Two weeks ago Pastor Heather spoke about dialing into God through prayer. She used the analogy of trying to reach someone by phone and getting a bad connection. I want to continue with this theme by adding the topic of intuition, and how that relates to our relationship with God.

How Do We Know This?

Can anyone tell me what intuition is? There is a difference between intuition and conscience. Your conscience is developed through being educated about right and wrong by moral authorities such as a parent, teacher or religious leader. All of these, and the culture you live in, play a role in the development of conscience. Your conscience is the part of your mind that reminds you of your values when you are confronted with a moral or ethical choice.

Intuition can play a role in the development of conscience if you let it, or it can be squashed out by authority that is too rigid. It’s easy to learn a value system that other people are already living by, but how does intuition happen? It’s a really hard thing to pin down. It’s easy to ignore an intuitive insight or feeling, especially when you live in a society that values concrete evidence.

Let’s look at the definition to see if we can understand what intuition is and where it comes from:

1. The ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.
2. A natural ability or power that makes it possible to know something without any proof or evidence : a feeling that guides a person to act a certain way without fully understanding why.

It’s a noun, that means it’s a thing not an action. Most people believe it’s a real thing, not just some hocus pocus belief. How many of you would say that you have intuition? Now, how many of you use your intuition every day, or all the time? We know it exists, but we don’t use it often because we don’t know how powerful it is.

Why is Intuition Important?

Intuition is part of the process of gaining understanding about the world, about people, about yourself, and about God. If you had to rely only on your ability to reason based on concrete evidence you would still be stuck in the dark ages. Intuition is actually your freedom to explore beyond what you know, to receive insight and inspiration, and to learn quickly. If humans were totally reliant on reason or prior knowledge through experience, people would have to have a lot more tragic accidents to learn anything.

The phenomena of intuition can only be explained with the recognition that there is an invisible side to life, a realm of pure thought and feeling that is beyond conscious perception. This makes intuition a doorway between the physical and spiritual realm. If you can keep the doorway of intuition open you will have access to a whole new realm of understanding and appreciation for life, and possibly because of that, a deeper relationship with God.

Don’t let the door get jammed

When you live in an old house, if you close a door and don’t use it often it can sometimes get jammed. The wood swells and warps and the door gets stuck, it wont open without tugging on it. Intuition is kind of like that too. If you don’t use it much, if you ignore it, it will close down. You may think that you don’t have intuition, but it’s more likely that you’ve been taught to ignore it, and so you’ve developed a habit of focusing on rational thought, based on thought patterns that already exist. That’s what modern society and education does for us.

Until children go to school they function more based on intuition and emotional impulses rather than on reason and prior knowledge. Now I think education is important, I was an elected School Board member in the past, but in this society our understanding of education is a little backward. Let me give you an example of this with this short video: londonplay.charity

What this video is showing us is that our mental reasoning faculties are meant to function in support of our more natural abilities to experience life in a joyful way. Experiencing life in a joyful way includes being led by our inner senses to explore, relate, and interact with the world around us. Intuition is one of those inner senses, and if we learn to keep the door open we can then use our rational mind to support our intuitive insights with concrete evidence.

A guide for experience and relationship

Intuition is not just about learning, although that’s important, it’s also a doorway to better relationships and a better life experience. How many of you have experienced “mother’s intuition”? A mother seems to have this inner sense when something is wrong with her child or something dangerous is about to happen. I gave a testimony before of how I stopped my son from being hit by a car because of intuition, and Pastor Heather gave the testimony not long ago of how she made it on time to officiate at my daughter’s wedding because of her intuition. I’m sure many of you have had some experiences like this.

We can also have spouses intuition, sibling intuition, friend intuition, workplace intuition, etc. When we allow our hearts to be open to God, and other people in our lives, we begin to sense when something is wrong or when they need our help. My mother always knew when I needed a call from her, and when the phone rang I knew before I picked it up if it was her. That happens when you’re connected in heart with someone.

You can be connected in heart to anyone if you’re trying to see them from God’s viewpoint. And if you’re trying to see people and circumstances from God’s viewpoint then it’s more likely that you will experience God’s heart, and grow closer to Him. So prayer , meditation and searching for that inner connection are all an important part of opening that door of intuition. Intuition, heart and reason are meant to be partners in this dance of life.

A Hard Knocks Life

In my life I can say that the majority of mistakes I’ve made, and I’ve made a lot, were because I didn’t pay attention to or follow my intuition. I can just as easily say that all the good things that have happened in my life were because I did follow my intuition, or inner guidance system, at crucial moments. Sometimes our intuition is blocked because we’re making decisions based on advice from others, or what we perceive as right based on what others are doing. This is a result of fear, insecurity, or immaturity and rigid concepts. I know in my own life that this has been the case. I’ve often learned the hard way, which was always ignoring that inner urging.

So I’m offering this topic today to suggest that life can be so much fuller, more inspiring, and joyful if we could just learn to keep that doorway open. Intuition does not usually knock loudly or scream. It’s often a whisper, a nagging but subtle thought, a gut feeling, an indefinable sense. It can sometimes feel like a calling, something that’s right for you personally.

Intuition is never connected to fear, insecurity, anger, resentment, guilt, spite, jealousy, rage, vengeance or power seeking. All of these emotions jam the door closed. If the intuition is a warning about something dangerous it feels like urgency, which is different from fear. Being intuitively open is our natural state of being as a mediator between the physical and spiritual world, but we lost that openness because of the Fall of Man and a long history of suffering has been the result.

Open the Door to a Better World

It’s time to open the door again, many people already have. All the good that you see developing in the world today is because of people who are following that still small voice inside. The results are not always obvious right away, but the evolution of humanity in a positive direction happens because of the unity of heart, intuition and reason. This is a really deep topic and I can only scratch the surface in this short time. So please, go deeper with this topic through your prayers.