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Dec. 21, 2015 - Praying Medic
49:28
040 Hearing God's Voice Made Simple

In this message, my wife talk and I talk about our latest book Hearing God's Voice Made Simple.Topics covered:How everyone can hear God’s voiceMy testimony of becoming a ChristianThe not so audible voice of GodHow can we know we're hearing from GodHow He speaks through artHow He speaks through our emotionsHow He God speaks through the gift tonguesHow people prophesy without knowing itResourcesHearing God's Voice Made Simple

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Hi, I'd like to welcome you to our show.
I'm your host, Prang Medic.
We're talking about life as a child of God and all things related to His Kingdom.
Thanks for joining us.
If you're a new listener to the show, you can find articles and books and other resources on my website www.prangmedic.com.
Now let's jump into this week's show.
Hey, baby.
Hello.
You look tired.
I am.
I'm going to try to muster up some energy for this today.
It's been a while since you and I have done a podcast together.
I've been too busy and you've been doing other things.
Well, we've both been busy.
Getting these darn books published is a lot of work.
And so we just finished up the book, Hearing God's Voice Made Simple.
And it was, again, another learning curve.
Like every time we do a book, it seems like, you know, we've done this process so many times now, but we still are having to learn things and do some stuff kind of on the fly.
Yeah, as many times as we've done these books, we still haven't figured out a process that is as seamless as we would like it to be.
Exactly.
And that's the problem that we're running into is we have to take what I create as a book file, usually in Word, and then we have to turn it into an InDesign file for the print book.
Yeah, because I'm very particular about that stuff.
You just hate Microsoft Word.
I do, I have to admit.
And I've probably said that before many times.
Well, I'm not liking it as much now as I did years ago.
The more they update Microsoft Word, the less I like it.
And there's no alternative for me right now.
But the problem is I compose the books in Word on my computer.
We give it to you, you turn it into an InDesign file, and then you create the print file.
And what a lot of people don't know about publishing books is when you create the InDesign file, you have to fit the text to the page and you have to move characters around and you have to You have to edit a little more.
You have to add text to fit the page or remove text to fit the page.
Because in professional book publishing, there are rules about widows and orphans and things like that.
So you can't have like a full page of text on one page and then have a few words flow over to the next page.
That is just, you know, at the end of your chapter, for example, you would just have a few words on one page.
That is a no-no in publishing.
And I think a lot of people don't know that if they're just doing self-publishing.
They think that's probably perfectly fine, but it really makes your book look amateurish.
So we always fit and make sure that all the baselines across the pages line up.
There's just little tricks.
When I tell people that it takes you two weeks to do the interior book file for one of our books, they kind of look at me like, Why does it take so long?
Like 80 hours of work?
Yes, it takes 80 hours of work to format one print book.
And we're trying to be, I'm sure we miss things, we do miss things occasionally, but we're trying to be very fastidious about keeping things uniform.
I do a lot of checking even once the book is already edited.
I do a lot of checking.
If you ever looked at the list of things that she checks in a book manuscript, you would not believe it.
She has this long list of like 30 things.
Yeah, and some of it is formatting that I'm checking to make sure we're consistent all the way through.
And you'd be surprised how much you miss on the first go around, you know.
Then you come back and look at a page a second time, third time around, and you say, oh, I didn't even format the first paragraph the way it's supposed to be.
So there's a lot of checking and recheck.
And then we add stuff.
And like this last time around, we just reformatted.
And the formatting caused the book to have more pages because we added notes and we added exercises.
And we were almost ready to create the final print file and then realized we didn't renumber the pages in the table of contents, which would have been a huge mistake if we hadn't caught that.
There is so much involved.
There's just a lot of little details.
And if you don't check those things, then you end up kind of kicking yourself later and thinking, oh, I wish I had done it better.
And then you have to go back and redo.
Well, two weeks ago, we were pretty much working on all of our days off, getting to get this latest book, Hearing God's Voice, done.
And people don't realize we're talking 12, 13-hour days, where we are, from the time we get up to the time we go to bed, working on the book, working on the files, converting things, editing, checking things.
And this process still didn't turn out the way I wanted it to.
I mean, we got the InDesign file ready to go for the print book, and then you converted it to a text file, and then gave it to me, and I opened it in Word, and I thought it was going to be just fine the way it was, but the margins were all messed up.
That's the first time that happened.
So it seems like there's a curveball thrown to you every single time you try to do the Kindle book.
But the problem is that in a print book, you have a lot of formatting and in a Kindle book, you're not supposed to have a lot of formatting.
So going from print to Kindle is problematic in that way.
It's a huge issue.
People don't realize what an issue it is.
