Hi, my name is Pete Cazaro. I want to welcome you today to the Emotionally Healthy Leader

Podcast. And our theme today is called the explosive power of listening, the explosive power

of listening, particularly to the Holy Spirit. And this is a talk I gave at Exponential 2020

this past week in Orlando, gave me an opportunity to really work on some new material

of the integration of the power of the Holy Spirit with emotionally healthy discipleship and

it forced me to reflect and ponder for a number of weeks on what's changed in my own life

because I came to Christ in an assemblies of God church. And really, my whole

early days, my first 17, 18 years of following Christ were mostly in a Pentecostal, you know,

charismatic context. And so a lot of emphasis of the Holy Spirit, but without E.H. discipleship

or I'll call serious discipleship.

And the result of that was we had a lot of limited, I'll call it fruit. We baptized a lot of

dysfunction, and the mission was compromised. But of course, God met us in an extraordinary way

in ways so unexpected through

emotionally the discipleship. We began to see that emotional health and spiritual maturity can't be

separated and let us into all kinds of theological new understandings of things like grief

and loss and limits. And then a slow down spirituality integrating things like silence and

solitude. And so these last 24 years have been walking out of that integration that's been very transformative.

And it's given me a much larger, broader view of the Holy Spirit than I had in the earlier days that I'd call it more of a restricted view.

And there's a lot I can say about this.

But today I want to focus particularly on listening

to the Holy Spirit. I want to look at two individuals. One is Philip, who's a great example of

listening to the Spirit, and Peter, who's a great example of not listening to the Spirit.

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