Are You Listening?

"God thunders marvelously with His voice; He does great things which we cannot comprehend" Job 37:5 (NKJV).  Those are the words I read a little more than 11 years ago as I sat in a hotel room in Myrtle Beach, SC.  Misty and I had gone for a short trip to the beach to get just a short break from helping my family care for my dying grandmother.  Being a follower of Christ I knew that God speaks to His children in many ways and one of those is through His Word.  I picked up the Gideon Bible and walked out on the balcony to see what God might possibly be able to tell me about this difficult time I was facing.  As I sat down to read I noticed that the Bible had probably been wet at one point and laid out to dry.  The Bible naturally opened to Job 36-37 because of the way it had dried and I started to read.  Now I have to preface this some with the fact that I'm not a big fan of just picking up the Bible, randomly finding a page and pointing to a verse and thinking that God is going to reveal some deeply profound truth in that way.  Not to say He couldn't but I don't think that is the way God generally works.  As I read I was looking for any bit of truth from my God that I could hold on to.  I read a few verses then I read over Job 37:5 and stopped.  I read it again and knew that the God of the Universe was speaking to me in that very moment.  I remember going into our room where Misty was at to show her what God had shown me.  In the chaos and turmoil of slowly losing a very dear lady in my life God was telling me that I didn't have to understand why He was doing it because He does things that doesn't make sense to us.  It was a little reminiscent of what God tells us in Isaiah 55:9 when He says "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" (NIV).

God wants a relationship with everybody.  Some choose to have a relationship with Him and others do not.  If we have a relationship with Him, through Christ's death on the cross, then part of that relationship is the fact that God wants to speak to us.  But the question we have to answer is "Are You Listening?"  Too many times God's people wait for God to speak in big ways, with the clouds parting, with a beam from heaven shining down on them with a loud thundering voice speaking directly to them.  The problem is, last time I checked, God doesn't work that way.  God is speaking to us in our everyday life.  Through our daily Bible reading.  Through our prayer time.  And throughout the course of our daily life.  But if we aren't listening we'll never hear Him.  That means we have to be in the Bible to hear from Him.  We must set aside a daily time to pray.  We have to make sure we have our spiritual ears open throughout the day to hear God speaking to us.

God speaks to His children.  I am certain of that.  But the real question is whether His children are listening.  So "Are You Listening?"

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