You know, when you upload a print book file to Amazon, they then ask you, would you like to publish your book on Kindle?
And if you say yes, you get this horrible looking Kindle file that is really not usable.
So you have to create your own.
And creating your own means stripping out all the formatting you just spent weeks putting in to do the print book.
Yeah.
And it's not an easy thing to do.
On the first book that we did, Divine Healing Made Simple, I got so frustrated because I'm a graphic designer and I don't think it should be that hard for me to learn how to do a Kindle book.
It's really like a mini website is what it is because it's supposed to fit different devices and flow just the way a website would.
And I've created websites before so I thought this can't be this hard, you know?
started looking at tutorials and I have found so much conflicting information and so many different ways to go about it and then you have to after you do it from the InDesign file then you have to go into the code and change code to clean things up because it never turns out perfectly.
And I, and I was like, I am not a programmer.
I do not want to learn how to do coding and tweaking that and everything.
After about two weeks of beating my head against the wall, I shipped it to a guy in India.
I mean, I just sent it by email to a guy in India, just gave him the PDF file and he created.
I have honestly never seen you more frustrated in your life than the two weeks you worked on that file trying to create our first Kindle book.
It was a nightmare, and you were just beside yourself the whole time.
Yeah, and I'm pretty smart, you know.
You are not a slacker.
I usually can figure stuff out, but that was just beyond me, and it seemed like a lot of work for very little reward.
I can honestly say during that process, I don't think you learned anything valuable.
It's terrible.
It's terrible.
But anyway, we've at least, you know, we found another program that we can do the Kindle file in, but it's still problematic.
We still don't have a perfect flow, like you said, and I'd like to get that figured out.
Before we create our course on how to publish books, we better figure it out.
We will have a process figured out that works really well.
Oh my gosh, it's just insane.
So anyway, we were going to talk about the book after we just... We probably should talk a little bit about the book.
Got long-winded on the process here, but well, hearing God's voice made simple.
So it's your belief that everyone can hear God's voice?
I think it's your belief, too.
I think we know the answer to that, but can you explain why?
Well, yeah, I think everybody can hear God's voice, even people who say they've never heard God speak.
I was an atheist until I was 38, and looking back over my life, I realized that God actually was speaking to me, or He was trying to speak to me, in a lot of different ways.
But I just wasn't aware that what was happening to me, the things I was sensing, were actually God speaking to me.
Right.
Now I look back and I can see, well, yeah, he was speaking about different things.
Circumstances that happened in my life.
They aren't just coincidences?
Yeah, all those coincidences, you know, that you, even the little prayers, like you and I, both before we became believers, we were praying these little prayers, God, you know, if you change this, if you let me sleep, if you do this, if you do that, it happens.
And then you think, oh, that was just a coincidence.
That wasn't actually God.
But I do know that God speaks to everyone at least through their conscience.
Whether you're born again or not doesn't matter.
God speaks to you through your conscience.
You have a sense of what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil.
And He speaks to everyone through their conscience.
As you go in your relationship with God, the ways in which He speaks to you become a little more obvious and probably more numerous.
He speaks to people through dreams.
I got a message from one on Facebook.
She used to be a Muslim.
She was having a lot of dreams.
Prophetic dreams about things to come when she was a Muslim.
Was having dreams all the time.
And she became a Christian.
And she started going to a church.
And she thought, oh, the people at this church are going to be interested in hearing about my dreams.
She starts telling them about the dreams she's having from God.
Prophetic dreams that portray future events.
And they immediately tell her those are all from Satan and she should stop having those dreams.
She should not believe they're from God.
They can't be there from the enemy.
She basically starts praying that she will not have dreams.
And she's refusing to receive her dreams.
Then she picks up my book and reads a chapter on dreams and then realizes, oh my gosh, that was God speaking through my dreams.
Because I specifically write about how Muslims have been having dreams from God for a long time.
Right, and they pay attention to their dreams.
They do believe that God speaks through dreams, and that's like the main way they get any kind of revelation from God.
Apparently, what I read is that they don't expect to hear from God in a personal way, day to day.
It's in their dreams that they hear from Him.
Yeah, I think I've heard the same thing.
So this woman verified what we had written in the book about Muslims and having dreams, and I said, you know, what you probably need to do is just ask God to start giving you dreams again.
Tell Him you want to receive His dreams, pray for dreams, receive them, write them down.
The same things that you and I do.
So, that's one of the ways in which I think everybody hears from God, is most people have dreams, and I think everyone has dreams from God, but a lot of people don't realize they're from God.
Okay, so we were going to also talk about your testimony of how you went from being an atheist to becoming a Christian.
You actually spell this all out in the book.
Yeah, I've never written out my testimony before in any of the books.
