Don't talk to me, I'm praying.

 As humans we are self centered.

 Some more than others, but because of the reality of original sin, and Adam and Eve's rebellion against God, we all have a tendency to seek the best for ourselves and be the center of our own little universes.

We look for ourselves when we are in a group photo, and we even sub-consciously give ourselves the benefit of the doubt in life way more than others. We try to conquer it, but it is still there. 

As Paul wrote to the church in Rome in Romans 7:14-15

"For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin. For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do."

Submission to God is foreign to our corrupted human nature, and we kick against being told what to do. (Ask any parent of a small child or even of an older child.) And we are not born naturally good. Please let us dispose of that particularly hard to get rid of lie.

We are rebellious and we like to be in control....even of our prayer times with God. We have an agenda, which we are sticking to, and how dare someone suggest that I should be quiet for five minutes when I have so many important things to say to God.

Hmmmm.....

Self deception is a truly interesting phenomena, mainly because we normally don't realize that we are deceived, for we are far too clever for that!

 In retrospect not so much, but at the time we cannot fathom how we could not have a completely perfect view and understanding of all reality, which includes our own precise perception of God.

This is bad news for us all, because God is so much more than we can ever understand, and self deception causes us to live in states of limitation where we decide what God can or cannot do.

Of course I am not talking about our mental theological understanding of who God is and what He can do. We would oftentimes get very high human grades for what we know and affirm as Christians. I'm talking about what we believe in the secret places of our mind, heart and soul that we don't share with others.

We are often scared, and live out of a place of fear.

What will happen if I wait on God, and He doesn't say anything to me?

Does that mean I'm not as important to Him as those other people who seem to be able to hear Him?

Even the possibility of it being true would be enough to crush me.

What happens if He says something to me that hurts my brittle pride, or self created worth, or high opinion of myself. I have heard from other testimonies that God can speak quite plainly and surgically, getting straight to the heart of the matter, breaking through well rehearsed defense mechanisms. 

I don't think I could cope with that.

I'm scared, and I would rather keep praying myself, and not allow the vulnerability of silence to impinge on my life. I keep myself busy so I don't have to be quiet at all other times.

This very concept of being still before God for five minutes is really a bridge too far.

So I find myself saying to God, not with words but with my very clear actions....

Don't talk to me, I'm praying.

Speak to me Lord

Speak to me Lord

and I will listen.

Maybe not today,

because I am particularly busy.

Tomorrow looks good.

I can get up early before work,

unless I'm too tired,

and I sleep through my alarm,

and then have to rush into the day.

You know how it is.

Speak to me Lord

and I will listen.

I will turn off my computer,

and mute my notifications.

I can't put my phone on silent completely,

because someone might need

to contact me urgently.

You know how it is.

Speak to me Lord

and I will listen.

I will have to find a time

when my other half

isn't trying to tell me something,

and the children are asleep.

Maybe late at night would work

really well when our home is quiet.

But I may fall asleep quickly.

You know how it is.

Speak to me Lord

and I will listen.

I think I will have to set aside a whole day,

but I don't believe that is going to happen

for the next couple of months.

My job is intense at the moment.

I can hardly take the weekends off.

You know how it is.

Speak to me Lord

and I will listen.

Definitely on a Sunday morning,

when we go to church,

but sometimes we don't make it.

You know how it is. 

I love writing poems, and I wrote this one in 2024. I think it sums up the issue of our varied priorities in life, and what is truly important to us.

 We have to get real with ourselves and honest with God. 

Do we really want to spend time listening to Him?

If we do, we will make time, and protect our time with God. The blessing and benefits of this are huge compared to the tiny sacrifice of our precious to ourselves minutes. 

If you haven't been able to thus far, please find those five minutes and be still, and listen to God.

May you be blessed in your journey. God's love for you is so great. He wants you to know Him more.

We are what we do.

 We are what we do....

Our lives are made up of all our inner thoughts and outward actions. 

