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!

Wandering Thoughts

 Wandering thoughts...

This is a big part of the human challenge to spend five minutes of active listening to God each day.

I could say it is easy to hold our attention for that short length of time....but it's not.

Why? You may ask.

One reason is that our minds are normally so busy, that when we become still the thoughts that have been pending in the background, suddenly make their move and invade our conscious head space. 

This five minutes is not trying to empty our mind, and think about nothing as some meditation techniques would try to promote.

We are attempting to create an opportunity for God to be able to communicate to us in whatever form He would like to, and our clear concentration is on Him.

We need to be actively keeping our minds focused on listening, rather than allowing a mental form of the literary device 'stream of consciousness' to use up our precious time with God.

Our hard working and beneficial memory can jump into the free moment to remind us of something we were trying to recall, or to give an answer to something someone had questioned us about previously. Not helpful at this moment, but write it down if it is important that you don't forget it again!

They can be thoughts about what you need to do next during the day. Don't let them rob you of this moment. Whatever it is, it will still be there after you have had a few precious minutes with God.

The wandering thoughts can be of the flesh, the world, or the human spirit, but they are getting in the way. They can also be from other spirits who do not want the best for us.

Be resolute...and then be resolute a few seconds later when a fresh wave of thoughts wanting their moment in the sun of your mind make their attempt....and then again a few minutes later.

One Scripture passage I have found very helpful in my spiritual journey is 

2 Corinthians 10:3-5

"For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ."

You may say these five minutes are not associated with war, but they kind of are. 

The enemy of our souls would rather we never listen to God, the world would rather we never listen to God, and our flesh doesn't particularly like the idea either, because then it would lose its place of selfish supremacy.

So we can bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. As one of the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:23)  self control is not limited to our physical actions. It involves what we say, and it involves what we think.

So let us choose to listen to God and keep choosing, and keep choosing, and keep choosing, until the other wandering thoughts of our minds realize they are not in charge of us. We are in charge of them.

So five minutes of disciplined thinking and listening will benefit us in yet another way. Encouraging our minds in the area of self discipline as the Holy Spirit enables us.

Have you tried to do it yet?

God doesn't have to use words

 God doesn't have to use words to speak to us.

 He can of course, but He can use other ways as well.

For those who may be reading this thinking 'I have never heard God's voice and I don't think I can', you may possibly be mistaken.

If we are a Christian who has received salvation through Jesus then His Holy Spirit is indwelling in us.

That means His Holy Spirit has a clear channel of communication to us.

 People who do not yet know God, still sometimes hear His voice internally, and I have personally heard a number of testimonies where God directly communicated to someone in their mind, and called them to Himself.

Anyway I digress a little.

We are all able to hear God's voice through the person of the Holy Spirit. (God the Father, God the Son Jesus, and God the Holy Spirit as One God in three persons, the Trinity.)

I have personally never heard the external audible voice of God.

 I have heard His voice in my mind many times, as distinctly separate and different from my own mind's self talk. 

He has spoken to me using words, but also

Pictures

Pictures we see during our five minutes with God should be taken seriously, and not automatically ignored or discarded as our mind just creating something.

 :sometimes a past memory, or something from the present, or even something that is still in the future that we have not physically experienced yet. Maybe it is a hurt He wants to bring His healing to, a situation He wants to bring His wisdom to, or a vision He wants us to receive and respond to in faith.

:sometimes it is someone's face, and God wants us to either pray for them or contact them.

:sometimes it is an image of a situation that God wants us to pray concerning or be involved in as part of His answer.

:sometimes He warns us about something that we need to be careful of or respond to according to His principles in His Word.

Promptings

Promptings are clearer than feelings.

 (Our feelings can be all over the place, and they are a very unreliable way to navigate life. One day we can feel amazing, the next day not so much, and feelings can negatively influence how we respond to someone else or to life without either of those other factors being different.)

Promptings during our five minutes with God should be heeded, if they of course line up with what God says in His Word. We feel prompted to pray for someone, contact someone, do something. Many Christians use the phrase "I felt led to do this." God spoke to them, not with direct language, but with a prompting.

