Stop And Listen

As I mentioned in my last post, I started school about a month ago and am loving every minute of it. In one of my classes this week we had an assignment to improve our listening.We had to take three minutes a day to sit in absolute quiet in an attempt to allow our hearing to reset. This was harder to do than I thought! On the first day the 3 minutes felt like 30! I kept looking at my timer every ten seconds. It was a little better for day two, and day 3, and by day 4 I was starting to really enjoy this time of quiet.

On day 5 of enjoying this quiet time I had a thought... how often do I get silent and quiet before God, to set my heart? How often do I take time to just be silent and listen to God's voice? The answer was not as often as I had liked. On the surface I thought I had been doing a great job of spending time with Jesus, until I realized that my time with God was one sided. It consisted of me talking to God or reading my Bible. I never really took the time to just listen to God's voice.

Psalm 62:5 says "Yes, my soul, find rest in God; my hope comes from him." If my soul finds rest in Him, and I am not taking the time to listen to Him, then how am I really resting? How can I truly walk away from my time with Jesus filled with Hope, peace and, love without hearing from Good?

The truth is I can't... and neither can you. 

Without the silent time to hear from God all we have is a monologue, a self focused time talking to God.  Now hear what I am saying. I am not saying prayer and Bible reading are selfish things. I am saying without Gods voice we will never be refreshed.

So here is my challenge to you, and myself, to take 3 minutes a day to just listen for God's voice. It may feel like the first 3 minutes of waiting is really 30, but trust me as we pursue this, day after day, we will want to extend our time listening for God's voice even longer