LISTEN LEARN AND OBEY

Deuteronomy 31:12 says, “gather the people together, men and women, and children, and thy stranger that is within thy gates, that they may hear, and that they may learn, and fear the Lord your God, and observe to do all the words of this law."

Since God has a plan for every life, we should become skilled in the art of knowing and working out that plan. It has been suggested that when we come to prayer we should have three attitudes: “Listen, learn, obey.”  Some will listen but will not learn and some will learn but will not obey.

The Christian is one who listens, one who learns and one who obeys. If he does not approach God in all three attitudes, then there will soon be nothing to listen to, or to learn, or to obey. The voice will grow silent. To the degree that we do all three will there be something speaking.

If we do not have guidance, then it is probably withheld for one of two reasons: We are untrained or we are unwilling. Guidance just does not happen. It is a result of placing oneself in the way of being guided. A radio doesn’t just happen to pick up messages. It is tuned in by deliberate intention, and then it receives. Receptivity is necessary to perceptivity, you perceive only as you receive. To this psychology agrees when it explains life as “instrumentation”. When the king complained to Joan of Arc that he never heard the voice of God, she replied, “You must listen, and then you will hear.”

But many of us do not want to listen to God, for we are afraid that if God reveals His will to us it will be along the line of the disagreeable. The fact that we have changed “Thy will be done” into “Thy will be borne”, something hard and disagreeable to be borne, shows that we look on the will of God as something that mortals must accept with a sigh, like the death of a loved one.

That view of God as something distasteful must be completely reversed, or we shall get nowhere with guidance. Jesus reverses that view when He says, “My meat is to do the will of Him who sent me.” My meat, my food. The will of God is food, food to every tissue, every brain cell, to everything that is good for us. My will is my poison when it conflicts with God’s will. To real living the will of God is reinforcement, not restriction.

“Forgive me O God, that I hesitate to throw down every barrier to your guidance. Why should my eye be afraid of light? My stomach pinched with hunger, afraid of food? No more should I be afraid of Thy will. I will not be. Every faculty sensitive and open to Thy suggestions, O’ my God!” Amen

Have a blessed day,  Pastor Robert Coutts

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