Dear Burning Hearts,

I’m sorry that I’m not able to record a teaching video this week. I’ve had a few days of migraines, including today, and the medication my doctor gave me has had a fatiguing effect. It’s very hard to talk.

So if it’s ok, let me offer this prophetic sense and encouragement instead. I’ve been in tears all week about it. Yes, with sorro…

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This is a really important teaching for us. We all bring so much to the prophetic table, and I believe that’s a good thing. But if we can’t name and see it it will blind us just as it did the Pharisees and Sadducees in Jesus’ day. The key to growing in prophetic clarity isn’t assuming we can remove ourselves from the picture (that’s…

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Dear Burning Hearts,

Over the coming months I’m going to change the flow of the weekly teaching’s a little. My hope is to make every fourth teaching a prophetic-prayer practice with theological and formational teachings woven together as we go.

As you all know a big part of quiet fire, this charism that God is birthing amongst us all, is learning to draw our prophetic words from the deep place of love and belovedness and not the sometimes outward focused, critical and heady spaces that has become common to many. That has its place of course, but God lives within us and so it makes sense that we learn to listen to him most often in the depth of our own soul’s.

This is the vital intersection between beholding prayer and the prophetic. They’re inseperable. So today I’m teaching you a prayer practice I developed for myself over the last fifteen or so years to draw down into that deep place of love. I wrote about this practice, and many others, in my book Beholding which I offer to you as support material for this journey if you’d like to take it. I have also pre-recorded a short 5-week course called BEHOLD with reflection questions and weekly practices for both individuals and groups which is available here.

If you enjoy this practice and want to continue to grow in it I have recorded it as a guided meditation (along with a number of others) on the Beholding Prayer Podcast.

For now, I hope today’s experience opens a new place with you and your Beloved.

Much love,
Strahan.

Transcript

(AI generated from the film audio)

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Window of the Soul

A prophetic practice for drawing from the still, small voice.

Hey, Burning Hearts. Today I want to do something a little different.

We’ve done six months of weekly teaching now, and we’ve just finished a package on spiritual warfare. What I’d like to begin doing, once a month, is folding in a practice — something you can take away and do daily or weekly, at your own pace, as often as you can. These are the practices I teach and that we move through together in the cohorts.

(A third cohort is coming up, by the way — click here to join us!)

These are ways of learning to listen to the voice of God within us. They’re designed to help you draw into the place where Christ already dwells in your soul.

The Quiet Voice we usually miss

So much of the time in prophetic practice, we imagine we’re listening for God outside — a dream, a voice, a vision arriving from beyond us. We’re far less attentive to the still, small voice within.

We get that language from Elijah, in 1 Kings 19. It’s the famous story: he calls down fire on the altar at Mount Carmel, confronts the prophets of Baal — and then flees into the wilderness, exhausted and afraid for his life, and hides in a cave.

Outside the cave there’s a great wind, an earthquake, a fire. But God is not in the wind, the earthquake, or the fire. And then Elijah hears a gentle whisper — a still, small voice — and walks to the mouth of the cave, and there hears God speak.

We can be a bit like Elijah — all fire and altars and prophets of Baal. But it’s the still, small voice within us that we most need to attend to if we want to grow in the prophetic gift.

And in the New Testament, Jesus says: “On that day you will realise that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you” (John 14:20). The whole grammar of the New Testament is that we are in Christ, and Christ is in us — the hope of glory, as Paul puts it (Colossians 1:27).

The gift of the Holy Spirit is not the promise of a fleeting visitation. It is the very life and presence of God dwelling within our souls at all times — ceaselessly, in perfect loving union.

Why we draw from the quiet

As prophetic people, we want to draw from that still, small voice for a couple of important reasons.

First, because of who God is. God is humble, gentle, quiet, patient, compassionate and kind. When we draw from the still, small voice, we draw out of that gentleness — and so what we hear tends to come out sounding the same way. If we prophesy from a gentle place, we prophesy in a gentle voice.

Second, because it comes from a place of love. When I’m in intercessory mode — which is good, and I do it too — I’m likely to be in an intense state: nervous system active, energetic, charismatic, focused on warfare or declaration. But when I quieten down into the place where God is within me, and draw from the still waters — the Psalm 23 waters, he leads me beside still waters — I’m far more likely to hear and speak words of belovedness, of identity, of healing, of God’s longing for people.

The mode through which we listen to God has a drastic effect on what we hear, and on how we deliver it.

