Video from Dallas Willard Ministries
What Hearing God Is Not: Hearing God - Dallas Willard (2 of 2)
"How can and should we seek God? What are our motives in doing so? In this session, Dallas makes important distinctions about what hearing God is not about and explains how God relates to us. If you've ever thought it difficult to pray, or to encourage others to pray, you'll greatly appreciate and be encouraged by this teaching. Download notes here --- https://dwillard.s3.us-west-1.amazona... This is Session 8 of the @Renovaré Institute's March 2011 cohort at Camp St. Malo, Colorado #hearingGod" from video introduction.
"A good way to initiate conversation with people is to ask if they are friends with Jesus. All human troubles come from thinking of God wrongly. To get this right is to get right thinking about us. If we are in the image of God, in order to understand ourselves we have to come to an understanding of God. We tend to think of ourselves wrongly because we’re thinking of God wrongly and then we can’t get right what our relationship with God is supposed to be. THE BIBLE: One of the ways to seek God’s face is to turn to the Bible… We have to read the Bible on the assumption that we don’t already know what it says. CONTROL: The desire to control is one of the primary ways that we fail to hear God. When we come into the conversation with God, we want to abandon our hopes to be in control. MOTIVE: Why do we want to hear from God? Do we want to hear from God when we don’t have a need? Am I trying to use God’s guidance to keep me safe? Many people want to know what the will of God is, so they won’t have to be responsible for their actions. RESPONSIBILITY is the heart of our relationship to God. If we aren’t careful and we lose that idea, we will misconceive the nature of our heavenly Father and will come to think of him as working with robots. That’s a great danger! If we get God’s nature right, we step into the conversation in a way that is creative. Matthew 25:14-30, The Parable of the Talents – is a teaching about our responsibility. • The ten-talent man took initiative! He didn’t wait to be told what to do with it. • The one-talent man’s problem was he had the wrong view of God. We can be on the wrong side of life because we are on the wrong side of God’s nature. That is why so many people only end up in relationship to God trying to get guidance. • That’s not the focus of a conversational relationship. • If you had a child that only wanted to talk to you when they wanted to know what you wanted them to do, you would realize there was something wrong in that relationship. • If we get God wrong in his attitude towards us and eliminate initiative then our lives will shrivel, and not grow and not expand..." from notes link above.
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