It is beautiful to be in communion with God each day, talking and listening, interacting and learning, going deeper into His purposes, understanding more of His heart for the world. 

However......

We seem to show interest in things of life often for a brief time before moving on to something else.

Look at the news cycles, and we find that even massive news events eventually fade out to be replaced with other things, even if they are clearly more trivial. The human mind's ability to concentrate for a length of time seems to be shrinking. 

(Possibly this is due to being used to watching clips that last for seconds and not minutes, and modern media consumption that often involves scrolling through multitudes of brief reports, videos or even faster image montages. I'm just guessing though....) 

Five minutes now seems like such a long time. Before this current age five minutes was barely anything.

So if we are struggling to last five minutes in stillness...

There is hope!

We can improve our concentration by practicing,

 and this is the beauty of daily time listening to God. 

We begin and it does seem hard, but then we continue, and we find we can hold our thoughts present towards God, and start to enjoy the experience of deeper relationship with Him.

I now feel a sense of wellbeing and true joy when I focus on listening to God, and when I am aware of His presence I am truly blessed. Of course He is always with us, but often our minds are too full of the other things of life to really notice. 

I encourage us to find somewhere where we can be intentionally present with God, and we will find over time a wonderful journey begins to unfold in our lives.

I want to be a friend of God. I want my inner thoughts and outward actions each day to lead me closer to Him, rather than further away. Spending five minutes listening to Him is only one of many actions in life, but it is a good part that can only bring blessing.

 Please try it sometime.

What if I don't succeed in spending five minutes listening to God each day?

 What if I don't succeed in spending five minutes listening to God each day?

I know this might come as a bit of a shock, but you will join the hundred percent of everyone else who also finds this challenging!

We often look at life in the wrong way. Half empty as opposed to half full. I should know. I have spent most of my life seeing it this way, but I am trying to change.

I'm the sort of person who makes a plan C just in case plan A or plan B don't work. I have also been known to travel with my "apocalypse" backpack instead of a hand bag, filled with all sorts of things I might need. Just in case things don't go well or don't work out or fail or be half empty....

Anyway getting back to my point, is it better to have tried and not totally succeeded than to not try at all? Someone famous in history said something like that concerning love.

I think it is and I know God definitely thinks it is, because even if you spend one five minutes listening to Him that is better than never doing it, and hopefully it will trigger some awareness of how much God desires to communicate with us, if only we would take time to listen to Him.

This is a radical journey to begin, and even more radical to continue in, but it is more accurately a definition of what it means to be in relationship with God.

We can be smug about the fact that we have "relationship rather than religion", but it is a very one sided relationship if we never actively listen to God's voice. Try a human relationship the way we can be in our communication towards God, and see how long that lasts without any listening from our side.

Yes we have the Bible, which is God's Word to us, and is of vital and supreme importance in our lives. His Holy Spirit also desires to speak to us, if we will listen.

Don't give up.

Spend five minutes with God today.

You can't hear God when you're running (away)

 You can't hear God when you're running (away).  Let me explain with the example of Jonah.

Jonah ran away from the call of God on His life,

and sometimes we can do the same in smaller and less obvious ways,

and ones that do not end up with us being thrown into a stormy ocean, being swallowed by a whale, spat out again, and washed up on a shore much to the surprise of anyone who saw him. 

Can you imagine what Jonah looked like? I have never really thought about that until recently.

Pale, slimy, stinky, with shriveled skin from being wet for three days.

By the way, the account about Jonah can't be a 'made up' story to prove a point, because the whole of Scripture is truth, with real history not fables or moral stories, and because Jesus spoke about Jonah's time in the whale Himself.

Matthew 12:40 "For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth."

So ...

If God speaks to us in our five minutes of listening time to Him and asks us to do something, and we choose to go in the opposite direction as Jonah did, we can't be surprised if things do not go very well for us. 

There is always a bigger picture involved than we realize, concerning why God is asking something from us.

