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Jan. 9, 2017 - Praying Medic

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069 Church Attendance, Time with God and Worship

In this episode, I share my thoughts on church attendance, how I spend time with God and what worship looks like. Resources Gigi’s Table Denise Hayes Studio My Facebook Profile

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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 everybody, this is Praying Medic.
	How are you doing?
	Hope you're having a good day.
	I want to talk to you today about a couple of things.
	Actually, the first A thing I'd like to talk to you about is a question I received from someone who's been following my website for a while.
	And they asked me to talk a little bit about what my daily devotion looks like, what my time with God looks like.
	The fellow asked, you know, when you spend time alone with God, what does that look like?
	How do you connect with God?
	How do you hear his voice?
	How do you fellowship with God?
	But I thought, as long as I'm on the subject, I might as well talk about a couple of related topics.
	The other thing I want to talk about is church attendance.
	And the third thing I'd like to talk about is my idea of what it means to worship God.
	I am going to warn you, I have some views that are a little non-traditional.
	I wouldn't say they're controversial, but they might be.
	And I don't hold controversial views just because I like to be a rebel.
	Like everyone else, my views and practices came out of my past experiences and they're unique to me.
	I'm not endorsing them as the right way to do things.
	I'm not suggesting that this is how you should do it, but people wanted to know.
	So I'm going to share some of my ideas today.
	When you first meet somebody, a stranger, and you start talking about God and they find out, Oh, hey, you're a believer too.
	What's the first question they ask?
	What church do you go to?
	Right?
	For some people you might as well ask them if they've stopped beating their wife.
	What church a person goes to is not as easy a question to answer as you might think.
	Our Western culture has made it a practice and a standard that you have to live up to, in a sense, that if you are a believer, you have to go to church regularly.
	When believers meet each other for the first time, one of the things they always ask is, hey, what church do you go to?
	I have around 3,000 friends on Facebook and another 5,000 who are following me.
	And I would say probably 75% of the people who are connected with me on Facebook do not attend church services regularly.
	I call them church dropouts.
	That's actually what I call myself.
	And it's not that we have walked away from God, lost our interest in God.
	For many of us, what we found is that being in a church, traditional church experience, going into a building, you know, one day a week or two days a week, devoting our time to that has not strengthened our relationship with God.
	It hasn't advanced the kingdom in a significant way.
	And for many of us, we've done it for a while, we grew to a certain point, and then there was nothing there for us that would continue the growth process.
	So we were led to fellowship and hang out with people in other venues.
	And many of us are not attending regular church services.
	And that is a hard thing for a lot of people to wrap their mind around.
	I have a lot of friends who do go to church services every week, and they love it, and it's great.
	Actually, my wife says the one thing that she does miss about going to weekly church services is the corporate worship.
	She misses that, and it is something that she would like to put back in her life.
	About seven or eight years ago, after I got kicked out of the church I was attending, the Lord gave me a series of dreams that were very powerful and very instructive.
	And He made it very clear to me that He intended to use me outside of the regular Sunday church services.
	Now, I had a hard time with that at first, and I was disobedient.
	We looked for another church, we went to another church.
	We attended several churches, actually, at the time, in Washington, and found some great churches.
	Learned a lot, connected with a lot of people.
	But the Lord kept speaking to me, letting me know, in very clear terms.
	His plan was to use me outside of the building, the Sunday meetings.
	I struggled for a few years to understand what that looked like.
	And then when Denise and I moved to Arizona five years ago, since we've moved here, we have not found a regular church to attend.
	And I stopped looking.
	A couple of months ago I was able to teach at the Southwest School of Supernatural, and I did run into a church near where I live that seems really cool.
	The leadership, I got to meet them.
	They seemed like really nice people without a lot of control issues.
	They invited us to come there and teach.
	The worship was pretty awesome.
	We could feel God's presence there.
	It's possible we may end up attending there in the future.
	But for now, the Lord is still indicating that he plans to use me mostly outside of the regular church meetings.
	When people ask me, you know, well, you don't go to church.
	How do you fellowship with people?
	You know, the Bible says you're supposed to fellowship with people.
	What some people don't know is I get more fellowship with other believers than most of the full-time pastors that I know.
	Over the last seven years, I've probably spent an average of between 40 and 60 hours a week connecting with believers on Facebook and some other social media platforms as well, but mostly through Facebook.
	I'm the administrator of probably half a dozen different groups on Facebook, prayer groups, prophetic groups, training and equipping.
	I'm always putting out information for people on healing and prophecy and hearing God's voice.
	I receive a lot of prayer requests through private messages, a lot of questions that people have.
	It's not like I'm not around other believers and being built up.
	I have a strong group of friends and we stay connected.
	We talk about the Lord.