Spirit to spirit

God's Spirit can communicate with our human spirit without our mind being able to fully understand what is being communicated. 

A sense of love, connection, well being, hope, joy, etc. can be imparted from God to us. Five minutes with God can bring change to us more effectively than hours of striving in our own strength. We become who we are meant to be in relationship with our Creator, and this can be a stunningly beautiful moment. 

Walls come down, and we are honest and open to God. He delights to meet us in this space, and it is so very precious.

Be convinced,

and spend five minutes listening to God today.

Time and Place 2

 Where do we feel comfortable with God?

That is where we should have our five minutes of active listening and being still before Him. (If that is a practical possibility.)

How do we talk to God normally?

Do we ever pray while standing still, sitting or kneeling?

Then do the same for the five minutes of listening.

Do we pray at a particular time of day, maybe early in the morning or late at night? Maybe we create a space during our day for prayer.

Add the five minutes of listening to God to that time. 

Some of us are wide awake in the morning, some come alive more in the late hours. 

We have been created in a wonderfully beautiful and unique way, so it is not good to copy someone else just because that prayer time or style suits them. 

Find a time and a place where we can have an uninterrupted five minutes with God.

(If we have small children it is still possible to do, because I have done so in past years when our children were young.)

If we can't possibly see a way that we could spare another five minutes listening to God as extra to the time we are already spending in talking to Him, then I would suggest it could be a great opportunity to gently but firmly prune something else out of our day.

For example....

Is it a hundred percent necessary for us to be daily up to date with a huge number of global news events? (I may be so bold to state at this point that I don't believe our spirits/ minds/ bodies were designed to carry the huge quantity of distressing information available to consume through our big or little screens.)

I now choose very carefully how I receive and process national or global news, otherwise it can leave me feeling overwhelmed and depressed if I can't do anything about it. (Prayer is obviously the one thing we can all do about it, but God has the whole world in His hands. We don't!)

Maybe five minutes less news and five minutes more time with God could be a blessing in other ways too. God could speak to us about the things that are on His heart that He would like us to focus on in prayer or in our lives.

For anyone who has cut news media down or out already, I'm sure five minutes could be pared off social media interactions without any terrible social consequences!

Nothing is insurmountable when God enables us to do it.

That includes these daily five minutes listening to Him. Try doing it and see.

Time and Place 1

 Time and place are important factors.

Late at night,

lying in bed with our eyes shut, 

waiting on God to speak to us is not such a good idea. 

Maybe we will fall asleep with our last thought being about God which is wonderful, but probably our minds are not in their most alert states, and sleep may well overwhelm us before we have had time to hear what God would say.

Running, walking or exercising are also probably not the best place for these five minutes. Of course God can speak to us whatever our circumstances, and I have had some important times of hearing God's voice while in the midst of doing other things.

The point is our level of concentration.

 When we are physically active doing something, our minds are absorbing and processing huge amounts of external and internal information.

 We are not 'still' and 'stillness' is a key in this time of listening to God.

Yes we can multi-task when talking with other humans, and we often do to the detriment of those personal conversations.

Imagine we are on the phone with a precious friend, and they are telling us something that is very important in great detail. We listen intently to them, not wishing to miss any of the details, so we can further communicate deeply about the situation.

I don't want to become flippant in my relationship with God.

He is holy and to be held in great respect, and I want His words to me to be hallowed in my sight.

The world has reduced Him through mockery to someone sidelined and insignificant in the minds of great numbers of people. 

May we not be in that place, but instead be ones who set aside time daily to be 'still' and listen to what God would say to us.

"Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!" Psalm 46:10

Amen. Let it be so.

Daily discipline versus Grand gesture

 We love to make the grand gesture towards God. 

It makes us feel good about ourselves and our spiritual walk. We talk to ourselves (and possibly others) about how we long for the day when we have the opportunity to spend hours of uninterrupted time in God's presence waiting on Him.

Never going to happen!

Maybe 'never' is too strong a word. How about 'highly unlikely' or 'very infrequently'.