I have written about God asking me to apologize to someone and be reconciled. It did not go well for me during my three years of running away from what He had asked.

 What if God asks us to do something else?

I remember the first time God asked me to give one of my possessions away. It was shortly after I had responded to Jesus' offer of salvation, forgiveness, and eternal life, and you would have thought my response would have been immediate obedience.

Not immediate...

My fragile humanity didn't yet understand (this work is still in progress) that in Jesus I have everything, and all the blessings and resources of heaven are mine, and God is my provider, and He wants to pour blessing into my life so I can bless others. 

God asked me to give away an object that at the time was precious to me. I'm not going to tell you what it was, because it will sound ridiculous that I couldn't let go of it immediately.

 I struggled for a few days, but then I released it, and gave it to the person God had said, and guess what?

 We were both blessed, and doors of spiritual blessing opened to me as a result of passing the gentle challenge to see where my true treasure lay.

Thankfully in this example my response was quite quick in obedience, but in my former example of three years of running away from what God wanted me to do, my spiritual life suffered, and doors of opportunity were firmly shut in my face until I came to my senses.

Was God being mean during those three years?

No God was being kind!

He wanted freedom and blessing for me and my friend. He wasn't going to bless my disobedience, because that would cause us both harm in the long term.

Was God being mean to Jonah?

 Three days in the belly of a big fish must have been deeply unpleasant, but God caused the events because He was looking at the bigger picture. He had asked Jonah to do something that would cause blessing to others, and bless him when he came to his senses about it. God explained it clearly to him at the end of the account. Read the whole book and see.

Jesus says in Matthew 12:41 "They (the men of Nineveh) repented at the preaching of Jonah..."

A whole city of people were saved from destruction, because Jonah finally obeyed God's voice. 

That is massive,

 an entire community of people; men, women and children affected in life and eternity by one person's obedience.

Maybe God has said something hugely significant for us to do, and we are currently running away? Can I please plead with us to pause, turn around, and go back to what God has said, and do it!

God wants to bless us and others.

Maybe we might say that we haven't heard God's voice for years. 

We need to remember what it was that He asked us to do, and we haven't quite got around to it yet, because we have been quietly running away hoping God won't notice.

Just saying He does notice...

and He won't bless our disobedience, because of His great love for us and others.

 

Maybe God has said something very tiny for us to do, like when He asked me to give something to someone else.

 Either way God's heart is for blessing, 

so 

it isn't the best idea to run away from what God has said to us.

Remember Jonah!

 

How can I tell if I am hearing God's voice?

 So....

We don't want our own imaginations, or another spirit with unhelpful ulterior motives to be leading us off track.

 How can we be certain we are hearing the voice of God through the person of His Holy Spirit?

One easy sign is if we hear words that our human spirit resists strongly, it is probably God asking us to do something our flesh doesn't want to do!

When I was at Bible college we were taught helpful words beginning with the letter "C" as a good initial checklist concerning what we heard in our minds when listening to God's voice.

I can't guarantee these are exactly the same as I was taught, because it has been a few decades, and I have also found a few others to add to a list.

In no particular order;

CLEAN 

If what we are hearing has anything evil, dirty, unpleasant or disturbing within the words it is not from God.

CLEAR

God is not the author of confusion, so if the words or ideas are muddled or chaotic they are not from God. 

CONCISE

Humans are great at waffling. When God speaks, He does not waffle, ramble, use loads of words when a few will do, use excessive repetition (He can repeat sometimes for emphasis), lose His train of thought or stop mid sentence.

CALM

God will never rush us with an idea, be manipulative concerning our response, never shout at us, or cause us 'to leap before we look' as it were. His words will not be urgent or stressed, driving us to do something.

CONVICTING

There is a huge gulf between conviction (a gentle prompting bringing awareness of sin, leading to repentance, and drawing a person closer to God) and condemnation (a harsh overwhelming sense of shame, driving a person away from God). God will never move to the condemnation side with His words. That is the territory of the enemy and his kingdom, and we can be pretty good at self condemnation with our own thoughts too. God doesn't go there.