	We learn and grow together.
	It is every bit as vibrant a fellowship for me as anything else that's out there.
	And it is the main way in which I connect with the people of God.
	I don't know what God has planned for me in the future, but for right now and for the last few years, He has really done some amazing work through me and in our circle of friends on social media.
	And like I said, I'm not criticizing people who attend regular worship services on the weekends.
	If that is what builds you up, if that's what strengthens you, if you get trained and equipped doing that, you should keep doing it.
	But, you know, the Lord has a different plan for some of us.
	So, be kind and be considerate when you talk to other believers who are maybe not attending church services.
	There are some good reasons why people stop attending regular church services.
	The second thing I'd like to talk about today is my spiritual routine, my daily walk with God, what that looks like.
	I was listening to a Mike Parsons message a couple nights ago and when I listen to Mike talk, sometimes it makes me feel a little bit embarrassed because Mike has an incredible walk with God.
	He is a rather disciplined person.
	He has certain devotional times that he sets aside every day, gets up early in the morning, spends time with God.
	He does what he calls, he opens his first love gate, which is a way that he deepens his connection with God.
	And he spends time focusing on what he's going to do that day, what the Lord and him are going to co-labor and what they're going to accomplish.
	He does this every day.
	I'm not sure how much time he spends doing that.
	And many people have daily routines where they'll get up in the morning or, you know, if you work nights, you might get up in the afternoon, spend some time with the Lord, maybe play some worship music, come into his presence, try to sense what he is saying, what he's doing.
	For a lot of people, they'll spend time in worship, put on some music.
	I have a friend, William Waring, who asked me a while back, what kind of music do you like to soak to?
	And I wrote back, I don't soak.
	I used to, but I don't anymore.
	And I'm not even sure why.
	There's nothing wrong with playing soaking music and spending time in the Lord's presence and I think it's great.
	You take trips into the heavens and you meet with angels and you can travel around the world and pray for people to be healed.
	I think soaking is a good practice.
	Put on some great music and get lost in the spiritual world.
	I think that's a great thing to do.
	It's probably a good discipline.
	It's not something I do myself.
	My routine, my spiritual walk with God is actually fairly boring and mundane.
	And I'm not saying that to be humble or anything.
	I'm just being real.
	If you followed me around an average 24-hour day, You wouldn't find anything in my life that's exceptionally spiritual looking.
	I spend my days very much like an unbeliever does, probably.
	If you looked at someone who doesn't know God and you looked at what I do, you probably wouldn't see much difference between our lifestyles.
	I get up in the morning, now that I'm not working on the ambulance.
	I'm a full-time writer.
	My wife has made sure to let me know that I am not retired.
	I'm still working.
	I'm just not working on the ambulance anymore.
	So, I get up in the morning, and that could be anywhere from 3 o'clock in the morning if I've had a dream, or 3.30 or 4.
	Usually I will write down my dreams, and sometimes I spend way too much time processing those dreams.
	I'll lay in bed thinking about the dream.
	What does it mean?
	How do I apply it?
	What is the Lord saying?
	So in a sense, my spiritual day begins early.
	Like I said, if I've had a dream, I'm already sort of connecting with the Holy Spirit and what he's saying, and it's not even sun up yet.
	But when I get out of bed, the first thing I do is go make coffee.
	And if Denise is up with me, I'll make coffee for both of us.
	If she's not up yet, I'll just make a cup for me.
	And I turn on the computer.
	And check my Facebook notifications, see if there's any new friend requests that I have to ignore, and if there's any new friend requests that I have to accept.
	I do get a lot of activity on Facebook.
	If you would like to connect with me on Facebook, you're going to have to send me a private message and give me a little information about why you want to connect with me.
	Because I do receive a lot of requests and I like to connect with like-minded people, but I can't connect with everybody.
	So, I get on Facebook and I check out what's going on, check out the newsfeed.
	I don't check my private messages every day anymore.
	And that's because my time to do certain things is very limited.
	Over the Christmas and New Year's holiday, I was inundated, my inbox, with people sending these little GIF images of Christmas trees and fireworks exploding and asking me to forward it and send it to somebody else.
	And I had, I can't tell you how many of these I had in my inbox on Facebook.
	After a while, that kind of stuff gets a little bit annoying.
	So, if you send me, if you just send me random videos, random links to articles, random images and things, I generally don't pay a lot of attention to them.
	If I'm currently having a discussion on Facebook about a subject and you find an article or a prophetic word about that and you send it to me, there's a good chance I may read it.
	But other than that, if it's an unsolicited random link that you just want to send to me or a picture, I generally don't pay attention to them.
	And I apologize for not responding to people at a time for the things they send me.
	But I have a lot of things I have to get done in the day and I only have so much time for those types of activities.