I've hinted at it and given suggestions here and there, but never actually came out and told people how I became a believer.
When I was 38 and I was working for a fire department, I had developed a really good friendship with a guy named John.
He was my paramedic partner.
So John and I had been having some personal problems.
I knew that the personal problems were really my problems, but I didn't want to admit that because I was full of pride.
I was a big-headed, arrogant paragon.
The pride thing.
And John was trying to correct me and I wouldn't let him.
So, I allowed my pride to come between us and we basically became worst enemies in a very short time, a couple of months.
We didn't trust each other.
We started to hate each other.
So, that was one of the situations that was going on.
Well, that's got to be difficult when you have to spend the whole day together.
A 24-hour shift with somebody that you hate and don't trust, probably three or four of the most miserable months of my life.
Wow.
I just hated going to work.
I can imagine.
So one day I realized that I needed to end this and I needed to bury the hatchet and allow us to become friends again.
And I basically admitted that I had been acting like a jerk and this, all this trouble was my fault.
He accepted my apology.
And a few weeks later he and I were talking and he suggested that I might want to check out this book he had been reading called Left Behind.
I wasn't really into fiction at the time.
I had read some science fiction when I was younger, but I wasn't really a fan of fiction.
So I didn't think too much about it.
And a couple of weeks later, our lieutenant talked to me and he said, Hey, you might want to check out this book I've been reading.
It's called Left Behind.
So now two people?
It's really weird that two different people a couple of weeks apart would recommend me to read the same book.
So I talked to my lieutenant and I said, well, you know, maybe I'll, I'll think about it.
Well, I had signed up for a 48-hour shift.
It was Memorial Day weekend.
And I thought, well, you know, if it's a slow weekend, I'd like to have something to read.
But it's not usually slow on Memorial Day weekend.
It's never slow on Memorial Day weekend.
That's when everybody's having picnics and they're getting hurt.
Yeah, I was working on the busiest medic unit in the county, on the busiest weekend of the year.
I didn't think it was going to be slow.
But on the chance that it was going to be slow, I decided to take him up on his offer.
That afternoon I went to his house and picked up the book, brought it home, and took it in to work with me the next day.
The next day was a very slow day.
We didn't have any calls the whole shift.
So, late in the afternoon, I got the book, and I started reading it.
As I was reading through the book, there was this one character named Rayford Steele, who was an airline pilot.
I started to really strongly identify with him.
His life was a lot like mine.
Ray's wife was a believer, and he wasn't.
Woven into this story was the idea that God loved me and that Jesus came to die for my sins.
I had been raised as a Catholic until the time I was about 12 or 13.
So I knew about Jesus and I knew about his death and I knew that he came to take away the sins of the world.
But it had never become a personal thing for me.
That afternoon as I was laying there in the bunker with the fire station, the idea that Jesus actually died for me for the first time in my life became a personal issue.
It hit you.
It hit me pretty hard.
I didn't understand why God cared about me.
Why did Jesus need to die to save me?
You had the same question when you were an atheist.
I was such an irreverent atheist.
I mean, I would say stuff like, well, who told him to do that?
I didn't ask for him to die for me.
So that night, as I was reading the book, I realized that I had made a mess of my life.
The Holy Spirit was dragging out all of my sins out of the closet, putting them out in front of me and saying, well, you think you're such a good person.
What about this?
And what about that?
And what about all these things that you've done?
If you're so good, you know, what about all these things?
And I knew that I wasn't as good a person as I thought I was.
So that night I told God, I'm tired of living my life my way.
Tired of doing things my way.
It wasn't working.
I had pretty much failed.
I had to admit that doing things my way wasn't really working and I kind of ran my ship aground.
So I told God, if you're real, Give me a voice or something I can follow and I'll follow you.
And I fell asleep that night.
I woke up the next morning and as soon as I woke up, I was aware there was this voice inside of me.
The voice was peaceful and it was comforting, it was reassuring.
And as I walked downstairs to the kitchen at the fire station, as I was going to speak to each person and I was going to tell them something, this voice reminded me, say something nice, be kind, be polite, don't be a jerk.
Um, this voice all day long, this voice was coaching me how to treat people.
And it dawned on me that the voice that I had asked for the night before, that's exactly what happened.
God came inside of me and was speaking to me and he was encouraging me and he was helping me become a better person.
So that's how I became a believer.
That's pretty cool.
And that's when I started to hear God's voice, and I heard His voice very clearly.
And so when people hear it that clearly, they often feel like it's an audible voice.
And you have something to write about that in the book too.
Right.
Because a lot of people talk about the audible voice of God, a lot of, especially prophetic people, they say that they, you know, they heard the audible voice of God speaking.
