My wife and I are leading a discipleship group with one additional participant. I wrote about this before. What is she learning? Well, 2:7 Series, Book 1, Growing Strong in God’s Family, asks that question in session 8: What is the most important thing you’ve learned so far? She said something like:

I’ve always spent a lot of time talking to God in prayer. In this course, I’ve learned how to listen to God so that it’s not a one-way conversation! I can now sit with my Bible and hear what God has to say to me.

Ding, ding, ding! That’s exactly what she was supposed to get! I’m excited. She went on to say:

This is something I thought I should be able to do, but no one showed me how.

Here’s what’s interesting: training in how to have daily time with God has been offered in her church. I taught two four-week sessions a couple of years apart, but she didn’t participate. I taught it once in a 45-minute session after a Sunday morning service, but she didn’t participate in that one either. I’ve preached in that church a number of times and referred to daily time with God more than once. The pastor made my time with God handout available in the narthex every week and referred to it from time to time. All of those things were there, in her church, and they didn’t make a difference for this lady.

What did make a difference? For whatever reason, she decided to sign up for the discipleship class this fall. No one encouraged her specifically to do that, except maybe the Holy Spirit. And in that class, in a relationship with June and me, using material that “requires” daily time with God as part of the training. Personal attention, engagement, relationship, accountability: that’s what makes a difference.

But we were gentle among you, just as a nursing mother cherishes her own children. So, affectionately longing for you, we were well pleased to impart to you not only the gospel of God, but also our own lives, because you had become dear to us.

For you remember, brethren, our labor and toil; for laboring night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you, we preached to you the gospel of God. You are witnesses, and God also, how devoutly and justly and blamelessly we behaved ourselves among you who believe; as you know how we exhorted, and comforted, and charged every one of you, as a father does his own children, that you would walk worthy of God who calls you into His own kingdom and glory. (1 Thessalonians 2.7 – 12, NKJV)