	So I apologize.
	But I do spend a fair amount of time on social media in the morning.
	I'll look at my Twitter feed, see what's going on with Twitter.
	I will go to my website, to my blog, and see if there are any comments that people have left on my articles that I need to approve.
	By the way, if you are a reader of my website, my blog, and you want to comment on there, you need to have at least two comments approved by me before your comments will be approved automatically.
	I moderate all comments.
	And so, in case you're wondering why you may have commented on there, didn't see it right away, it's because comments are held in moderation.
	So I check comments, I check Twitter, I check my social media profiles and see what's going on.
	If there's anything urgent I need to respond to, I usually do that.
	I'm very strategic about my social media as far as the things that I post.
	And this is no secret to people who know me.
	I love to post content that my friends have come up with.
	I post a lot of articles that are written by my friends from their websites.
	I post a lot of different material on social media.
	I'll actually spend a couple of hours reading my friends' blogs and articles, and looking at their videos, looking at podcasts, and finding out what they're doing, what they're hearing from God.
	Really, my way to know what God is talking about, what He's doing, in a large part comes by reading the websites and blogs of my friends.
	For me, that's a big way to know what God is saying.
	Nothing wrong with spending time alone listening to God, but I have a lot of prophetic friends.
	And when I have a dream or a series of dreams about a certain subject, many times I want to know, is God speaking about this to anyone else?
	And it's surprising how often I will start reading the websites of my friends and see the same subject being written about.
	And then a few days later, somebody else writes an article on the same subject.
	And then when I do that, I start to realize, okay, God is definitely talking about this subject.
	So I think it's valuable to spend time not just trying to discern what God is saying to you, but what is he saying to other people?
	So, I'll do that for a while in the morning.
	Go get some more coffee.
	Make some breakfast.
	And, unlike a lot of people who have this devotion time in the morning, I don't do that.
	My morning is pretty active.
	When the sun comes up and it's warm enough outside, I'll open the window.
	Our pool is right outside our window, and a lot of times there's birds flying around and singing, so we listen to the birds.
	It's a pretty relaxing atmosphere in our house in the morning.
	Denise will get up and she'll start doing her stuff.
	Now this morning, I was kind of surprised.
	Right after we had coffee, she grabbed her paints and started working on a painting.
	We have a fairly disciplined work schedule.
	If I'm not on social media, I'm generally working on a teaching outline, a blog post, an article, or a chapter in a book.
	Or I'm editing a chapter in a book.
	I have some very specific goals that I like to accomplish each year as far as the books that I want to get published and articles and things I want to put out there for teaching.
	So, I am pretty devoted to working on my writing.
	And I just spend a lot of time writing.
	And that is actually when my time alone with God commences.
	I found some time ago that God speaks to people in different ways.
	God inspires and speaks to Denise while she's painting.
	She is a creative person.
	God created her to be an artist, has given her artistic talent, and she paints.
	And God speaks to her and gives her revelation, which she sees in her mind as colors and patterns and images.
	And emotional themes.
	So as she's painting, she's listening and communicating with God.
	And I do the same thing when I'm writing.
	As I sit down at my computer to write, if I'm writing a book, for instance, I will maybe come up with an outline.
	But as I'm coming up with the outline, I'm always having this discussion in my mind with the Holy Spirit.
	It's an unspoken discussion, but I just direct my thoughts towards the Lord and I say, OK, Lord, I want to come up with an outline for this book.
	What is this going to look like?
	So, I'll have this thought, and I'll write it down.
	And then I'll have another thought, and I'll write it down.
	And another thought, and I'll write it down.
	And then I start to see a pattern, a direction.
	Oh, I see where this is going.
	So then, I have another thought, and another thought, and I keep writing them down.
	If I'm writing an outline for a book, the Lord will, many times, just give me bullet points that He wants me to cover in a book.
	So, he might say, look, first let's cover the biblical basis for this idea, because the first thing people are going to want to know is, is this in the Bible?
	So, I'll write that down as bullet point number one.
	Then he'll say, well, you have some testimonies.
	So, put that down as a bullet point.
	So, testimonies come in.
	And then he'll say, well, you remember those dreams that I gave you?
	Don't forget those.
	So, there's another bullet point.
	Okay, talk about my dreams.
	So, this is how the Lord gives me revelation about how to write a book, how to outline it.
	Like I said, as I sit down at my computer, I start writing and I turn my thoughts toward what I want to do, and the Lord just starts speaking to me through my thoughts, through my conscience.
	Through visions that I see in my mind, that is how I connect with God.
	If you know a fellow by the name of Northwest Prophetic on Facebook, he goes by Al Mack.
	He's had similar experiences.
	He likes to write and he has found that, and this goes to the third question, which is how do we worship God?
