G.W. Bill Elliott, Jr once noted;
Have you ever had to swallow your pride, and quickly realized; "Man... I bit off more than I can chew?" Talk about needing a weight-loss program, right!
Week:
2
Hearing and Presence
Learning to hear God and cultivate His presence. This session trains attention toward God’s voice through Scripture, prayer, and quiet practices that sharpen spiritual perception. It balances expectation with patience, offering practices to recognize promptings and to dwell in God’s nearness amid daily life. The aim is to move from information about God to an ongoing, felt relationship with Him.
Objectives
Build short daily presence practices.
Discern God’s voice from other noise.
Practice stillness and listening.
Reflections
What one short practice will help me notice God today?
How has God spoken to me in the past?
What distracts me most from hearing God?
NowTo the HowTo
Accountability/Tracking
Use a shared checklist to note when you practiced a presence break; share one confirmed impression at week’s end.
Community Action
Host a 20 minute guided listening exercise in pairs where one person speaks and the other listens without response.
Creative Project
Make a “Presence Plan” poster listing three daily pause times and a Scripture to anchor each pause.
Leader Prompt
Model a 3 minute silence and invite reflections on how God’s voice felt different from other thoughts.
Personal Practice
Schedule three two minute “presence breaks” daily—silence, breathe, listen—then jot one impression.
Devotionals
Expose Your Feelings
Our devotional today gets right into the middle of our feelings. Not in a hurtful or exciting way, but to help us expose how they directly impact our lives with the Lord. See, feelings are such a grey-area gateway between our spiritual lives and physical lives, and therein tend to provide confusing signals and perceptions to the world around us (our horizontal experiences) and the leading of the Lord Himself (our vertical experiences). One of the clearest descriptions for 'feelings', is; "...
Close as it Gets
Acts 17:27-18, Hebrews 11:1 God claims He is close (closer than a brother), and His spirit lives within us. But all too often there are predicaments wherein it feels and seems as though He saw something horrible coming, and took off! Our devotional today is a wonderful reminder just how close He was, is, and will always be. Now, the keyword in my opening sentence is 'feels', right? We enjoy a spiritual fellowship with our Lord because our connection to Him is invisible, it is intangible, it...