My working theory is that a lot of the prophetic material we get is coming out of hyperactive nervous systems and hyperactive environments — and it’s shaped accordingly, in both content and tone. What we’re going to start exploring, this month and next, is changing that voicing into the voice of love. In other words: learning to speak the way God speaks. And that begins by drawing down into the quiet of God.

The practice: Window of the Soul

I’m going to lead you through an exercise I created called Window of the Soul, designed to help you access that inner voice. Let me explain where we’re going before we begin.

The exercise helps us drop out of our headiness and our thoughts, down through our emotions, and into the depth of the soul. Not so that we get stuck in ourselves, self-focused — but so that from there we can offer ourselves to God vulnerably, nakedly, openly. In that transparency, we become able to receive his love.

A few notes before you start:

• Have your journal ready. You can pause here and go get a pen and paper. After the prayer I’ll invite you to write, in the first person, what you felt God say to you — beginning not with “Dear Father” but with God’s voice to you: “My child, my son, my daughter, my beloved…” and then free-flow from there.

• We’ll begin with the body and the breath. Our bodies are God’s temple, as the New Testament describes them. The Old Testament word behind “Holy Spirit” — ruach — is literally breath. So this isn’t a mindfulness technique; it’s a way of embodying prayer and the presence of God, so we can sink deeper into his love.

• This is only one way to do it. You don’t have to keep it. I’m offering it because it’s worked for me for twenty years.

The guided prayer

Read slowly. Let each movement settle before the next.

Wherever you are, make yourself comfortable. I like to sit with my palms open on my knees when I pray — a way of saying, I’m available, I’m here. Close your eyes.

Begin to take slow, deep breaths. A good deep breath fills your stomach, not your chest — your chest barely moves; you feel your belly filling like a balloon, the air pressing against your lower back. Count in for four, and breathe out. Let your body relax — your shoulders, your neck. If you feel distracted or chaotic, wiggle your feet and your toes; feel the weight of your body on the seat, the bed, the floor beneath you. This is the body Jesus lives in. Notice: are you hot, or cold? Notice the sounds, the temperature. Just breathe, and become aware of God’s presence.

Now, as you sink into that presence, into his love — imagine that down in your stomach, in your gut, in the depth of your being, there is a window, or a door, closed. Focus your sense of self there, deep down.

Behind this window is everything you are. Your past, your present, your future. Your hopes and your dreams. What you love about yourself and what you don’t. All your joys and successes, all your failures and weaknesses. Everything you say to God, and everything you don’t. The whole fullness of you — hidden behind a window that only you have the power to open or close.

Hold it. Feel the weight of your existence, gathered there. Let it fill your awareness. Allow yourself to feel whatever you need to feel. If you drift, turn your focus gently back down into your gut, into your soul.

And when you’re ready — imagine opening that window. Opening that door, to God. As you do, picture everything within you, all of yourself, held completely open to him. Nothing withheld.

And in reply, God holds nothing back from you. His light and his love pour into you as you pour out toward him — an intermingling. Let yourself be seen. Let yourself experience his love. God is love. Let him in.

Hold that as a gaze — a loving gaze between who you really are and who God really is, there in the depth of your being. Hold it. Keep breathing. Receive his presence. Let its lightness and sweetness fill you. That honest, raw availability.

And now, in that place, ask him this:

“How do you see me, Father? How do you see me today?”

Wait for a picture, a thought, a sound, a feeling. Let God show you how he sees you today. Try not to overthink it — just receive it, in the spirit of the still, small voice.

Then breathe deeply again. Turn back to the weight of your body — how his presence and love have made you feel, in your muscles, in your mind. Rest there. And thank him for being with you.

We thank you, Jesus, for your love and your presence. Amen.

Now write

While you’re still in that prayerful state, pick up your journal. Begin with “My son… my daughter… my beloved… my child…” — whichever feels right — and write, in the first person, what you felt God saying.

And if you felt nothing? Start writing anyway, and see what the Spirit inspires. Listen to that gentle voice within, not outside yourself — “My child…” — and write. Pause here for three or four minutes, then come back.

Carrying it through the month

I hope that was helpful — and I hope you enjoyed the journaling.

My invitation this month is simply to keep returning to the image of the window opening within you. You can go there in an instant. As you move through your day, just turn your attention toward God and say, I’m here — your pain, your goodness, your hope, your joy, all of it — and let his presence flood in.

As we keep practising this, keep experiencing God’s love in that deep, still place, we’ll grow over the coming months in drawing from that love to shape our prophetic voice — and we’ll always have a place we can enter to hear him.

