Deepening Spiritual Connection Beyond Intellectual Understanding

"Now, Jesus came on the scene, and he's even meeting with someone outside of his own tribe, the member, the woman at the well. And he ends up saying, you know, you need to worship God in spirit and in truth. And what he was getting at on a whole level, a number of different levels, with the one for us today, which is to worship and then find yourself in union with and adore God from your spirit." [00:05:23]

"And so what we need to do is we need to pull back the beta thinking and relax the mind and get to a place of letting our spirits connect with God because he's speaking and he's loving us from that place. And often we don't think that we're hearing anything. We don't think that we're having an experience with him. But if we quiet ourselves and we remove essentially the noise of the soul trying to take over, the will trying to control things, and our minds constantly preoccupied and trying to find shortcuts with things, they're powerfully, beautifully created mind." [00:08:03]

"And so some of the ways in which I have found and have been taught over the last number of years to do that simply is through things like worship, which helps me to suspend the things that I'm thinking about and focus on God. So it's a place of allowing my mind to rest and my spirit to come alive. I'm fanning the flame, if you will, by worshiping." [00:09:06]

"And often, if we allow that time to continue and we allow our spirits to continue in the song that our spirits would be singing to the Father all the time, there might be some more things that come out even after the words are done, maybe after the music's done. And so often, I'll leave on some spa music or some meditation music, and I'll just let the quietness of that moment last." [00:10:02]

"There are only those moments when finally our bodies that have manifested this disconnection with our spirits finally break through anxiety, a mental breakdown of some kind, physical anomalies, that when the spirit is left yearning, wanting to connect, trying to find its way out, but there's something broken, right? The mind is jamming something. The soul is keeping it at bay. Things break. There's manifestation of these things within the body. So, wow, I want and I hope that you want your connection to be with the Father to be 24 -7." [00:12:05]

"I'll say the Lord's Prayer, just kind of quiet my spirit before I go to sleep, but I'll tell my spirit and I'll tell Jesus, take me where you want to take me this evening. May I find rest in you. I quiet my mind. I surrender everything and everyone to you. That's John Eldridge's benevolent detachment. And we just release ourselves back to him and our spirits back to him for rest and connection. And often the four, five, six, seven hours that we get each night can be such an incredible doorway into an adventure with him that our spirits take as if drinking fresh, clear, refreshing water and are rejuvenated. Now our bodies are, our minds are, and our spirits should be." [00:13:04]

"And many people use the word of God and the Psalms and the beauty of the scriptures, the power of the scriptures to meditate on and meditate, meaning to chew on, right? Like sheep chewing on grass, you know, cows chewing, you know, they're cut there. I mean, they're continually mulling over and repeating and making, you know, beneficial for them. They're getting all the nutrients out of it. They're really digging in deep. And so if you take even the scripture, think of Psalm 23, right off the top of my head, think of the Lord is my shepherd." [00:14:18]

"Dive in deep discover what the Lord means is it Jehovah is it Yahweh is it another name of God what is shepherd what is a shepherd how does Jesus refer to shepherds what is this all about the Lord is my shepherd I lack nothing take how I started to feel um yeah like I'm connecting and when I do I often weep but that's just the way I I'm built but when I feel that sense of connection you you union. Oh man, I love it. I want more of that. I want to experience that regularly. So worship, right? Meditation. I mean, it could be anything. It could be the word Shalom." [00:15:07]

"We have this sense of quieting, finding, locking into a scripture, breathing through it, and relaxing. Now, you can do this in your room. Jesus says, go. and pray in secret right where your father is and he sees the things that you do in secret like close your door get in your closet i love getting into the woods and walking with my dog and i go 20 30 40 minutes around the park and i'm alone and i have nature and i'm at peace and i get to walk and i get a sense of rhythm and i get a sense of movement and i go for it but i'll take an idea and i'll ask him what do you want me to do with this or where do you want me to go or who do you want me to talk with or who do you want me to pray for and so then i'm opening that window right i'm opening the window to my spirit where my spirit now has a chance to connect i can't emphasize this enough this is not something that you try once and you walk away and you're like ah it's not working that's your mind saying something like oh i'm not getting some kind well it's hard to do that when you're" [00:17:07]

"Competing with social media it's hard to do that when you're competing with everything else that you're doing you think that god's just going to tune in and you know your mind's just going to shut and everything's going to have this tremendous revelation well in the same way you build you know a capacity to connect it takes practice you know just learn how to dribble you know basketball the first time i mean everything you know you want to perfect your the art of creating great coffee it takes time i mean whatever it is that you're trying to do it's worth taking time to practice if you will like brother warren says practicing the presence of god and so the emphasis of worship the emphasis of meditation the the the positioning of getting ourselves out into nature to relax our minds to live from and connect to god through the spirit takes time and it's a practice so the big theme for this obviously for this talk has been" [00:18:08]

"Connecting to God through your spirit. I've given a couple of different examples of what I think that might be helpful to do that. And I think I'll leave it at that for this particular session. And then I think the next session I'll come on and I'll talk a little bit more about some of the experiences that I'm having within the kingdom. But hopefully that's helpful and we" [00:19:10]