CONSISTENT

God will never use contradictory language or ideas. Again another thing humans are great at especially in today's world. God doesn't change, and neither will His Word, or His truth, much to the upset of many who would desire to alter things to their particular preference. His words always make sense logically.

COMFORTING

The Holy Spirit is described as the Comforter, and so this attribute will come through what we are hearing. If we are troubled, distressed, or tormented by what we hear, it is not from God.

Jesus says in John 10:27 "My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me."

Let's practice hearing His voice for five minutes each day. 

It could change our lives for good. 

What happens if God says something I don't want to hear?

We are human. 

We are influenced by our inherited fallen nature.

 (No man is inherently good. The Bible makes that very clear.)

Romans 3:23 "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."

If you disagree with me, please take it up with God yourself.

So it is possible that at some point God will communicate something to us, that our yet to be fully sanctified nature will disagree with Him about.

Disagreeing with God is a special kind of madness, but it is one I have experienced in my own life to my own detriment. Surprise!

Disagreeing with God is so foolish because:

He is all powerful, all knowing, our Creator, has unconditional extreme lovingkindness towards us, wants the best for our and others' lives, is outside time and space knowing everything in the past, present and future. I could go on, but hopefully we get the point.

Also God is eternal, so if we are in disagreement with Him in this life, guess who has the most time on their side?

God can patiently wait for us to come to the obvious conclusion He is right, but we can waste a huge amount of time in our finite life span getting to that point. May I say from personal experience it is just not worth it!

Okay, if you need a personal testimony to be convinced, I am willing to give you one from my own life. Wisdom is learning from other peoples' mistakes, so I really hope that can be true here, and my foolishness can be useful to help someone else learn a better way.

Some years ago I confronted someone about the potentially dangerous spiritual path they were taking, hurtful words were spoken in response, and a personal friendship was broken. I knew I was right and they were wrong in this situation. 

During my five minute times of listening to the Lord after these events, the person's face would come into my mind, and I could hear God's voice very clearly encouraging me to be reconciled with this person.

Then I started down the path of madness by arguing with God rather than obeying His prompting. I told God if I sought reconciliation with the person, they would think they were right and I was wrong. I knew they were being deceived spiritually, and I didn't want to encourage them in it!

Madness I know, but I totally justified my behavior in my own mind. I wonder if anyone else reading this has done the same in a different circumstance.

God is loving, gracious, patient and .... persistent up to a point. He will not strive with us forever.

Genesis 6:3 "And the Lord said, "My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh; yet his days shall be one hundred and twenty years."

Most of us don't get to that age, so time is not in our favor if we are trying to resist God.

God would speak to me from time to time about this issue, but I tried to ignore His words and 'get on with my life'. No prizes for guessing how well that went.

How long do you think I kept up my argument with God?

A week, a month, a year?

I am very sorry to say I kept up my madness and foolishness for three years, and I didn't know true inner peace for that whole time. I was still right I would remind myself, but the ache in my heart didn't affirm it.

After three years 'I came to my senses', and said to God during a prayer time, "Alright I will go and see this person, but you have to tell me what to say."

Quicker than a quick flash, the Holy Spirit replied "Tell them you are sorry for caring more about being right than caring for them."

Ouch!

Moment of revelation, which is often what happens when we actually take time to listen to God.

"Okay I will."

I contacted the person, and asked if I could go around and see them. Yes it was hard, but the other option in continuing my stubborn resistance was harder. 

I sat with them in their home, and said the words God had told me, and immediately a massive weight came off my spirit and I felt free.

They weren't ready to be reconciled, but I had done my part. It was some years later again, that they contacted me wanting to apologize and be reconciled, but that is their journey to tell.

Does it make sense to accept what God says to you, (if it lines up with His Word, the Bible), and not to start arguing with Him?

I think so!