So if, at least twice a week, you can sit down, breathe deeply, go down into your soul, and ask God “How do you see me today?” — and let him answer — that’s the work for now.

In time I’ll help you develop this into how we come to see other people. But for today, we can’t share what we haven’t first experienced ourselves:

If you don’t experience God’s love in the depth of your own being, you won’t be able to prophesy God’s love into the depth of someone else’s.

This is where we start. Have fun with it. Let me know in the WhatsApp group, or in the comments, how you get on through the week — I’d love to hear your experiences and any questions.

Otherwise, much love to you. Next week we begin a new series: how God sounds, and New Testament prophecy

Over the coming months I’m going to change the flow of the weekly teaching’s a little. My hope is to make every fourth teaching a prophetic-prayer practice with theological and formational teachings woven together as we go.

As you all know a big part of quiet fire, this charism that God is birthing amongst us all, is learning to draw …

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Dear Burning Hearts,

I’m glad to announce our third and final prophetic cohort for 2026. During these five weeks together we’ll focus on;

• Receiving Christ’s presence through contemplative prayer

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• First person prophetic narrative

• Prophetic prayer journalling

• Small group reflections and …

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Finally, prophetic mentoring sessions are now available!

Firstly, please let me thank you again for the support you offer this ministry. Your generosity means that through the Society we can offer more than we take from people and invite them into an immersive experience of God’s love, word and wisdom in their prophetic life. I can’t thank…

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Recently a generous bunch of you gave us your feedback1 about what you love, and want to see more of, in Burning Hearts.

Community was top of the list.

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Finally, we made it! Here’s my presentation of the third major view on spiritual warfare that you’ll likely have come across in the water of our time. We could do a year on this alone and if you’d like to do that I highly recommend the Lord of Spirits podcast. Start at the first episode and enjoy having your mind blown.

In the end we finish wit…

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I decided to split the final teaching on warfare into two sessions so as not to overwhelm everyone. This subject is fascinating and has massive practical applications for how we see our place in the kingdom and the world. I hope this session provides some clarity and joy to you about the life and work of Jesus Christ and the beauty of the …

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Today we explore the traditional view of spiritual warfare held by the church through the majority of her history. It begins with a 6th Century writer who called himself Dionysius the Areopogite and his understanding of the divine hierarchy and how it relates to demons and demonic activity.

I hope next week to compare and contrast t…

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I can’t believe it’s been over six months now since the Society began! With over twenty weekly teachings, two cohorts, four Society Chapters and an ongoing WhatsApp group we’re well under way toward our dream of building a movement of people growing together in this beautiful ministry we’ve been given.

And as we do, I’d love to hear fro…

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Dear friends,

As we slowly make our way through our shared rule of life, we come to the second and most obvious commitment - to pursue prophetic ministry. This isn’t just a good idea, it’s a biblical one;

"Follow the way of love and eagerly desire gifts of the Spirit, especially prophecy.” - 1 Corinthians 14:1.

The Apostle Paul loved the gift of prophecy.…

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Kia ora friends,

Today we take on a big topic - spiritual warfare. Because it’s so vast and can go in so many directions, I’ve done my best to keep it directed toward how it relates to discernment of spirits specifically and how we can both purify and grow in both as prophetic people.

It’s always tricky wading into this one as I know it raises more quest…

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Dear Burning Hearts,

The church has never needed prophets more, and yet she’s never been more unsure of them. There’s a good reason for it, the prophetic ministry has gotten weird, even abusive, and God has judged it. What’s worse than the very ones who are meant to speak for God abusing, cursing and l…

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Hey friends,

Tomorrow at 7pm Central Time a bunch of us will be getting together live on zoom to learn prophetic prayer, practice the gift together, cover some Q&R and explore our Burning Hearts Rule of Life.

And you’re still welcome to join!

These Cohorts are where this community really comes alive and are our pathway for building our Chapters - small g…

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Hey friends,

We’ve had some great conversation going on in our WhatsApp group about the gift of discernment of spirits and some of our personal experiences with it. Lot’s of great questions, lot’s of stories about dealing with the senses we get in different environments and people.

Most of these questions seem to group around two main themes: the nature…

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We need to become spiritual again. Truly spiritual. Ear to the prophetic voice, full of wisdom and revelation. Yes to mission, yes to theological orthodoxy, yes to cultural dialogue, but a renewed yes too the mystical life of the church that seems so lacking today. Even in many of our ‘charismatic’ communities.

