The Challenge of Hearing a Word from the Lord

Scripture Verse that caught my attention today: Jeremiah 10:1 Hear the word that the LORD speaks to you, O house of Israel.

Observation: Simple and complicated all at once.

Application: On the one hand I’d like to be able to say that if we would just regularly take time to listen to God speaking to our hearts, we would be much more in tune with God’s way of working through our lives. I’d like to emphasize the importance of daily devotional time and of just setting aside our agendas of the moment in favor of a divine alternative.

But of course it’s not quite that easy. The way we interpret the Bible and even the types of things that we might claim to have ‘heard’ from God are heavily influenced by a number of factors. The messages we hear at whatever church we attend, the books we read, the other media we consume and the sociological understandings that we claim all combine to shape what we might ‘hear’ the Lord say. Probably one of the greatest fallacies is the belief that if everyone in the world were simply Christian it would be a better place. History has proven that those of us who claim the Christian faith have the propensity to be just as greedy and self-serving as anyone else—hence my current efforts to quietly hoard the little bit of ice-cream left in the family freezer!

But perhaps it’s not all bad that even as Christians we seem to hear competing words of the Lord. Maybe the Lord says one thing to one person and another thing to someone else. Sometimes, of course, we simply misinterpret what the Lord says. But either way I think it can help to keep us humble. We can always be wondering if we’ve heard it correctly or whether it’s the other person who has heard the word of the Lord correctly.

And so we can move forward by faith, but also with caution by faith—faith that if we happen to be wrong, God will see to it that someone else is right. Either way, it all starts with more and more of us authentically listening for a word from the Lord…sometimes through and from each other.

Prayer: Lord help me to more authentically be listening from words from you, from whatever source(s) you choose to use. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

(Scripture Readings today included: Jeremiah 10-12 and John 14)