Last week, I found myself in prayer pleading with the Lord to convict me with a sense of passionate revival, which comes by seeking His voice and following Him in our continued discipleship. It was in that beautiful moment of prayer that I felt the urging to reread two books that have blessed my personal discipleship in Christ. Yesterday, I promised at The Blue Point Bible Church that I would publish thoughts from those two books each morning this week (by 10am). Visit the following link each morning to read my devotional thoughts going through, Pastor Mark Batterson’s book, Whisper, and Christian missiologist Alan Hirsch’s book, Untamed.
In Whisper, Mark Batterson writes:
“Learning how to hear the voice of God is the solution to a thousand problems! It is also the key to discovering our destiny and fulfilling it”.
“If you life is off-key, maybe it is because you have been deafened by negative self-talk that doesn’t let God get a Word in edgewise!…If you don’t silence those competing voices, they’ll eventually deafen you. You won’t be able to sing God’s song because you won’t be able to hear His voice.
“If you aren’t willing to listen to everything God has to say, you eventually won’t hear anything He has to say”.
Pray with me and victorious saints from history, “Speak, Lord, for you servant is listening (1 Samuel 3:9)”.
“…when God wants to be heard, when what He has to say is too important to miss, He often speaks in a whisper just above the absolute threshold of hearing”.
“When someone speaks in a whisper, you have to get very close to hear. In fact, you have to put your ear near to the person’s mouth. We lean toward a whisper, and that’s what God wants. The goal of hearing the Heavenly Father’s voice isn’t just hearing His voice; it’s intimacy with Him. That’s why He speaks in a whisper (cf. 1 Kings 19:11-12). He wants to be as close to us as is divinely possible!”.
As I often make mention of at BPBC, in order to truly live out our eternal life we must have Spiritual disciplines in effect. We must examine ourselves and the things we think about and do. We must seek, search, and study out the things of the Lord. We must rest in thinking upon things that glorify God. The more we do this the more intimate our relationship with God becomes. I just posted last night a quote from famous boxer, Manny Pacquiao, “Life is too short in this world. So make sure you have a personal relationship with God”.
Coupled with listening for the Lord’s voice by being intimate with Him, we must also seek to follow after Him with our lives. In Untamed, Alan Hirsch seeks to ‘reactivate a missional form of discipleship’ in Believer’s lives. In the book’s foreword, Pastor Rick Warren notes that, “We’ve become tamed by tradition, captivated by culture, and controlled by our desire to fit in, not make waves, and never offend anyone. We’ve become domesticated instead of being discipled”.
In Untamed, Alan Hirsch writes;
“To be a truly radical disciple does require relentless evaluation of one’s priorities and concerns, together with an ongoing, rigorous critique of our culture, to ensure we are not adopting values that subvert the very life and message we are called to live out”.
So for the next couple weeks, we will discern the whisper of God and examine areas such as our idea of God (“…nothing is more important than a right perception and experience of God”), cultural issues, self and Spirituality, and the church’s mission. We will come to see that, “A dynamic, vital, living reality and response to Jesus in every moment of our lives is our most fundamental truth, and we have forgotten it to our great peril”.
Be blessed,
Michael Miano, pastor
The Blue Point Bible Church
(www.bluepointbiblechurch.org)