Well, I think there's a little misunderstanding about what an audible voice actually is.
In order for something to be audible, it needs to be something that anyone with normal hearing is able to hear.
Right.
That's the definition of audible.
So, if I dropped this coffee cup on the floor, anyone in the room would hear the coffee cup hit the floor and break.
Right.
It makes an audible sound because people can hear it.
But when people speak about God talking to them in an audible voice, they're not referring to some voice that everyone can hear.
They're speaking about a voice only they can hear.
It sounds to them so clear that they say, oh, he spoke to me in an audible voice.
The question I would have is, were there other people around you and did they hear the voice too?
Because if they didn't... Then it wasn't audible.
Then it wasn't audible.
But you know, I know sometimes it sounds like it is outside of your head.
I know when I've heard Someone speak my name for example in the morning when I'm just waking up I hear someone say Denise and I believe it was an angel but it sounded like it was actually in the room outside of me you know it wasn't in my head and it wasn't like my conscience.
In other words, but you didn't hear it.
Right.
You know, you were right there in the same room.
And that one morning when that angel said, um, next.
Yeah.
About four o'clock in the morning, I was awake.
I was in the living room on my computer and you get up and said, Hey, did you hear that loud voice yelling the word next?
Because it sounded like it was coming from the living room where you were.
And I was like, I didn't hear anything.
You didn't hear anything?
A couple of minutes ago, a loud voice yelled the word next so loudly, like I could swear people in two or three houses away would hear it.
But I heard nothing.
But you heard it very clearly, like it was an audible voice.
So that's one of the things that is a little bit hard to understand for some people is you can hear something that sounds like an audible voice, but what was really happening is whether it's an angel or demon or God, they're all spirits.
They speak in a spiritual language.
They're able to direct their voice to certain individuals and shield it from other individuals.
So that only the person they want to talk to gets the message.
It's a little bit like passing a note in classroom.
You can write a note and give it to exactly the person you want to receive it, but so that nobody else can see it.
Until the teacher finds it.
Until the teacher finds it.
Right.
So an angel or God, they're able to give us private messages that only we can hear.
Sounds like we may be hearing an audible voice, but really it's a spiritual voice.
And then sometimes what you hear does not sound like it's outside of yourself, but it sounds more internal, like your mind.
You have to discern whether that's coming from you, or from God, or from the demonic.
And this is something you and I talked a lot about while we were writing the book.
The difference between an internal and external voice.
And what sounds like an external voice and sounds like an internal voice.
Because we know that the Spirit of God lives inside of us.
And sometimes we experience His voice as what seems like an internal voice to us.
It sounds like our own thoughts.
There are two spirits that live inside of us.
There's our spirit and there's the Holy Spirit.
And a lot of people have trouble distinguishing what is actually the Holy Spirit speaking and thinking and what is us speaking and thinking.
One of the most common ways in which God speaks to us is through barely perceptible thought impressions in our mind.
And a lot of people are hearing the voice of God, they're hearing the Holy Spirit speak to them, but they're expecting probably to hear this loud external voice.
And that's not what they're hearing.
They're hearing a very silent, quiet, sneaky, what people call the still small voice of God.
Very often it just sounds like a thought impression that enters your mind.
The question people have is, if God speaks to us through thought impressions that sound like our own thoughts, how do we know which thoughts are His and which thoughts are ours?
I think sometimes it's really easy to tell, and other times it's hard to tell.
I remember one time when my son was, I don't know, he was probably about 14 years old, and I got divorced, and I needed to go out and work outside the home for the first time in years.
I was looking at jobs and there was this job I knew they were going to offer me this job and it was so far away and I thought this is really going to take me away out of the home for a lot longer period every day than I want to be away from home from my son and I just was begging God to give me a clue what to do because I knew they were going to call me and after I interviewed with them twice I knew they were going to offer me the job and I didn't know if I should take it or not and I was a pretty new believer then
I'm on the floor with my Bible on the floor.
I had tears dripping onto the Bible.
I'm asking God, you know, what do I do?
What do I do?
Because I, I wanted to have the right answer.
And it was an internal sounding voice that said, you're going to be okay, even if you don't take this job.
And I thought, no, I'm not.
I started arguing, you know, no, I'm not.
No, I'm not.
I, cause I knew that wasn't my thought.
That was one of the times when it was so clear to me, I do not think that way.
I think more in fear.
Right.
You don't have confident thoughts about your own success?
No, I was thinking, no, I'm not going to be okay.
That's not me talking.
And then I realized, you know, I was sitting there arguing with God.
Then a week later, I get a phone call from my next employer and I didn't know At the time she was gonna hire me but she hired me part-time so and I could make my own hours so a week later God showed me You were going to be okay.
