Exploring the Prophetic
A 90 Day Journey of Hearing God’s Voice
Copyright © 2018, Shawn Bolz
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author via the website below:
www.bolzministries.com
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Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation Used by permission.” (www.Lockman.org)
Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™
First Edition, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-947165-90-8
Publisher: ICreate Productions, PO Box 50219, Studio City, CA 91614
www.bolzministries.com
Printed in the United States of America
Preface
1. Prophetic Gifts Show the Nature of God
2. Sharing Headspace with God
3. Hearing God’s Thoughts About Humanity
4. Measure Your Fruit
5. Every Area of Life
6. Removing Performance
7. Focus of Each Word
8. Prophecy Is for Relationship
9. His Secrets
10. Relationship Supersedes Rules
11. Knowing God
12. Our Guide
13. Holy Spirit
14. Develop an Ear to Hear God
15. Step Past Discernment
16. Word of Knowledge
17. Receiving a Word of Knowledge
18. Word of Wisdom
19. Prophecy
20. Listening to God’s Thoughts
21. Lens of Love
22. Promises Create Peace
23. Centering God in Our Lives
24. Our Minds
25. Discerning the Counterfeit
26. Discerning Heart
27. Practice
28. Desire to Be Right
29. Holy Peer Pressure
30. The Gap
31. Becoming
32. God’s Original Intention
33. Hearing God for Evangelism
34. Words of Knowledge for Ourselves
35. Relating to Our Creator
36. The Mind of Christ Is a Lifestyle
37. God’s Eternal Nature and Promise
38. Solutions and Life Lessons
39. We Are Empowered by His Voice
40. Spiritual Gifts Are for Everyone
41. Spirit of Jesus
42. God Thrives off Our Connection
43. Prophetic Gifts Promote Connection
44. You Are Your Own Prophet
45. God’s Voice Brings Justice
46. Environment of Feedback
47. Developing Your Weights and Balance System
48. Our Mental Network
49. Making Mistakes
50. Risk
51. Be Authentic
52. You Are Not Your Gift
53. There Is No Normal in God
54. Knowing Yourself
55. Accountability for Relational Skills
56. Exercise the Gifts
57. Know Your Audience
58. Faith Container
59. Lead with Blind Love
60. God’s Original Design
61. Representing God
62. Only Revelation Produces Prophetic Words
63. Prophecy Is the Heart of God
64. God Is Always Speaking
65. We Are Coinheritors
66. Self-Accountability
67. Practice Skill Building
68. Risk-Taking
69. Beware of Patterns
70. Ask Lots of Questions
71. The Prophetic Accelerates Relationship
72. See What God Sees
73. Win the Prize
74. Love Is the Main Goal
75. Participating with His Nature
76. Prophecy Should Never Violate Our Ability to Have Choices
77. Discernment Is a Conversation Starter
78. Shake It Off
79. Becoming a Living Epistle
80. Inherit Blessings
81. Gospel of Good News
82. God Will Go Outside Our Boxes
83. Prophecy Is About Relationship
84. Expect the Unexpected
85. Learning About the Father
86. Interpreting God
87. God Continues to Share
88. Power of His Nature
89. Prophetic Attitude
90. Developing Life Skills
Growing in hearing God’s voice and developing the impact of what he shows you—for yourself and the world around you—takes a deliberate journey. This devotional will help you to not only take intentional daily steps, but also to pose some deep questions only God can answer in your time with him. It will also bring you into thought-provoking connections at various points of your relationship with the Holy Spirit. As you go on a biblically based journey led by his voice, you will view yourself differently, love people more, see into the future, and understand the present and past with eyes only a friend of God could have.
I want to encourage you to give yourself over to a patient process of hearing God. To develop a sense of what he is saying takes big, risky devotional times and great intentional pursuit in a way that satisfies your heart. When you start to spend time with God this way, you will forget the process it sometimes took to get there, because hearing God will become as easy as thinking.
I love your desire to go on a devotional journey with God, and I promise that if you complete this daily devotional, you will definitely be able to track many areas of growth in your life—even just by reading the Scriptures themselves, let alone digesting the teaching points and answering the questions. Journey, journal, and pray through this. Let your heart expand with faith until you can hear God in unimaginable ways.
How to use this:
You can use this in whatever way you want, but we designed it to be a devotional or self-discipleship tool to be done over a compacted period of time. Don’t be hard on yourself if you miss a day; just do it tomorrow. Don’t skip any questions, though, just because you don’t want to answer them; take yourself past what is just appealing to answer and really dig deep into the tool so that you can have an outcome not even you could predict.
- Shawn Bolz
1 JOHN 4:7–8
“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.”
The prophetic gifts are supposed to first display love, acceptance, mercy, compassion, and the nature of God to whoever is receiving the prophecy. Instead, for years people have misused or mishandled the prophetic gifts as a means of finding their identity through their performance.
God’s goal in talking to you is not to just be directive, corrective, or even direct. Just as parents’ goals include creating identity and purpose in their children, so too God wants to reveal his nature to you and rewire your brain with Kingdom thinking and living. He wants to make your heart full and whole and help you make the best decisions you can, not make them for you. That is why Jesus spoke in parables; he was changing the perspective of everyone around him to see from heaven’s culture rather than Earth’s. He wanted to realign their heart attitudes and relational skill sets with those of heaven.
How have you been changed by love through the hearing of God’s voice? If you are having trouble remembering, simply bring to memory a Scripture that spoke to you in love and changed you.
ROMANS 12:2
“And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”
We have a spiritual mind that’s intimately developed and connected through our relationship with others. As Paul says, we can literally have the mind of Christ (see 1 Corinthians 2:16). As his mind develops in us, we start to grow in our capacity to have wisdom, revelations, and profound ideas that can shape the world around us. One of the things I love about the idea of sharing headspace with God is that it renews our minds. Romans 12:1–2 talks about the renewing of our minds when we connect to God.
Continually make yourself mindful of God’s thoughts. God presents us with a magnificent gift every day. He gladly offers his mind for us to connect with, partner with, and explore. As we take every thought captive and subject it to the Word of God, our minds will continue their daily transformation into the mind of God.
Pick a subject you really care about right now and sit down to really think about it. Become an observer of your own thoughts. You are in charge of what goes on in your mind. Write out all of your thoughts about this subject and analyze which thoughts partner with God and which ones seem more human driven.
MATTHEW 6:10
“Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
Once you start to grow in a lifestyle of hearing God, you begin to hear his thoughts about humanity. This goes much deeper than just knowing basic information about people. You start to know God in the way he wants to be known. You start to give wisdom, revelation, insight, and counsel in a way only a master strategist or counselor could. The endgame of getting to hear God is not just about giving people special words. What if God could trust us to counsel nations? What if we knew his heart about things most of humanity is dying to know about?
You are uniquely positioned in the lives around you to bring transformation and reformation unto the Kingdom because God speaks to you. The problems in life are daunting, but God’s voice and solutions are endless. God cares about the intricacies of your day and wants to provide you with creative solutions for the betterment of your life, family, business, and all areas of influence.