Listen and the Lord will Speak

Listen and the Lord will speak

Psalm 85:8 “Let me hear what God the Lord will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, to his saints, to those who turn to him in their hearts.”

I like this verse fro two reasons.  The first is because it starts with saying, “Let me hear what God the Lord will speak.”  I like this because I do not think that everyone is aware that the Lord wants to speak to us.  Do you know that the Lord is wanting to speak with you?  He does not want to just sit and listen while you spout off all our requests.  The Lord wants to have a conversation.  He wants to help guide you and He will give you direction.  We often think that we can’t ask the Lord questions because He doesn’t talk back.  However, the Lord will speak to you if you give Him the attention and silence that He needs.  What happens a lot of the time is that we ask the Lord questions but we don’t give Him the time and space to sit and listen to His answer.  This is probably because we aren’t expecting Him to answer.  God is busy, He is worrying about the whole world, He doesn’t have time to answer my silly little question about this or that, right?  Wrong.  God has all the time in the world for you and for me.  He can deal with our questions at the same time as He can deal with everything else.

We have a hard time understanding this because our brains are limited in our capacity to understand things beyond our imaginations.  It is hard for us to understand how God works with time because we can only go forward in time.  Trying to grasp or understand how God can see all things that are happening in time at the same time is very confusing for us.  This is where faith comes in.  Faith is trusting in things you can’t see, and even things you can’t understand sometimes.  St. Augustine said, “ Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of faith is to see what you do not believe.”  I use this quote as inspiration to remind me that if I want to see that which is unbelievable and extraordinary, first I need to have faith in those things I can’t see.  This starts with spending time with the Lord.   Spending time getting to know God better.  Spend time with HIs Word, read the scriptures, study them and see how the apply to your lives.  Did you know the scriptures are just as relevant to our lives today as they were more than two thousand years ago?  The books of Proverbs is chuck full of advice for how we should be living our lives.  When you spend time in the scripture you get to know God better and you also want to be a better person.  

The more you learn about God and who He truly is, the more you want to be closer to Him.  God is truly amazing.  There are no words I could say that will help you see how remarkable He is.  However, when you read the Bible, when you read how many times and how many different ways He has saved His people, you can’t help but fall more and more in love with Him.  You also can’t help trust Him more as well.  Spending time with the scriptures is a great way to grow in your faith.  Sometimes when you sit and ask God questions, He will answer you with scripture.  I have had several people tell stories about how they asked God a question and then over the next day or two they either got a scripture verse randomly come to them, or they had people give them a scripture verse and the verse was an answer to their question.  God works in so many different ways.  He is amazing!  

Spending time with scripture is so important and the more time you find to spend with scripture, the more you will see your faith grow.  However, I think it is just as important to spend time in silence with the Lord as well.  We tend to turn to the Lord when we need Him and we ask Him for a bunch of stuff.  We put our requests in and that is great.  God wants us to turn to Him and ask Him for all that we need.  He is our provider and He loves when we ask for things.  He also loves when we just sit with Him in silence and let him minister to us.  He loves when we talk with Him and then also give Him a chance to talk back.  See what God wants to tell you.  He can only talk to us when we let Him.  If we are always busy, and fill all of our time with noise, then He can’t talk to us.  Well, He can, but we won’t hear Him because we aren’t listening.  

Spending quiet time with God can be difficult.  Not because we don’t want to but because we live in a busy and noise world and we are not used of quiet time anymore.  Our brains are used to going a million miles a minute and so even when we sit down and try to spend time just listening to the Lord, our brains keep thinking of a million other things we should be doing.  That’s ok, God understands how we work.  He is looking more for the effort and He will do the rest.  God is so amazing, he has the ability to take our imperfect effort and make it perfect.  If you have the desire to grow closer to Him, He will help you.  If you have the desire to trust Him, He will help you.  He is amazing like that.  He turns our imperfections into perfections if we allow Him to.

The other thing I really liked about this verse is the last part of the sentence when it says, “for he will speak peace to his people, to his saints, to those who turn to him in their hearts.” I think we could all use God speaking a little more peace into our lives.  We are all struggling to find peace these days.  There is so much turmoil, anger and hate in the world right now.  Having God speak peace into us would be awesome.  If we want to hear this peace the Lord is speaking we need to turn our hearts to Him.  That means we are not turning our hearts to the world, to TV, or other worldly vices.  We need to turn to God and spend time with Him in silence and in His scriptures.  If you trust me, and start to spend more time with God in Silence as well as spending more time in the scriptures I guarantee you will be surprised how much closer you feel to Him.  If you did not know before today that God wants to talk with you then I urge you to spend some time talking with Him and then giving Him time to talk with you.

One thing I wanted to mention because one of my prayer group ladies mentioned she wish someone told her this.  She said sometimes when she asks God a question the answer doesn’t come right away.  She will ask God for advice on a situation and often times the answer doesn’t come right then.  She said, for her, the answer usually comes from something someone else said.  For instance, she will be talking to a friend, or read something in a daily devotional, and she will just know that is God talking to her though that person or thought that devotional.  God will get His answer to your question to you in a variety of ways if you are open to hearing it and are looking for an answer.  The first step to hearing God talk with you more is to know He wants to.  If you aren’t even aware that God wants to talk with you then you won’t be on the lookout for it and you won’t spend time in silence listening for it.  I hope after hearing this today, if you didn’t already know God wants to talk with you, then you will start listening for all He has to say to you.  I hope you will start to be on the lookout for all the ways He might be talking to you.  Imagine how amazing it will feel to actually get answers to your questions.  

Dear Heavenly Father, I ask you to bless all those listening to this episode today.  Lord, help us find quiet time to sit and listen to you.  Give us the desire to sit and study scripture and learn more about you.  Lord, you have always been here for your people and reading about all of that gives us more trust that you will always be there for us.  Lord, we want the peace that you give those who turn to you, help us turn to you.  Lord we love you so very much.  You are the great “I AM,” and you are the King of Kings.  We are so grateful for all you do for us.  We ask all of this in accordance with your will and in Jesus’ holy name, Amen!

Thank you so much for joining me on this journey to walk boldly with Jesus.  I look forward to spending time with you on Monday.  Have a blessed weekend.

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