I was going to be okay.
Right.
The fruit.
There's a couple of ways that I use to discern whether something I hear is from God or whether it's just from me or some other source.
One of them is knowing my own thoughts.
And that's one of the problems that some people have is they don't really know themselves very well.
They don't spend time thinking about their own thought process.
How do I view the world?
How do I view myself?
How do I view others?
You really need to spend a little bit of time, once in a while, looking at yourself.
Not navel-gazing, not meditating on yourself.
But you do need to get a good understanding and you need to be real and transparent and honest about how you see things, how you view things, and the way in which you think.
Because once you understand your nature, the way in which you think, and the way you see the world, When a foreign idea, when a strange thought, or a brilliant thought, or a thought that is full of love and compassion just lands in your little brain, you can look at that thing and go, that was not me.
I don't know where that thought came from, but I know that was not the way I think.
And that's one of the filters I use to determine if something is from me or from God is, I know that God's thoughts are different in nature than my thoughts.
My thought is, well, I just want to sleep a little bit more and then I want to have some coffee and go curl up on the couch and chill out.
God says, well, you really could get up and write another blog post or write a book or go pray for some people.
So, I get these little ideas, and part of the process of learning how to recognize the voice of God is just knowing that it's not you speaking.
It's knowing how you think, knowing how you are, and realizing that when you get these ideas, realizing, well, that definitely wasn't me.
Yeah, like, I'm not that smart.
Right.
I'm not that brilliant.
Right.
The other way is judging the fruit.
So Jesus said, by their fruit you shall know them.
And by the fruit, he's talking about if you put something into application, if you get some revelation and you start using it and you live by it, what is the fruit that comes from that?
There should be some good results.
You had an experience where after you heard this internal voice tell you, you're going to be okay if you don't take this job.
A week later, you got a different job.
Yeah, and it enabled me to do some freelance from home and work part-time so I could keep everything going and be there for my son.
You got fairly quick confirmation that what you heard was from God because the voice told you you'd be okay if you didn't take the first job.
So you followed it and the fruit was good fruit.
You got a better job.
It was hard to follow it.
It was hard to turn down that job when they called me.
But I just said it for personal reasons.
Right.
I will sometimes get thoughts about people that we're around, typically for healing.
I'll see someone and I'll think, I think God wants us to go pray for that person.
And you'll look at me and go, no, I don't think so.
So I'll go over there and I'll ask them if they want prayer.
And they'll say, oh, I'd love to have prayer.
Oh my gosh, I'm hurting all the time and I have all these problems.
And so we start praying and they get healed.
For me, one of the ways in which I know that God is speaking is when I act upon what He says, if the person is healed or if we get to pray for them and bless them, that to me is confirmation that I was hearing from God.
And if you do that often enough, you'll start to realize when He's speaking to you and when it's just your own imagination.
Hmm.
So I should probably be more obedient?
Well, obedience doesn't hurt.
I'd like to say that I'm obedient all the time, but I'm not.
Sometimes, you know, you got places to go.
Stuff to do.
I'm shopping.
I'm not stopping to heal somebody on the way, right?
True story.
Oh, we were going to talk about how God speaks to us through art of all things.
Do we want to open that can of worms?
I don't know.
It doesn't have to be a big can of worms.
You're an artist.
Well, I'm trying.
You are an artist.
God is trying to emphasize that I am an artist.
In fact, I just had two dreams about being an artist the past two days.
I was just going to ask you, what were the last two dreams that you had?
Yeah.
So, art.
Yeah, so you have some thoughts on that, and you did a lot of research on this chapter that you wrote about it.
I did more research on the chapter and how God speaks to art than on any other chapter in the book.
And you were really becoming enthralled with some of the stuff you found.
Well, I got a little bit carried away, because I didn't really know.
I suspected that God spoke to us through art, but I didn't really understand or didn't really know for sure how he spoke through art.
So, I did a lot of research, did a lot of reading, stumbled upon some brilliant observations by C.S.
Lewis, which helped me understand the way in which God speaks through, I think, all of the creative Right, music, art, writing, film.
In this chapter on art, I do give readers a little bit of an art appreciation class taught by Dr. Lewis.
And basically, C.S.
Lewis kind of lays it out as there's two ways to view art.
One way is to view it as a receiver, and the other way is to view art as a person who uses art for something.
So if you use art, you're essentially viewing it through a utilitarian lens.
Like if you use it for decor or something like that more than... If you use it for marketing, if you use it for commercial art, if you use it for some kind of a purpose that serves you.
The best way to view art is to receive the message that the art contains and not to view art as something that serves a purpose.
One of the things he also talked about was not, for himself anyway, in his writing of fiction.
