Notes:
Samuel was unable to distinguish between Eli’s voice and God’s. That is the initial stage where God’s voice sounds like the person who mentored you. Gradually you come to a point where the umbilical cord cuts…you come to a place where you realize that it’s God talking and not Eli. So it is my job to gradually lead you from a place where God sounds like me, til you can hear that God sounds like God!
We are looking at a generationally passing of the mic, from Eli to Samuel. Samuel can hear God, but cannot discern him. Eli has lost his ability to hear the voice, but not discern him. We have a generation of people that can hear the voice, but lack the wisdom to know what to do with what they hear.
The promise of God is bigger than the reality of the individual. Greatness must be grown into.
Great preaching is almost musical.
The Word of God does not need crutches. Truth needs no crutches. The human ability to sense truth is utterly amazing. We hear with more than our ears.
Everyone one of us is an orator. Whether we get paid for it or not.
The art of being a great speaker is being a great listener.
The mic is YOURS. It’s not going to be yours, it’s yours. It’s heavier than it looks. Don’t drop it when your feelings get hurt, don’t drop it when you’re angry.
“I wanna hear a Micheal Jordan flu game story. Like I time where you stood…” “I can’t think of a time that I didn’t.”
You become great in your mind, before you become great on a stage.
If you wrestle with insufficiency complexes…Change the way you talk to yourself, you’ll change how your story is…the woman with the issue of blood said within HERSELF…the greatest sermon starts within you!
When you stop getting better, you start dying. When a teacher ceases to be a student, they begin to be irrelevant. The [critical] voices that live in my head, are still the voices that live in my head, but they don’t live too LOUD. The art of it is not to kill the voice, it’s to cut the volume down. Instead of existing at a 10, it exists at a 3. I don’t want to kill it, because then I become arrogant. If I become arrogant, I lose my anointing. God balances my accomplishments with the thorn in my flesh that makes me question myself. I don’t want him to remove the thorn in my flesh, because I want balance for the weight of the glory that he placed in my life. But I don’t want that voice to become so loud that it cannibalizes what he created in me.
Have an inner circle of people you trust to reaffirm you. We need each other.
One of the signs of greatness IS to be self-critical. The more you care about details, the closer you get to greatness.
The further you push me, the higher you go.
Join our church-wide Bible Study. Comment at least once!
Watch START Class, if you haven’t already!
Find one person to talk to regularly, maybe meet for coffee or a hang out night, and just talk about what you’re learning from God right now.