In this module, we want to guide people to begin to learn how to live with a greater awareness of God in everyday life.
This includes, among other things, how we can learn to listen to God in all the different ways in which He speaks to us, including through our thoughts, our emotions, and our bodies.
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Introduction
In this module of discipleship, I mainly give guidelines on how we can live with a greater awareness of God and his presence in us. Contrary to what many people think or believe, God is never far from us. In other words, it is about prayer, because that is what prayer really is: becoming aware of God's intervention in our lives and listening to it and talking to Him about it.
He lives and dwells in us and we live, move and exist in Him. The only reason why people often think that this is not so is because they have
not learned to pay attention to Him and listen to Him. Their attention and consciousness are completely taken up by other things that the world presents to them as necessary and important. Therefore, they often feel that they just do not have enough time to give so much attention to God "now". Perhaps one day, after their retirement, they will have more time for it. This means that they in reality misunderstand and deny the whole purpose of God with us as His representatives.
If God is truly who we say He is, it means that He is an infinite Source of
love, goodness, care, grace, mercy, compassion, wisdom, insight, light,
advice and concern. If this God then says that He wants to be a God to us, in other words that He wants to share Himself with us in all His fullness; and that He desires that we will be His children, in other words that we will receive what He shares; why would any right-thinking person then want to turn his or her back on Him; or want to ignore Him?
God desires that we will increasingly discover who He really is, who we
really are and thus learn to live with His fullness as source of our whole
existence. This is only possible if we learn to become fully aware of His
presence, His workings, His communication from moment to moment with each of us.
Therefore, I believe that it is on God's heart that we will learn to live HERE and NOW with a much greater awareness of Him. In other words,
to live a life of prayer. After all, He created us as His representatives,
with the intention that we will represent Him where we live, work and
play. His purpose has always been to be an integral part of our total life. He wants to accompany us on our journey through life from moment to
moment, so that He can be our Shepherd, Counsellor, Helper and much more. He longs to be the Source from whom we live in every way, the
Source of love, goodness, wisdom, grace, etc. If we do not learn to pay
sufficient attention to Him, to become aware of Him and to listen to Him, we miss the abundance with which He wants to equip us, completely.
I therefore sincerely hope that these few guidelines will open up a life of
greater and deeper awareness of God for you.
We follow the same procedure as with the previous modules. We begin each session by praying the Psalm of the week together. I do not mention this again at the beginning of each session, because I believe that everyone is already familiar with the process.
Deon Loots
PS - The original translation was done by Karen Wissink. With the revision, which was quite comprehensive, I made use of Google translate in order to save time. If any of the readers are picking up either spelling or grammar errors, you are welcome to tell me about them.
