Praying Through an activation

One of Matt Holman’s favourite ways to pray is by using an ‘activation’, which simply means hearing God through an activity. He introduces one here.
 

When we look at scripture, we encounter many stories of how God speaks to humanity. I love reading those biblical stories as well as hearing current examples of how people connect with God today. Every single time there are notable differences in how he speaks - this to me is overwhelming evidence that the voice of God is not stale nor stagnant but always flowing, just like the rivers described in Ezekiel 47 …so where the river flows everything will live...

Prayer, in essence, is positioning ourselves to engage with the living God and, therefore, with the reality that we are created for an eternal, intimate relationship with him, just as he designed. When we think about how we interact with those close to us, we see that this happens in a variety of ways - it’s no different with God (see footnote 1).

Lynn Green states, in her call for us to be beacons of prayer, that God has been speaking to her from Isaiah 43:18-19:

‘Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.
See I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland’.

That passage has been significant to me in recent years because it is a powerful call to re-focus on Jesus and what he is doing in any given moment. It’s a call to encounter God’s perspective and to experience intimacy with Jesus while simultaneously finding ourselves in the desert, amongst life’s challenges (see footnote 2.