Happening right now…
If you happen to read this within 24 hours of when it’s posted, Tucson area pastors will be gathered in united prayer for our city and one another on Mt. Lemmon at our annual (since 2009!) three-day pastor prayer summit. Can we pray on our own? Certainly. Yet praying somebody else’s prayers, which is how corporate prayer functions, adds immensely greater depth to our prayer lives.
Plumbing the depths
It simply isn’t possible to exhaust the depths of the voice of God. When I reflect on seasons when my ability and desire to hear God catapulted forward, I smile at the diverse parts of God’s Body who functioned as my mentors, including: a Lutheran pastor when I was in college, Navigators, a group of pastors who met together weekly in the mid 1990’s, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Charismatic and Pentecostal mentors from multiple denominational and ethnic streams, and the daily pursuit of Jesus’ John 17 prayer.
Oh, the power of the Word of God!
God spoke the cosmos into existence (Genesis 1).
The voice of the Lord is like thunder and lightning (Psalm 29).
The voice of God shapes hearts and history (most of the Bible).
Jesus is the Word of God in the flesh (John 1).
Foolproof unity
If every part of the Body of Christ were growing in both desire and ability to hear and obey words spoken by the Head of the Body, Jesus, unity would be inescapable. Disunity and division would literally be impossible, if only we were all together following the same Conductor. Right?
So every effort made to sharpen our ears to the sound of His voice is time and energy well spent. In my leadership training course right now, we’ve been talking about the work of Steven Covey: the four quadrants created if one axis is important/not important, and the other is urgent/not urgent. The critical quadrant is important but not urgent. It’s the easiest to overlook, but the most fruitful use of our time.
Wouldn’t you agree that growing more aligned to the voice of God
would be the poster child of quadrant two
(important, yet not typically seen as urgent)?
Hearing His Voice
Two daily devotionals help me each morning both hear from God and expand my understanding of how we hear from God. One, Hearing His Voice by Chris Tiegreen, has been blowing both my wife’s and my minds several times a week for months. It was given to me by the leader of Unite DFW (Dallas Forth Worth), Rebecca Walls, who I know through both the City Leadership Collective and a national group of John 17 fanatics informally known as the ecosystem. I’ll end with some of what I read there last week (April 24.)
“God has rigged our relationship with him to be dependent on other people. Faith is a very individual matter, of course, but it isn’t only that. For us to be spiritually independent and know God fully on our own, we would have to have every spiritual gift and connect with every aspect of His nature. We couldn’t just know Him through our own journey; we’d have to experience every journey ourselves. God is too big for that, and too wise. God’s nature is to love, and love doesn’t isolate. It connects.”
Yet again as you finish this article, take a moment to pray for the connections being made this very moment by the God who is Love.
Blessings,
Dave Drum, Founder of J17 Ministries