He didn't want to be blatantly Christian.
In his books, The Tales of Narnia, he essentially presents the gospel of the kingdom through children's fairy tales.
Right.
But he puts the message in there in a way that really speaks more to the subconscious mind than to the conscious mind.
And so this is about making the art or the writing more accessible to everyone.
Right.
And that the message will come through to the person as they're ready for it or as they're willing to accept it.
You can convey the realities of the suffering of Jesus through an abstract painting just as much as you can a painting where there's this bloody Jesus on the cross.
Right.
A lot of people don't understand that, but that is the reality.
God is able to impress upon each individual person the message he wants to convey through that particular painting or film or book.
Without the blatant Christian symbols and things like that.
Exactly, exactly.
That's one of the things that I believe.
I do believe that, and I was surprised that C.S.
Lewis talked about that.
I think, for me, I don't know, I don't want to paint and draw the typical Christian motifs only because they've been so used and maybe overused, you know?
They've become cliche after a while.
Yeah, and I don't know, maybe that's a big fear I have, I'm not sure, but I don't want to do it that way.
And God is telling me that that's okay.
It's not your voice.
Yeah, it really isn't.
It's somebody else's voice.
Yeah, and you know, More power to the people who do that.
You know, I'm not arguing with it.
I just know that it's not the path that I have to go down.
When I started writing, I was trying to imitate other writers that I really looked up to.
And I found out that I was trying to imitate them and I was trying to write in their voice.
And some of the early feedback I got from friends basically said, look, you need to develop your own unique voice.
You have a very good voice.
They could see it in certain paragraphs when I would use my own writing voice, my own unique style.
And they would say, look, these paragraphs here, this is your natural voice.
The rest of this, you're trying to imitate somebody else.
You're making it up, yeah.
Right.
So I think it's really important for each of us to learn to paint, to write, to create films, baking cookies, using your own innate creative abilities, the way God put them in us, and not to become a carbon copy of somebody else.
Right.
And I know you make a point, as far as film goes, about how the church, people who make Christian films, are often just evangelizing the Christian community.
Right, because who watches Christian films?
Christians.
Right.
And so, I mean, it's important, I guess, for Christians to have good entertainment, but they're not going to be evangelizing the world through that medium if they keep doing it in a way that's overtly Christian, I guess.
I was very deeply impacted by the movie The Passion of the Christ.
I think it was a really well done movie.
Fabulous.
I love the fact that Mel Gibson funded it himself.
He spent his own money.
The cinematography was good.
Oh, it was excellent in all ways.
It was good acting.
It was a really good film.
The issue I have with films like that, however, is 99% of the people who watch films like that are Christians.
So how are those films reaching and transforming the culture?
The unbelievers, yeah.
I mean, you know what it's about.
You know what the motifs are.
You know what the message is.
But those types of films don't tend to seep out into the cracks and crevices of society.
They don't tend to become the salt and light in the darkness.
They really become something that the church rallies behind, believers rally behind.
I don't think they have a big impact on non-believers.
But films like The Matrix, on the other hand, Yeah.
The Matrix has been watched by just about everybody.
And when you look at that film, and if you subconsciously, whether you're aware of it or not, there are a lot of kingdom principles and spiritual principles woven into that movie, The Matrix.
There are probably a lot of people who have been affected by it and impacted, and they've learned things about the nature of God and the kingdom, and they weren't even aware of it.
Yeah, that's pretty cool.
Okay, so there's a chapter also on how God speaks to us through emotions.
Yes, this is something that is a little bit newer to me.
I've been in touch with a lot of people who, they kind of call themselves prophetic feelers because they have this really, what they believe is a very unusual ability to sense other people's feelings, to sense emotions, to sense what God is saying through emotions.
They walk into a room and they can feel other people's emotions.
They can feel depression, they feel sadness, they feel despair and hopelessness.
A lot of those people have had difficulty discerning that the emotions they're feeling are actually external to them.
Not theirs, yeah.
Right.
Feeling all these emotions and they don't really understand where they're coming from.
It's a little bit of a mixed bag because some of the emotions are theirs, some are emotions of other people, and then some are emotions from God.
And probably some of them are demonic.
Yeah.
So once you get into this discussion, it really is a can of worms because you have to figure out where are these emotions coming from?
Why am I feeling them?
Who are they for?
And what does God want me to do about them?
Or are some of them demonic?
And do I just need to, you know, rebuke them or get rid of them?
I'm glad I'm not one of those people, because I think that would be very difficult, and I think we've seen a lot of our friends who are prophetic feelers.
They sense so much, and it's a little bit of a hard life.
I think it is.
I mean, imagine driving through a town and feeling all the emotions of hopelessness and despair in that town.
