How can we possibly hear from God when we have so much noise ringing in our ears? It reminds me of the Christmas favorite of mine "how the grinch stole christmas," the original cartoon...
"...All the Who girls and boys would wake bright and early. They'd rush for their toys! And then!
Oh, the noise! Oh, the Noise! Noise! Noise! Noise!
That's one thing he hated!
The NOISE! NOISE! NOISE! NOISE!"
So often it's the noise in our lives that block us from hearing God's voice. And it seems that when God does answer above the storms of noise that it's often a pretty hard thing (check out Job 38), not so much the busyness in Job's life but rather chaos and hardship... but the point is well taken that when God has to raise his voice, it can be a very tough voice to hear.
So, since life isn't gonna slow down on it's own I guess it's up to us to start figuring out how to make time to hear from God ourselves. It seems He's always speaking, usually quite a bit louder than we might imagine. I've had the pleasure of speaking the last couple weeks to a college group on our local university about these topics and as such have rejoiced in my own re-familiarity with this idea. A couple of ideas really help as i think about eliminating the noise in my life and re-attaching to the still small voice of God.
We have God's voice in a very LOUD way in the pages of Scripture. The Bible is an incredible source of wisdom, encouragement, challenge and truth. I believe every word of the Bible is inspired by God and thus correct in all it affirms. Unfortunately, for all it's Truth ... it's life-giving wisdom is not absorbed by osmosis. You actually have to read the thing. So there's the first principle to hearing from god, you've gotta spend time in His love letter to us. As in daily, not just what some dude standing behind a pulpit on sunday morning can speak into our lives, no matter how true or how good of a communicator.
This is the primary source of God's voice in our lives, but there are a couple of other practices that work as super charge boosters to making his voice amplified. They both have to do with focusing our attentions. As we've already discusses above we are so over-stimulated in every way that to focus on any one thing for more than a few seconds nearly never occurs. Even as i type, the TV is on, my daughter is talking to me, my cell phone is at the ready, and there's music streaming on Spotify. We need to seek out quiet, a special restful place for our soul where we can talk to God and He to us. Once we've found that place then the joint practices of meditation and prayer have their place, and best service to God.
We find that prayer and meditation had such a powerful place in Christ's life that we should certainly strive for these practices in our own lives. Both of these practices come chock full of "mystery and confusion" but neither are intended to be such. Meditation is definitely associated with some weird stuff in Eastern religions but for a Christian we not talking "OHM" here, rather it is the very opposite. Where Easter religions strive to empty the mind of everything and thus find Nirvana, Christian meditation rather attempts to fill the mind with God. It's a focusing of our hearts and minds toward the one that we are giving glory too. That is done thru some practical things like getting alone, turning off the noise, sitting down with God's word so that we can recount to ourselves who this God is that we're worshipping is. Remember what he's done in the Bible, remember prayers answered in our own lives, remember the beauty he's created all around us, and Focus in on Him. There is not a correct posture or stance, place or setting, time or temperature... it's just taking the time to find quiet and think about God. It's a listening time, a time to search scripture for what God is saying. It is not time to air to god all your needs and concerns. That time is called prayer and is quite different.
Prayer is a beautiful, powerful, bold, humbling and sometimes scary thing. While meditation is a listening time, prayer is an invoking time! Prayer moves the hand of god, but only in accordance to his will and his word. So how do we know how to pray? by knowing the God we're praying too. That's done by knowing his word and listening to his voice, see the circularness of this process. God teaches us how to pray as we pray. Prayer seems to have a huge learning curve to it but i think we can all enter into it at any stage as long as we're seeking God in prayer and not just looking for a genie in a bottle to get our wishes granted. Prayer is the divine privilege granted to God's children to enter His throne room and present all that we have on our hearts, whether hurts, fears, cares, joy, praise or even those things we don't know how to express. God is God, he already knows but he also asks us to ask. Jesus spent a lot of time in prayer and who better to model our lives of prayer after. There is certainly much modeling to do.
One primary thing that Jesus models is quietness. Time after time he rises early, before anyone else and goes off to a quiet place to commune with God. He spends time with God before he starts anything else. He had the demands of the whole world on Him and yet he worked very hard to make that time count. Because of that I think He was connected to the Father at all times. Scripture exhorts us to pray without ceasing and I think this is how that's achieved. When we start our days with intense focus on God then we can see his hand at work in all that happens in our days. We're in communion with Him thru prayer and as such we begin to see people and situations as He does. The better we know the God we seek to worship, the better he'll be evident to us at all times.
Fresh life in the spirit comes sometimes comes when we rediscover how to connect to God afresh again. I was sitting in my office the other day when i took the picture above. I had been doing some reading and prep work for teaching that weekend when i saw this image (as a photographer i often "see things" in pictures). Anyway, the picture of jesus behind the smoke (from incense that i use to overpower the "essence" of teenagers that invade on a weekly basis) which appeared to come straight out of a cross that hangs on my wall. It was so symbolic of what i was feeling. Like God's presence was there and moving, filling the whole room and calling me again to a fresh life of intimacy with my creator. I pray that fresh movement of God's spirit on each one of us. That we would make lives changed and challenged for God's glory our highest pursuit. May He move afresh in your heart today, as He's been working on mine.
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