Week 1- Hearing God's Voice

So the first section of teaching that we had is all about hearing God's voice. The sessions are run by a guy called Mark Virkler who is part of the "Communication with God Ministries" (www.cwgministries.org). He shared his own testimony with us about the frustrations that he had once becoming a Christian, that he read in the bible that people heard God's voice, but that he never heard it himself. He tried everything and finally had the following simple steps:

1. Stillness - Quieten yourself down, give yourself some space where you can be free from distractions
   
2. Vision - fix your eyes on Jesus, focus on him
   
3. Spontaneity- The way God normally talks to us is through our spontaneous thought. The things that come into our head without us planning them are often from God.
   
4. Journaling- write down everything God has been saying.
   

Mark has been stressing the value of journaling, of just writing whatever God puts into your head. This is incredibly useful for a number of reason. We are not perfect and we get things wrong. If you are questioning everything as God says it you interrupt what he is saying. By journaling you give yourself the ability to just flow, to let God say what he wants and then allow you to look back on it. Once you have written it you can read over it and test it- Does it fit in with what the bible says, does it fit with the character of God? It also means that you can submit the journal to three other people, not to see what they think about it, but what they feel that God is saying about it, if they think it is from God.
He also taught us a lot about Right brained and left brained people. Ideally God wants us to be able to use both sides of our brains. The western world leans heavily on the left brained way of learning, on rationalization and reason and as a left brainer himself he had to learn to tap into his right brain functions to better meet with God (not to replace his naturally left brain, but to supplement it with right brained functions as well). Right brained activities are things like music, art, imagination. So we would start our journal practice times picturing us with Jesus, walking along a beach or in a field or something and then stop trying and see what happened.
It all sounds so simple when he says it and made me wonder why I hadn't worked all of this out long ago. It takes practice though. The course he gave us is designed to be a 12 week course and we studied it in 4 days. I'm sorry that I can only just you such a glimpse of what we were taught, but if you want to know more then you can either go to the website I gave earlier, or grab me when I come back and have a chat, and or have a look through my course books.