Maybe especially there.

Have we forgotten the necessity of Spirit-empowered, divinely led prayer? I don’t mean in the way we sometimes mean it in the charismatic world. I mean prayer filled with wisdom and revelation wrapped in gentle, patient yet vehement love. The kind that transforms a life, the personal kind where Christ reveals himself to the soul in poetic, mystical love. Communion.

It feels to me that in our popular imagination it’s megachurch pastors, less revelators, who capture the imagination of the church. Or those who argue best, or post the most, or sound the most self-assured. Even amidst the traditions there’s a renewed sense of attention but so often lacking the soft, dynamic love and gentleness of the Spirit.

The spiritual voices, the voices shaped by the humility and obedience of interior and heavenward prayer, those whom are alive in the strange and magnificent life of the Spirit, seem lost. They’re too quiet for us, not “provocative” enough for the algorithm, unattractive to our pride and love of grandiosity.

I don’t mean the practical one’s either. I mean the weird ones with visions, dreams and experiences that discomfort us. Those whose spirituality is so confronting that they force us to ask ourselves whether our love is truly love, and our prayer truly prayer.

We’ve had some let downs in figures who showed promise yet proved shallow and we have an understandable caution. But if we throw the mystical baby out with the celebrity bathwater we lose Christ with it. Because this is who Christ is - cosmic, beautified, loving, dynamic, unsettling. The church needs people to follow him there or we get stuck with a placid, suburban spirituality. Doing everything right on the outside, but it’s desperate and depressed within.

The church is full of theology, of human wisdom, and of practical knowledge, but we’re outsourcing our mysticism to neuroscientists and psychologists or even worse, leaving it to the unholy mystical arts to fill the space. We have become so therapeutic that we’d prefer to pay hundreds per hour for a therapist to diagnose our interior pain than run to a prophet or a sage, those who for centuries have helped us navigate the inner war, for help in repentance or revelation.

Armchair psychologists and overworked GP’s are the default new shaman’s making promises they can’t really keep, offering drugs that rarely work and offering a worldview that decenters the gospel and the church has little response. Instead we’ve enveloped wholeheartedly the natural fatalism of the world - drug this, ice-bath that, diet this, self-heal that. Perhaps just in christian language.

Where is the upward turn? Where are the voices calling the bride back to her spouse in full, burning love? Charismatic churches are often much more focused on the ‘next move’ than they are about Christ’s heart and our ministry of love to him.

I’m not at all saying psychology is bad (though we do seem saturated with a lot of pseudo scientific psychology at the moment), only that it seems to have become our default worldview rather than Christ. We see the gospel through psychology, rather than psychology through the gospel. Our Christianity has become therapeutic as a result, constantly trying to settle the peace, anxiety, sadness or fear within itself rather than throwing it upon Christ and self-forgetting in the face of his beauty (I know, I’m going to get heat for this).

If it’s not that we’re strong in the other direction - fixating on keeping busy, being active in the world, doing the mission work. And we should be! But we should have equal fixation on returning the burning, longing love of God in personal, deep, affective, communion. Why don’t we care as much that we may not be keeping that flame alive? Imagine if we were as intent with one another about our prayerful affection as we are about our lack of missional energy?

Christ is the gospel, after all, and he has called himself our Bridegroom1. He speaks of loving us like his Father loved him2, of being in us and we in him3. His very incarnation was the truest expression of his self-sacrificial willingness to love us to death.

Will we deny him the deepest longing of his heart?

The last decades, and centuries, have been predominantly missional and I am so profoundly grateful for that. My heart is missional, I spent the first half of my life as a musicianary. But do you know what I kept bumping into? Fading Christians at festivals and marketplaces, slowly numbed by a lack of fervency, despondent because of the lifeless rituals of day in day out nominal christianity, experiencing church hurt without the magnificent beauty and power of Christ as a counterbalance. I often found myself missionalising post-christians who weren’t kept alive in the heat of spiritual love.

Why? Because for decades we’ve been running far more leadership or social justice conferences than prayer gatherings. And we’ve lost our mystics.

A church that is full of itself and not the life of the Spirit has little to offer those she missionalises. We simply risk becoming like the Pharisees Jesus said travelled the world to make a single disciple only to bind them up in their own spiritual lacklustery once they had (my paraphrase of Matthew 23:15). What are we inviting the world into? I guarantee you lost people aren’t looking for more loud voices, corporation-like structure, or ice-bathesque promises in Christian garb.

