| MARCH 5, 2024 -- For God alone my soul in silence waits; truly my hope is in him
I’ve come to believe that for each of us there are things that God wants us to do, or wants us NOT to do, but that most of us are so busy with our lives that we never hear the requests. This is, in many ways, the kind of problem that parents often have with their kids. The automatic “OK Mommy”, when in reality the command or instruction never went into the child’s brain. Or consider the communication problem some wives have when their husband is sitting on the couch, absorbed in a championship football game.
There are several reasons why we don’t hear God speaking; perhaps the first reason is that we expect that God will speak to us in one of those resounding Basso Profundo voices, enough to make the windows rattle, and therefore are totally misled as to how we really hear God’s voice. His voice is NOT conveyed through the ears, and so we are doing the wrong sort of listening. [I will admit that there are some people who have heard God’s voice as though a person were speaking to them, but for the vast majority the voice of God comes through the action of the Holy Spirit, conveying the message God wants to deliver. The apostle Paul explains this very well in First Corinthians:
However, as it is written: “What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived”— the things God has prepared for those who love him— these are the things God has
revealed to us by his Spirit.
The second most common problem, as described in the first paragraph of this article, is distraction.
The third problem is that most of us don’t expect God to be talking to us. After all, “I’m not worthy for God to speak to me”, and therefore don’t bother listening. Remember, God’s call to us is not restricted to “Holy People” but is directed towards all His children.
Next comes stubbornness and disobedience. God calls, and in our stubbornness, selfishness, and pigheadedness we refuse to listen. And finally, there is disbelief. God calls and we refuse to believe that God is talking to us. We feel that it is impossible that God would speak to us, and therefore there cannot be any message delivered to us.
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