177: Pete Greig | Hearing God’s Voice -

177: Pete Greig | Hearing God's Voice

Pete Greig | Hearing God's Voice

Pete Greig has committed his life to helping people hear the voice of God and facilitating the supernatural outpouring of His word and truth throughout the world. In addition to being a best-selling author, Greig is one of the founding champions of the earth-rattling 24-7 Prayer Movement and Senior Pastor of Emmaus Rd Church in the south of England.

His newest book, How To Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People (March 2022, Zondervan) is the follow-up to his 2021 ECPA Book of the Year finalist, How To Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People.

Having addressed God’s silence in God on Mute, and then How to Pray in his previous bestseller, Pete Greig’s new title brings wisdom and guidance to one of the most pressing and perplexing aspects of universal Christian experience–How to Hear God.

Greig’s 24-7 Prayer is an international, interdenominational prayer movement, with a vision to revive the church and rewire the culture through non-stop night and day prayer. Pete describes, “We started in 1999, when a simple student-led prayer vigil went viral and groups all over the world joined in to pray. Now, over two decades later, thousands of communities have taken part in 24-7 Prayer in churches, communities and cities in over half the countries on earth.”

He and his wife Sammy live half their year on a riverboat, and the other half on an island off the coast of England.

Pete Greig and Amber discuss hearing God in the natural and the normal, experiencing Him with all of our senses, and why the Spirit living in us allows us to hear Him differently than most people in the Bible.

Hearing God’s Voice Questions Pete and Amber Discuss:

(3:31) Why do you think Christians have strayed so far away from expecting to hear from God?
(5:40) Describe the differences between God’s Word and God’s Whisper.
(8:16) Because of hurt that has come from fellow Christians we sometimes don’t know when to trust that voice. Do you have anything that you would share when it comes to that?
(14:53) To what degree should we expect God to speak to us today like He once did in the Bible?
(20:30) I’ve heard time and time again that contemplative prayer, imaginative prayer, breath prayers are progressive, not Biblical, dangerous and the list goes on. Will you speak to this?
(25:47) You, Jon Tyson, Tyler Staton, Sharon Garlough Brown and others have spoken about the practice of Lectio Divina and how it has impacted your walk with Jesus. Others, such as David Helms, Tim Challies have spoken about the dangers of it. Will you speak to this quote from Tim Challies ” if we follow Lectio Divina from personal devotions to sermon preparation, we may not preach the text, but preach our interpretation and appreciation of the text. We preach the text as it impacted us, not the text as it is.”
(34:36) Let’s end with a question my husband wanted me to ask you from your book God On Mute. After long battles with health issues for your wife, what wisdom would you offer to those who still struggle with this daily as your wife and family does?

Hearing God’s Voice Quotes to Remember:

“God’s not weird most of the time in the way he speaks to us. He speaks to us in the natural and the normal. So most people are hearing him more than they realize.”

“The Bible is our source of authority, but we need to know the living Word of God in Christ, as well as the word of God in Scripture.”

“I’m always asking God, is this a love confronts or a love covers situation?”

“We step into post the Gospels, and the church begins. Peter stands up on the day of Pentecost and says, here’s the mark of the Holy Spirit being poured out, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams, the spirit will be poured out on all flesh, on men and women, young and old. This is the era we live in, because we have the Holy Spirit, we can all hear the voice of God in ways that our forefathers in biblical times long to do and couldn’t.”

“Most people’s experience who lived in Bible times was not what we can experience as those who are in Christ Jesus filled with His Spirit.”

“It’s got a very flashy name, the Christological hermeneutic. But all it means is that we read the Bible through the Jesus glasses. We understand the genocide passages, the tricky things about women and head coverings in the Pauline epistles, we understand all those difficult bits in the light of who Jesus was, because it all points to him. And that really changes the way we relate to the Bible.”

“I’d been so worried about people saying, all this stuff is new age that I had failed to teach him the Bible on how to be mindful and present. And so I was able to say to him, put all that those books away, let’s get the Bible open. Let’s talk about Psalm 46:10, Be still and know that I am God. Let’s talk about the fact that God created you from breath. Let’s look at the fact that one of the ways the Holy Spirit is described as the Ruach, the breath of God. Let’s think about the fact that Jesus appeared amongst his disciples and breathed upon them and they received the Holy Spirit. Let’s think about all the times in the Bible were prayers weren’t with words, they were with actions….And so we pray with our whole beings, with our mind, our body, our soul, everything within us, we worship God with everything.”

“Lectio Divina is one of the things that helps us to engage with those parts of Scripture that are like love letters, that are less like doctrine.”

“Lectio is about how do we read the Bible, not just for information education, but for conversation and meditation.”

“We always want God to airlift us out of our problems. We always pray for miracles, but more often he parachutes in and joins us in the middle of them.”

“If God is silent, we need to understand he’s promised never to leave us, never forsake us. So his silence is not his absence, it is just his presence manifest another form.”

“He loves you. He more than anything, he died to have a relationship with you. And he wants to walk and talk with you in a way that is natural and normal and beautiful. And he doesn’t want to be restricted to religious boxes. He doesn’t want to be trapped between the the cover of your Bible. He doesn’t want to just live in the church sanctuary. He wants to do all of life with you, all of your imagination, all of your heart, all of your soul, all of your senses. He wants to have a relationship with you.”