves you the most, “Yes. Whatever you want me to say, wherever you want me to go, whatever you want me to do, I will say it. I will do it. I will go there.” Additional resource links from this week’s conversation– so you and your team can easily find what is mentioned or referenced 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.

Right? Well, yes, multiple levels. First of all, sometimes God will speak to you. And it’s not one else’s business. It’s just in you and God. So just because he speaks to you doesn’t mean that he’s trying to speak through you. By the way, important point for all. Because all too often, anytime you say anything to us, we’re immediately writing down to share in our next sermon. And and sometimes there’s very little space for God just to confide in us anymore, because we hold the microphone too often. So as an aside, but if you don’t have any holy secrets, in your relationship with God, it’s a bit like a marriage where everything that happens in the bedroom is shared publicly, just not healthy or appropriate. So. So that’s thinking number one. Distinction number two is, you know, if we look at the means of communication, for example, one of my great discoveries in this book was how I knew that dreams were obviously a big thing in the Bible. Just how big in the New Testament as well as the Old Testament, in the birth of Christ, dream after dream after group, direct, Apostle Paul, you know, the whole his whole evangelistic apostolic strategy rooted by dream. So I was very challenged, that perhaps since Freud, and Jung and the rise of psychoanalysis, that explains all dreams is just the fruit of the subconscious. I wonder if we in the West have, have completely sort of walked away from that. Stories from the developing world and Muslims, we like that, but we don’t really expect it in our own congregations or our own lives. A dream isn’t, you know, we’re maybe for me, and not someone else? Or maybe someone not. And I think that’s another mistake. We sometimes make the moment say, I had a dream. I probably need to say, Lord, is this for me? Or is this someone else? And if it’s for someone else? Is it so that I can pray for them about that? Or is it for me to share with them? And then if it’s to share with them, is it the right time to share with them? Because we often get timing wrong? Is it something I need to sit on for a while and marinade? Or do I need to use it in a different way? Do I need to go and talk to a third party saying I think God might be saying this to me about that person. So the whole way we steward what God says to us, if it’s for other people, requires as much pastoral eq as most of the other activities that we engage in.Hearing his voice is not so much a skill we must master, as a master we must meet. Jesus is what God sounds like Pete Greig: Well, that’s a great question, because it is. That’s right. It’s the most astonishing superpower any of us have, the ability to hear God. Just stop and think about the fact that, if you believe that he made the universe with a few words, what might happen if you hear him say something to you? So this is the key to guidance. This is the key to growing spiritually. Jesus says, “Man should not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Father.” In 1 Corinthians 12 the apostle Paul lists various expressions of prophecy including words of knowledge (in which God shows us things about other people that we had no other way of knowing), words of wisdom (in which God gives us great insight), etc. Elsewhere in Scripture we see God speaking very regularly through dreams and visions. Pete Greig: I remember someone saying to me once, “God is humble.” And it freaked me out and I thought that can’t be right. And they went, “He is.” He’s not the guy at the party on the dance floor under the glitter ball with the white suit. He’s the guy kind of quietly unloading the dishwasher in the corner. It’s like blink and you’ll miss him.

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. I remember meeting Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners, at the Houses of Parliament. He pulled out a Bible from which he had carefully cut every single reference to social justice, poverty and the poor. There was hardly anything left! The late, great Ron Sider reminded us that ‘God's Word teaches a very hard, disturbing truth. Those who neglect the poor and the oppressed are really not God's people at all—no matter how frequently they practise their religious rituals.’ Pete Greig: The apostle Paul says that “the one who prophesies speaks to people for their strengthening, encouraging and comfort” ( 1 Cor. 14:3). The prophetic gift enables us to strengthen, encourage, and comfort other people with God’s Word which is “living and active“ ( Hebrews 4:12). In his latest book, he offers insight and tools to help turn your ordinary, everyday prayers into a real, conversational relationship with the God who is speaking, more than you know. Christin Thieme: So you’ve divided the book into two parts, God’s Word and God’s Whisper. Why did you separate it in that way?

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So we have a God who communicates. So that would be a very short book. If the book was the fact that God speaks, it’s just, he does. The issue is psychology. The issue is each of us is wired differently. So how do we receive what God is saying? And sometimes our problem is either that we are expecting to hear God the way someone else does and we’re just wired differently. Or we are expecting to hear God the way he spoke to us in the past, but he’s speaking to us in a new way in our new context. Full-text transcript of this week’s episode– review something you heard, pass along snippets, post tweets, create presentations to share, or use in whatever way you find most helpful in developing your ministry leaders

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? The Bible says that hearing the voice of our Creator is both central and natural to our existence as humans.

About this book

And so I’ve had to learn how to recognize the voice of God. And the good news is you do get better at it. It’s a bit like when someone first calls your cell phone. Your phone doesn’t recognize the number. Right? And then you get to know them a bit and you program it in. And after a bit, you don’t even need to read their name on the screen. You just recognize their voice. Find the 24-7 Prayer Lectio 365 app, a free daily devotional resource that helps you pray the Bible every day. And as a preacher, I’ll say it’s much more to do with how we listen than how God speaks. When we’re hungry, when we’re desperate, when we’re attuned to God’s voice, we receive with faith. I think that’s what it means to have ears to hear. Jesus is saying, “Hey, don’t just listen with your physical ears, but listen with your spiritual ears.” Pete Greig is founder of the 24-7 Prayer movement. In 2019, he published How to Pray, on the whys and hows of our words to God ( Feature, 12 April 2019). His new book examines the other side of the conversation: how we hear God speaking to us. When it comes to hearing God, the Bible is the language of his heart. Nothing he says in any other way, or in any other context will ever override, undermine or contradict what he has said in the scriptures. 2. Prayer