In my personal experience the likelihood of this sort of grand gesture actually happening is maybe a few times a year.

We prize the grand gesture over the daily discipline because it is something we can add into our minds' compendium of successful achievements. 

Five minutes a day sounds too small a time to give to God. We think we will wait until we have much more free time to give Him.

Like I said because of the myriad of our daily choices .....never going to happen.

God is so gracious. He knows how frail we are. 

Jesus said to Peter in the garden of Gethsemane, when He came to His disciples and found them sleeping, "What! Could you not watch with Me one hour? Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." (Matthew 26:40-41)

One hour? They couldn't be available to be with Him one hour. I'm not judging. I'm just saying.

As with the disciples so it is with us. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. The flesh would much rather use any free moment it has to scroll through whatever social media one likes, or watch or read something on an internet site, or answer vitally important correspondence with other humans.

Spending time daily with God takes discipline and our flesh would rather not, thank you very much.

So we get to choose who is going to be in charge; our flesh (mind and body) or our spirit?

God waits for us to listen to Him daily. 

Will we respond to Him today?

 

How busy are our minds?

 A few modern answers to the question, "How are you?"

 are "Busy!"  "So busy!" or  "Crazy busy!"

 We wear these verbal labels like a badge of honor as if being busy all the time is somehow meritorious; deserving praise, honor or reward. This is crazy talk, but so is much of the modern form of existence.

 When Jesus said that He had come "that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly" (John 10:10), He didn't mean that we were meant to be so busy with things that we couldn't spare five minutes to listen to Him speak to us by His Holy Spirit.

He didn't mean that our minds couldn't learn to be still for a few minutes each day, but were constantly needing to whirr with external information and thoughts about what we had just done, were doing or going to do.

When I began to attempt to spend five minutes with God in silence each day my mind would ramp up with thoughts of mundane things like hanging out the washing that couldn't possibly wait for a few more minutes, and then after I went to do that something equaling pressing would scream for attention, and I would not return to my time with God. 

We have to ask ourselves, "Who is in charge?"

My body, my mind, or my spirit?

(Hint: Our spirit should be in charge of our mind, and then our mind should be in charge of our body!)

Our spirit should allow God's Spirit to be ultimately in charge, and how great it would be to practice this vital discipline by giving God's Holy Spirit the time (just five minutes) and opportunity to speak to us every single day.

Just saying....

Tonic Against Sin

 If we know that we are going to spend five minutes each day silent and actively listening to God, how does it affect our behavior?

 Well, can I encourage us if we are struggling with any sort of sin this might be the perfect opportunity for the Holy Spirit to be able to speak to us, and counsel us in how to walk out of what is trying to entrap us. 

Our default setting as humans is to hide from God when we sin. As Adam and Eve hid in the garden so we move away from God in shame rather than moving towards Him in repentance asking for His saving grace to set us free.

When we sin we can hide from God for a day, or a week, or a month which can sadly become a permanent attitude. 

Yet when we decide to spend five minutes each day before a holy and loving God, suddenly the sin which seemed very appealing before now seems awkward and clunky, and we decide we would rather not ruin our day or our time with God. 

Try it and I know you will find it an amazing sin deterrent,

 a tonic against sin.

 This daily five minutes with God can be life changing for good. 

The Elusive Five Minutes

 How hard can it really be to spend five minutes in silence listening to God? Quite hard actually.

 It is a matter of priorities, and how we spend our time reflects what is important to us, and what takes precedence in our affections or our thoughts. 

Some people like to stay busy or distracted all the time, because we don't want to be left with our own thoughts. There are painful pathways that we would rather not walk down so spending five minutes in silence in any way can be threatening. Add to this that we are intending to actively listen to God during those five minutes, and the sense of threat may even increase.

 Am I acceptable to God to be consciously in His presence rather than hiding in the metaphorical garden of my life? 

Do you know that spending five minutes with God in silence each day is a wonderful tonic against sin in any of its myriad forms? But that subject is for another day.

I encourage you to press through your human defense systems, and spend five minutes listening to God today.