	I know there are a lot of people who feel like worshiping God is equivalent to singing songs of praise and worship to God, and that is worshiping God.
	But it's not the only way to worship God.
	I think there are many different ways we can worship God, and I think the way a particular person worships God is unique to them.
	Like I said, nothing wrong with going to a church on Sunday and spending a couple hours in really good praise and worship music, getting blasted, hanging out in the glory, seeing visions.
	I love that stuff.
	It's great.
	But I've learned that my worship of God It largely comes through the things that I do in my daily life as I'm writing, as I'm talking to Denise, as we're eating dinner, we have conversations.
	The Lord inhabits our conversations.
	He inhabits our thoughts and he inspires us.
	And sometimes I'll give Denise a prophetic word while we're having conversations.
	Or sometimes when I'm writing, if I'm writing a blog post, The Lord would just give me this prophetic revelation about what he's going to do in the future, what he's going to do next year, what he plans to do with this group of people, and what he's trying to work out with a certain situation in the world of politics.
	Nothing wrong with playing music and singing.
	I think it's great.
	But I think many times the very average, mundane, boring things that we do every day, whether it's teaching kids in elementary school or if you have a job changing tires, you can make those boring, mundane things your worship to God.
	And I do.
	My typical day is sitting at a computer for eight or nine hours a day and writing.
	Writing, corresponding with people through email, corresponding with people on private message, or just writing articles and writing chapters for books.
	In all that I do, in all of my communications, when someone asks me a question, I'm always in this mindset of, okay Lord, what do you want me to tell this person?
	How should I pray for them?
	In what direction?
	Or, writing an article.
	You know, what do you want me to say in this article?
	My entire day sitting at a computer, writing and responding to emails, is actually my form of worship.
	It is the way that I connect with God.
	It's the way that I show Him my love.
	Now, here's the thing.
	One of the most frequent complaints I receive from people is that they don't know their destiny.
	They don't know really what God has created them to do.
	And that is a very frustrating thing.
	But I have found that the things that God has created us to do are not usually as mysterious as we think they are.
	Um, sometimes they are in the boring and mundane things like writing.
	It's not a terribly exciting thing for a lot of people, but I enjoy doing it.
	I've always enjoyed doing it.
	I never knew that it was part of my divine destiny until a few years ago when my wife confronted me.
	And said, don't you realize God made you to be a writer?
	And I thought, that's the dumbest thing I ever heard.
	But when I started to look at back at my life, I realized I always have enjoyed writing.
	Just never thought I could make a career out of it or never thought that I would write in a way that would inspire and bless other people.
	And as I started to obey that, as I started to ask God, okay, what does that look like?
	He started to show me what my destiny as a writer looks like.
	And I think the same thing is true for a lot of you.
	You're probably already doing something that you really enjoy doing.
	Or in the past, you have enjoyed doing something and then gave it up because someone told you you couldn't make a living doing it, or it wasn't your calling, or you were destined to do something else, but you still have that passion to do that thing.
	Whatever your passion in life is, when you do something that brings you great joy, great pleasure, great satisfaction, it's very likely that the thing that you're doing that gives you great joy, pleasure, and satisfaction also gives God joy, pleasure, and satisfaction when you do it.
	When you tap into the thing that God has created you to do, So, with my friend Ginny Wilcox, she loves to bake.
	And she's really good at it.
	And she has an Etsy shop called Gigi's Table.
	She doesn't just bake goodies and send them out to people.
	She corresponds with the people that she sells the bakery to.
	And she ministers to them.
	And she prays for them.
	And she encourages them.
	That is part of her ministry.
	That is what she's called and destined to do.
	Now, you wouldn't think that someone's, you know, divine destiny could be baking cookies and crescents and sending them out to people across the country, but I think that actually is part of her destiny and calling.
	It's her gift.
	It may seem very mundane.
	It may seem weird.
	It's not standing on a platform with a microphone and preaching to 100,000 people.
	But she loves doing it.
	She's very good at it.
	And she finally figured out that that is what God has called her to do.
	So she's doing it.
	And I think for a lot of us, we probably overlook the everyday things that the Lord can take great pleasure and joy in watching us do.
	I know that when I'm writing, It gives the Lord a lot of pleasure.
	It gives him joy to watch me doing what he created me to do.
	There is nothing that gives the Lord greater joy and greater pleasure than watching his kids do the things they were created to do.
	When we find our destiny, when we find our true calling, when we understand what it is we were created to do and we start doing it, it gives him great pleasure.
	It gives us pleasure.
	And to me, that is the most sincere form of worship.
	It's simply doing the things God created you to do.
	Well, that is going to be a wrap for this week.
	Thanks for tuning in.
	I'll catch you next week.
	This is Praying Medic out.
	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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