Yeah, feeling demonic, feeling a burden for the whole place.
Right, and not being able to have that lift until you spend a couple of hours praying for the town.
Yeah.
I'm glad that's not my assignment, actually.
I'm glad that God has people who are able to do that, who are able to sense those emotions, and are able to intercede and pray for towns and groups of people, because they have figured out, okay, I didn't feel these feelings five minutes ago.
I'm driving into this town, or I walked into this room or this building, and now I'm feeling all these emotions.
And they are aware that God is speaking to them through their emotions, and it's a burden to pray, or whatever it is that God wants them to do.
But it's a really interesting subject.
I think a lot more people are sensing those feelings than are aware of it.
Yeah, and maybe the ones who aren't aware of it through reading this book, they might begin to be aware.
Well, I just posted the blog post about how God speaks through emotions and a couple of people left comments on it saying, Oh my gosh, this explains what I've been experiencing, but I didn't know where the feelings were coming from.
So hopefully the book will help people understand that not all the emotions they feel are actually their own emotions and not all the thoughts that we have pop into our brain are our thoughts.
A lot of that is God speaking to us in ways.
He's trying to communicate different things to us, and we're not aware of it.
Yeah, I can usually discern things one-on-one with somebody.
Like, I can feel things if I'm one-on-one, but in a whole room of people, I don't pick up all that kind of stuff, thankfully.
I'm pretty oblivious to it most of the time.
I'm pretty good at picking up demonic when it's attacking me.
I can usually discern that, but I'm not too good with the broader picture, I guess.
That's very interesting.
All right.
There's something else we wanted to talk about, and that is how God speaks to us through the gift of tongues.
Well, you probably know more about this than I do.
Well, I speak in tongues more than you do.
If you've been around us much and seen the two of us praying for people, you'll notice that my wife almost always is praying in tongues.
You pray in tongues more than you pray in English, probably.
Yeah, I've gotten very awkward with my English prayers.
Once I started praying in tongues, I almost struggle with praying in English now.
I can't come up with the words.
Maybe I just think I don't sound very eloquent.
Remember the other night we were laying in bed and we got a text message and it was someone asking for prayer.
So you waited for me to start praying in English.
And as soon as I started praying in English, you joined in tongues.
Yeah, it's just my comfort zone now, and I don't know, I guess a lot of times I feel like I don't really know what to pray, so that's my fallback position.
And that's the cool thing about tongues is if you don't know what to pray, if someone gives you a prayer request, or if you're faced with a situation you don't know how to pray, or a person you don't know what their specific need is or what the will of God is for that situation, if you're able to pray in tongues, the Holy Spirit is actually giving you the words to pray.
And it bypasses your intellect and it goes right through your spirit and it comes out and you're praying the will of God.
You're praying how God would have you to pray for that situation.
It's like the perfect prayer.
Yeah, that's pretty amazing.
And you don't even necessarily, I mean, some people can discern tongues, but I don't.
When I'm speaking in tongues, I don't know what I'm saying.
Yeah, I guess in a lot of churches they don't allow people to speak in tongues unless there's an interpretation given.
But we never interpret when you're speaking in tongues.
No, it's just prayer.
How can people operate in prophecy without knowing it?
Well, prophecy is just an interesting subject to me.
I don't operate in the gift of prophecy probably as well as I could if I had spent more time focusing on that gift.
My comfort zone is healing.
Your comfort zone is tongues.
Jesse Berkey, his comfort zone is prophecy.
We all have an area of the supernatural where we kind of become really comfortable with, and that becomes our fallback position.
That's where we start from.
Yeah, and then sometimes we don't develop the other areas that we should.
Right, because you get so proficient at that one thing that you don't really develop all the other ones as much.
But prophecy, I find prophecy really interesting.
What I've noticed, as I've thought about this, is I suspect that a lot of people operate in prophecy more often than they realize.
It was kind of weird because as I was sitting down writing the book, writing this chapter on prophecy, the Holy Spirit started to remind me of these stories from my past where I had run into somebody and I had spoken something to them concerning their life or a friend or a neighbor.
And I didn't even know what I was saying at the time, but I gave them some kind of like a word of encouragement, just basically saying, Hey, you know what?
Don't worry about it.
Everything's going to be okay.
And the Holy Spirit basically was telling me, you weren't aware at the time, but I was giving you my understanding of the situation.
And you just spoke as you were inspired by what I was telling you and you didn't think about it.
You just gave this response.
It just popped into your mind and you spoke it out.
And that was actually a prophetic word, but you didn't know it and neither did they.
Right, and then later you're thinking to yourself, why did I say that?
Why did I say that?