What they ache for is a vital, spiritual, deep relationship with the Trinity in the core of their very being. Whether we can name it or not, we all want to be mystics.

If this sounds harsh (I hope it reads more like deep longing than judgement!) it’s only because I have a broken heart. Because I, like everyone else, need mystics in my own life. I need them to urge me on, to speak holy things to me, to remind me that Christ dwells in heaven amidst angels and powers, that miracles happen, that love is power, that I can have mystical and beautiful experiences of Trinity in my own home even amidst my broken and frail humanity.

I need someone who will help me pine for God like David, believe in God like Paul, see in God like John. I need the church to be that mystical place as well as the beautiful, broken missional and theological centre she is.

And I don’t know why it’s so hard to find it.

It feels like we’ve lost our appetite for it letting the stain of human brokenness shade our hopeful and immanent expectation of Christ mystically in our own lives. We’ve settled, and that settling is ruing us. We’ve become so earthly minded that we’re no heavenly good. We’ve traded divinely given wisdom for human understanding and what we’re left with grows without life, lives without heart, appears like a fountain but drinks like mud.

I pray and pray for prophets and mystics for the church. But when they’re in our midst they’re drowned out by our casual cynicism and our blocked up ears. Our hearts are so hard we’re offended by mystical love, upset by it. We will talk about everything else but our lack of love for Christ. We’ll call people to missional practicality in our community till we’re blue in the face but I almost never hear a call to return the spousal love of the church to her Beloved.

We have overcorrected. We have an insecurity.

What will happen in eternity when we have no mission left, no giving, no working, no serving and we’re faced with God’s pure longing for union with us? Does that sound boring or shocking or does it make our soul leap? Is it truly what we long for most, or just to be free of sin and fear. Because they’re not the same thing.

The mystics call us to that ache. Not from perfection, but from vulnerability. Not because they are all and have all but precisely because they’re not and they can’t live like that without pulling every other wounded soul with them in their longing.

Maybe it’s just me and it’s a dream, but I believe the future will be marked by the return of these rare souls. If you meet one, cling to them. If you feel like I do, pray to become one. Carry Christ’s burning heart or the longing to do so. The longing is enough, it’s attractive, magnetising. It’s God’s presence in and of itself. It’s not falling short of love that kills the church, it’s her being ok with it.

When they come to us they won’t distract people from mission and action, they’ll energise it with divine power because they’ll carry the heart of God which does both. If you meet them, tell your friends, and gather together to draw all you can from them. Even if it’s just a dozen, even five of you. Pray for them in the church, for your pastors to become them. Ask for God’s kindness to light a little fire in your own heart and breathe on it every day.

I know for me I’d rather burn with two people who ache to love Christ for my whole life than be left in the masses of placid cynicism and lukewarmness with all the activity and resource in the world. It’s what’s got me through all these years - my person longing for Christ and his unfaltering willingness to fill it.

My own heart is weak, I’m weak. I need the burning heart of Christ to awaken me and teach me love. My most prayed prayer in my life, I’m sure, is “I love you Lord, oh help me to love you!” But at least I know it and can employ God with tears to help me.

Christ, help us to love and burn for you. Even in our weakness, especially in our weakness.

All my love,
Strahan.

Father, restore to us your prophets and mystics,
restore to us divine wisdom and revelation,
visions, dreams and empowerings,
the ecstasy of your presence, purity of heart,
the holy sense of you in our gatherings,
a confidence to be heavenly minded, to be divine,
to be caught up in the mystery and magnitude
of prayer and wonder, burning with the love that
you have. In your name we ask it, we ache for it,
in your Bride, in ourselves, amen.

The real beauty of a community like ours is in the relationships, the working things out together, and in the sharing of the road.

That’s the dream for our Burning Hearts cohorts. Yes, we’ll learn deep forms of prophetic prayer, practice our gift and sharing words. But we’ll also get to know one another, share our stories, and prepare the way f…

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Kia ora Burning Hearts,

Today I explore the gift of Discernment of Spirits a little more by returning to night visions, discerning community spirits and interpersonal experiences and focusing on how we might respond in each.

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Friends,

This week we continue our series on the Revelatory Gifts with a peek into the gift of Discernment of Spirits or as Paul says, the ability to distinguish between spirits.

I can’t help but think how much more mature and stable the church would be if we could teach her true spiritual discernment in our times. Arguably so many of the issues the worl…

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