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Most of us are used to being wordy in our prayers. We speak to God in prayer; we don't listen to God. But Christian spirituality has a deep history and tradition of prayer as a form of listening to God.

In this episode, Steven and I discuss how prayer is a way to listen to God, our "go to" forms of prayer, and how a person can best begin to develop a prayer habit. 

The following items were mentioned in this episode:

• Steven Carrizal's article, Listening to God in Prayer
• Scot McKnight's podcast about praying at set times with set prayers

How do we know what God is saying? If discipleship is about doing what we hear God say, then how do we know what God is saying?

For Christians, the most trustworthy and reliable source for hearing God's word is his word, the Bible. But for many, the Bible is a difficult, unwieldy, hard-to-manage and hard-to-understand book. It shouldn't be this way, though -- and we believe that God has given us his word so that we will be drawn into his life. We believe that God desires to speak to us through his word, and that we can develop sensitivity to hear what he is saying.

Join us for this conversation, where we discuss four ways of listening to God in scripture so that we can not only hear what God says, but also do what he says.

Download Steven's article: God Speaks: Listening to God Through Scripture

Listening has many functions. In our last episode, we discussed how listening deeply to another is a gift to them, a ministry, if you will, of listening. In this episode, we discuss how listening is an activity that helps us learn.

But this kind of listening requires several of the same values and postures that the gift of listening requires. We must maintain a posture of humility as we seek to learn from another. 

In this podcast, we discuss listening as both ministry and gift. The art of listening is a skill to be learned. In our conversations, we are often processing how we want to respond or distracted by our own thoughts. Listening as a gift helps us practice the "one another-isms" in the New Testament, as we put others' needs ahead of our own and honour others above ourselves.

We demonstrate this type of listening towards the end of the podcast as Jeremy shares some recent disappointments and Steven listens to him in a way that helps Jeremy process the disappointments in a positive way that enables him to find growth.

We continue our discussion about spiritual discernment in this episode, which builds off the textual discussion about Acts 1, 13, and 15 we engaged in last time. In this episode, we talk practically about our own experiences in spiritual discernment and offer suggestions and modalities for how you can learn to practice spiritual discernment with others. 

How do churches, and disciples, make decisions? How do we hear the voice of God and discern his will? Discernment is a mode of discipleship, but discernment is best done as part of a community of faith.

In this conversation, Jeremy and Steven talk about why discernment is important, and share thoughts around how discernment was done through community, prayer, shared experience, worship, and scripture in Acts. 

This is part one of a two part conversation. In part two, we will talk about how churches and disciples today can practice good, healthy spiritual discernment in community. 

In this conversation, we tackle the question of how to do discipleship in the digital times we find ourselves in, as churches continue to discern best practices that allow them to gather together in safe ways while practicing social distancing.

The conversation is wide-ranging, and we discuss pros and cons of digital discipleship, the necessity of community for discipleship, and how churches of all sizes can better focus on discipleship.

Prayer is a mystery to many of us -- a mystery in that it's something we often don't understand, and a holy mystery in that it somehow draws us closer to God, even if we don't understand how. In this podcast episode, Steven Carrizal and I share our personal journeys in prayer and talk about simple ways people and families can grow in prayer practices. ​