Okay, so I think we're gonna wrap it up.
We've kind of gone longer than we expected.
Ginny's going to like that because Ginny likes long podcasts.
Oh, does she?
She does.
Well, she's baking.
She can listen.
Well, she's either baking or she's driving.
So she's like, Oh good, it's a long podcast.
This is going to be great.
Yeah, I like that too.
You've gotten some good feedback on the book so far though.
It hasn't been out very long.
It's only been out for a couple of weeks.
December 8th, I guess we hit the publish button.
Yeah, we've gotten some really positive feedback.
We don't have a lot of reviews on Amazon, so if you want to give a review, if you read the book on Amazon, that would be cool.
We'd appreciate it.
But the feedback we're getting so far has been really positive.
People are really encouraged.
They are realizing that God has been speaking to them already in ways they were not aware of.
That's my goal, is to help people understand God is speaking in many different ways that we're not always aware of.
And this book, I think, more than any other book that I've written, really is going to encourage non-believers, atheists, and agnostics, if they get a hold of this book, they might start to consider the possibility that maybe God has been speaking to them already and they weren't aware of it.
Oh yeah, I mean I think that's something that really can come across because I know for myself with Seeing in the Spirit, when I read Michael Van Vlijmen's book, I did the exercises in that book and I began to see more but really what I was doing was I was noticing more.
I was noticing that when I close my eyes at night and I'm trying to rest to go to sleep, things would come into my vision.
I mean, there were other things that I learned from that book, but I was starting to become more aware.
So if you're not aware that you're hearing God's voice, this book will probably show you that, yes, you actually are already hearing.
You're just not connecting the dots.
That's actually the message of both this book and the one on seeing the spirit.
The same message is it's not an issue of whether or not you have a gift or the anointing.
It's a question of becoming more aware of what is already going on.
You're already receiving spiritual communication from God.
You're just not aware of it.
And so the exercises in the books are designed to make you more aware of what God is already saying and doing.
Yeah, like you're listening more for it.
I know with seeing in the spirit, I am watching for those visions that just, they might be super fast, like there might be something that comes into my, like the little TV screen in my mind, just super fast, and I would have just ignored it.
But now you're not blowing it off as much.
No, now I... You're paying attention to it.
Oh, what was that?
You know, whereas before I was kind of oblivious to it, really.
Right, and that's the same thing with me.
I know that the more I pay attention to those little visual things, the more I realize God is speaking to me continuously.
But it's a question of me being aware of what He's saying.
And that's the thing that we've found with both this book and the Seeing the Spirit book, is everyone who has been doing the exercises, doing them nightly or at least a couple times a week, Every single person who has written to me said, wow.
And when I started doing these exercises, it was crazy.
I very quickly started seeing visions, was aware of things, started hearing God's voice some more clearly.
That's the goal of these books is to get people to start doing some exercises and really becoming just more aware of what God is already saying.
Yeah I mean we're a lot of times we're just not paying attention.
I know we all have busy lives and and you know with media and games and Facebook and YouTube and TV you know a lot of times we just are we were bombarded with so much visual and audio information that God's kind of somewhere in the background if you're not really That is a big problem in our society.
Our lives are so bombarded with information that, yeah, God takes a back burner.
So one of the things that we're trying to do with these exercises is to give you 5 or 10, 15 minutes, maybe 20 minutes a day where you're shutting out all the noise and the clutter and just focusing on God and finding out what it is that He's saying and doing.
Awesome.
Yeah.
So hopefully you'll be encouraged by this book.
If you have any feedback, if you've read the book and it's helped you in any way and you want to contact us, that would be great.
We love hearing testimonies of people who are being trained and equipped and encouraged through the books.
Also, we are thinking about, we've had some requests to do audio versions of the books, but it's a lot of work and I'm not sure who would do it because my husband is pretty busy already.
You were thinking about doing some of the audio recording yourself.
Yeah, I could record the books.
But I just want to know if there's a lot of interest there.
We've had some people just request that, but I don't know if that's something worth doing or not.
So maybe people can give us feedback about that.
Yeah, if you think that audiobooks would be helpful, let us know and we'll gauge whether or not we're going to spend the time and money to do audiobooks in the future based on whether people think it would be a good use of time.
Okay.
I think I owe you a steak dinner, baby.
Yeah, I saw you were thawing out a steak.
Well, folks, that is our show for today.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Thanks for dropping by.
If you're new to the podcast and you haven't been to my website, you might drop by and check out the articles I have there.
If you have any questions or comments about the show, you can contact me at admin at prayingmedic.com.
That's A-D-M-I-N at prayingmedic.com.
You can also contact me on Facebook and Twitter.
I'd like to thank you again for dropping by.
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