Attune to God’s Guidance By Tracy Mathews

Attune and Tap in the Source

How attuned are you? Do you struggle with insecurity, irritability, or being overwhelmed by your leadership? Do you face toxic relationships, uncertainties, or challenges you are unsure how to address?

If you’re reading this post, I guess that you’re likely to believe that, through faith in Jesus, we have the Holy Spirit within us as a constant companion and source of:

• Power and inner strength (Ephesians 3:16)
• Truth, wisdom, and revelation (John 16:13, Ephesians 1:17)

What About You?

However, let’s be honest. How often do you experience the Holy Spirit giving you inner strength so you don’t feel insecure, irritable, or overwhelmed? How often do you receive the Spirit’s truth, wisdom, and revelation so that you’re able to effectively navigate toxic relationships, constant uncertainty, or complex challenges?

Moreover, Galatians 5 tells us that if we walk by the Spirit, we “will not gratify the desires of the flesh,” including “hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, and envy.” Instead, we will experience the fruit of the Spirit, which “is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” If we “keep in step with the Spirit,” we will not “become conceited, provoking and envying each other.”

How long has it been since you have experienced hatred, discord, jealousy, rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, or envy in your daily work? If you were to ask your colleagues to rate you on each aspect of the fruit of the Spirit on a scale from (1—never expresses this) to (10—always expresses this), what ratings would they give you?

If you’re like most people, you might have room to grow. Let’s consider why we aren’t experiencing more of the Spirit’s fruit, wisdom, revelation, and power. I would argue that it is probably because we haven’t put as much effort as we could into intentionally tapping into the presence and guidance of the Spirit. I would also argue that we don’t do this, in large part, because we aren’t sure how to go about it.

Good News for Leaders

Well, I have some good news for you. At Attune, we’ve spent many years learning how to train leaders and teams to do exactly this, and we’ve found that:

Most of us can be trained to become more aware of God’s presence and guidance for the specific situations we bring before him. When we practice spiritual attunement—meaning we practice hearing God’s guidance and aligning our response with it—we typically find ourselves experiencing more of the power, inner strength, truth, wisdom, and revelation that Scripture promises!

We have also found that with ongoing practice and growth in spiritual attunement, we typically become more emotionally healthy, adaptive, spiritually formed leaders who grow in our expression of the fruit of the Spirit.

Growing in Spiritual Attunement

So, how do we learn how to attune to God?

We learn it the same we learn how to do most things – through intentional practice and repetition. It is a lot like learning how to play a sport – like basketball. Some basic information is needed, but attuning to God is mostly learned through hands-on practice. Exercises that help people develop the muscles, movements and postures of attunement can be really helpful.

The Attunement Process

At Attune, most of our exercises follow this attunement process flow: We begin with a specific situation or leadership area that we bring before God.

We Listen

Listening involves noticing and naming some of the deeper and wider patterns at play, with postures of openness and calm acceptance.

We Discern

From this place of openness and observation, we then discern. Discerning involves identifying what is most important to attend to—coming to our best sense of the key themes we most sense God inviting us to live further into. For this step, we practice postures of trust, dependency, and expectancy for God to show us the way.

We Go

Our final step is to go. This step involves determining and taking the next steps that move us toward our best sense of God’s guidance. A critical posture shift for this step is to reorient around our best sense of God’s guidance, deprioritizing other motivations or goals that we came into the exercise with.

We then remember that attunement is an iterative process and seek to repeat the process after a few steps have been taken. This is necessary because God rarely reveals the whole picture all at once. Most often, it takes lived experiences in the direction of God’s guidance to gain a fuller understanding of the context, how God is moving in it, and how God is inviting us to join in with his work.

Attune: Ready to Try?

If you would like to develop your attunement capabilities further, here are several guided exercises to help you tap into God’s presence and guidance for your hour-by-hour leadership challenges.

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Tracy Mathews is the founder and Executive Director of Attune. Through facilitated workshops, Attune offers tools and training to help teams slow down, listen deeply, and tap into more of God’s guidance for decision-making, strategic direction setting, and team building of organizational leadership.

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